‘Unlike the hon gentleman,” home secretary Shabana Mahmood told Liberal Democrat MP Max Wilkinson during last week’s parliamentary debate on her new asylum proposals, “I am the one who is regularly called a ‘fucking Paki’ and told to ‘Go back home’.” Her “personal experience” showed “how divisive the issue of asylum has become in our country”.
I, too, am called a “fucking Paki” and told to “Go back home”. There are few Asians, certainly of my generation, who have not faced such abuse, and worse. But unlike Mahmood, I do not believe the best way to tackle the broken asylum system is through her new hardline policies. Yet, so besotted are conservatives with Mahmood, many even praise her use of the “race card”. Experience of racism, though, is no guarantee of wisdom in combating it.
There are many good reasons for reforming asylum procedures. The previous government effectively stopped processing asylum claims, creating the backlog now fouling up the system. The use of hotel accommodation, a policy that elicits such fury, is the result not just of this backlog but also of it being more profitable for the private companies tasked with housing migrants. That is also why so many asylum seekers are placed in some of the poorest areas in the country and in houses in multiple occupation (HMOs). All this needs resolving, not to mention the need to stop small boat journeys.
Black and Asian people facing racist abuse is not, though, a reason to change the asylum system. It is a reason to challenge bigotry. The idea that racism should encourage us to make life harder for asylum seekers is no more acceptable than, say, to suggest that a “blasphemous” film or book should be banned because some Muslims object to it.
The targeting of black and Asian Britons stretches back to well before the current controversy over small boats. From the 60s to the 80s, racism was often explained away as the inevitable result of there being too many immigrants, who were unwanted and didn’t belong. Many suggested that to stop racist abuse and violence we needed to stem immigration and deport black and brown Britons.
Today, apart from those for whom figures such as Enoch Powell remain heroes, few would accept that the way to staunch racism is by indulging racist claims. Half a century on, the character of both racism and immigration has changed, though in complicated ways. Britain is no longer as viscerally racist as it once was, and yet, over the past decade, the language of the far right has seeped into the mainstream, with migrants denounced as “invaders”, calls for mass deportations and laments over “white decline”. This has been justified by pointing to soaring immigration numbers and popular disaffection.
“If we fail to deal with this crisis”, Mahmood told parliament, “we will draw more people down a path that starts with anger and ends in hatred.” The hatred certainly is directed at migrants and at Britons of migrant background. But the anger has been brewing from long before the small boats crisis.
At its root lies the shattering of the postwar social contract and a sense of betrayal as successive governments have failed to address questions of inequality and poverty, of falling living standards and unaffordable housing; a sense of feeling abandoned by political parties and social institutions and of being rendered voiceless.
Immigration has become symbolic of a world that seems more insecure
The relationship between immigration and the fraying of the social fabric is complex. The sociologists Vera Messing and Bence Ságvári have been tracking long-term trends in public attitudes to immigration using the European Social Survey (ESS), a biannual study conducted since 2002. It allows for comparison between nations with different migration policies and different attitudes to social institutions.
What shapes hostility towards migrants, Messing and Ságvári observe, is not the presence of migrants, but perceptions of trust and cohesion. “People in countries… with a high level of general and institutional trust, low level of corruption, a stable, well-performing economy and high level of social cohesion and inclusion… fear migration the least,” they note, whereas “people are fearful in countries where the basic tissue of society is damaged, where people don’t trust each other or the state’s institutions, and where social cohesion and solidarity are weak”.
Could it be the rise in immigration, and fears of loss of control of borders, that has eroded trust? The correlation between migrant levels in a country and attitudes towards them is the opposite of what one might expect if this were true: “Countries with a negligible share of migrants are the most hostile, while countries where migrants’ presence in the society is large are actually the most tolerant.” “Anti-migrant attitudes,” Messing and Ságvári conclude, are an “expression of people’s lack of safety and security, and a symptom of deep-rooted problems in the society”. Immigration has become symbolic of a world that seems more insecure, precarious and out of control.
Mahmood’s policy is unlikely to stop the boats. The home secretary claims her measures will minimise “the pull factors that draw people to this country”. Yet, her own department’s research shows such pull factors being “limited” as “drivers of migration”, given that “many asylum seekers have little to no understanding of current asylum policies and the economic conditions”.
Even were it to succeed, though, Mahmood’s policies would not staunch popular disaffection. That disaffection has far deeper roots. What hysteria about immigration does is obscure those roots, making it harder to address the underlying causes of working-class anger.
Photograph by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images