People on the water, The English Channel, UK, 21/09/2022
Minus 15 degrees Celsius, a Sudanese man and I walked Italy’s snow covered mountains towards France, diving behind trees as police skidoos hunted us. Parting at the border I felt I was watching someone who would be dead before sunrise.
His daughter screamed scared of the sea as the Syrian picked her up, “Get in, Brother, we’re going to England,” her mother said from the boat. I stalled, they roared away towards the five red lights at Dover leaving me waist deep in the sea.
An Afghan fell from the US military plane leaving Kabul. His brother showed me the video, on the runway there dead, his head red and cracked. The Taliban were back. He saw his chance for a better life and took it, I wish he was still here, he told me.
People have always migrated, western politics are making it harder but it won’t stop. I wanted to think about it and would appreciate your views. I should state migration is a hugely complex problem, to which I do not offer any simple conclusions or solutions, but questions.
Should we help?
I met the Syrian family in the boat after six months of infiltrating an Iranian people smuggling gang as a journalist. In the Calais Jungle, I met Syrians escaping war, Iranians a regime. What do we owe them? Can the Syrian ask a Brit for help? If we tell the Iranian her government is bad, is she justified to come here? The cosmopolitan says we should have open borders, but isn’t a nation state an organising principle? Don’t we need some thing to stand on? Would open borders mean a state of ever changing identity? Are today’s war migrants practice for tomorrow’s environmental migrants?
In Strangers in our Midst (2016), David Miller, highlights the “equal moral worth of all human being”, and asks “What must citizens do for those who are not their compatriots?” What of the moral worth of the settled? Fully open borders are as impractical as they are potentially violent, Bernie Sanders sees them lowering wages to $2-3 per hour, those struggling today would be priced out and with even less work—is that right?
The Sudanese man on the mountain’s mother urged him to leave after he was shot at. Should we rescue all we can? Or choose? In Kabul, I visited a shop offering letters proving Afghans had served alongside Americans with the names of senior officers lifted off LinkedIn, how do we find those who truly need help? The Taliban are worried about the brain drain asking citizens to stay and build the nation rather than flee. Should we encourage people to stay in Afghanistan?
What is a citizen anyway? Joseph Carens argues “Citizenship in Western liberal democracies is the modern equivalent to feudal privilege—an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances…restrictive citizenship is hard to justify when one thinks about it closely.” Carens’ greatly enhanced life chances cannot be seen in Grimsby which is in parts worse than Kabul.
Will the country change?
The Reform Party’s Lee Anderson wants his country back. Paul Marshall, the billionaire, is building up the Church of England as around 20 churches go on sale annually. Politics is concerned with Islam’s rise in the UK, where Muslims may become over 17% of the population by 2050. Will our culture change with less Christians, less churches, more Muslims and more mosques? Miller describes settled societies as those where “most of whose members have a sense that they and their ancestors are deeply rooted in a place.” An ancestor being a person typically more remote than a grandparent, it won’t take the UK’s Pakistanis long to qualify. As communities become more mixed, Robert Putnam says mistrust increases. I witnessed this growing up as Pakistanis lived for safety in an area away from native Brits.
Am I in the same boat?
My father was invited to the UK for work in 1961 and reports that Enoch Powell wasn’t a nice chap. Still the UK has given our family a better life than a Pakistani one simply from having constant electricity, safe shelter and clean water. Could the UK help others in their own country without migration? I saw the Taliban give cash to the people who suffered in the Gayan earthquakes to rebuild lives in situ instead of moving to Kabul.
Miller says on embracing “a receiving society (some show) exaggerated patriotic commitment”, I may have done that by joining the British Army but should that make me a lifelong citizen? Fijian soldiers had to fight to stay in the UK after their service was over, such is the contract. Conscription always seems a good idea to those who have never dug a trench but should the economic migrants serve in our military? Not all are suitable, the French Foreign Legion does not take everyone.
Sajid Javid removed Shamima Begum’s citizenship, making her one of Hannah Arendt’s ‘heimatlosen’. Matthew Gibney highlights,“More than 100 nationals were stripped of their citizenship by the Home Secretary in 2017 alone on the grounds that doing so was ‘conducive to the public good’. Is it right for a person to be stateless today? A person cannot be afforded basic rights without a state, and what is a state without citizens?
In sum
These are a few questions I’ve been thinking around to write more on the subject, I have a near 4000 word essay to be published soon on migration in a newspaper which I’ll post here. Living in London, I found it is easy for many to ignore this issue, those taking it up are the ones directly affected and those who want to profit from it—the politicians and the poor. I hope we can engage on it, please send any comments you may have and I’ll see you back here soon.
Adnan
References
It is easy to find references to much of the above, for example, Paul Marshall’s interview in Prospect magazine, but I would like to recommend two books which sit on two sides of the debate, David Miller shows the case for open and closed borders before concluding we need to control immigration, and opposite to him you may place Joseph Carens’ views which can be found in Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Case for Open Borders in Debating the Ethics of Immigration, which is a collection of authors.
Cole, Phillip. Debating the Ethics of Immigration: Is There a Right to Exclude? Oxford University Press.
Miller, David. Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration, Harvard University Press.