Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World

"The next book that I’ve chosen is The Uninvited by Jeremy Harding. This is a book that was written in the late 90s about the people coming to Europe at that time and the people who were transporting those refugees at that time. As a journalist covering a similar theme nearly twenty years on, I find common purpose with the author, Jeremy Harding, because he was interested in the same things that I’m interested in. I’m researching the same themes and practices that he was researching twenty years ago. It is fascinating to read an in-depth piece of investigative reporting from a different era. “He is a brilliant writer, and a big thinker on the subject of migration and its implications for western policy.” There are these fascinating passages about how smuggling between Albania and Italy works. For me, this is intriguing because I’ve spent a lot of time talking to smugglers in Libya and Egypt and Turkey and Niger. So to read about smugglers in another context, and how they function in the Adriatic Sea between the Balkans and south-eastern Italy, is fascinating. It is not just a book about the mechanics of migration, it is also a beautiful text. He is a brilliant writer, and a big thinker on the subject of migration and its implications for western policy. There’s a very elegiac passage where he talks about the ethics of smuggling. He takes on the idea that traffickers or smugglers are evil or the cause of migration as Western governments like to present them. He has this very beautiful piece of analysis where he says, ‘Human traffickers are simply vectors of the contempt which exists at the two poles of the asylum seeker’s journey; they take their cue from the attitudes of warlords and dictators, on the one hand, and, on the other, of wealthy states whose citizens have learned to think of generosity as a vice.’ So, basically, he’s saying, in a very deft way, that the brutality and the cruelty that some smugglers exhibit is simply a symptom of wider cruelties within the places where refugees are coming from and also in the countries where they are travelling to. For me, if you have borders, you’re always going to have people trying to get round them. When you have people trying to get round them, you’re always going to have people who are going to provide a paid service to smuggle you across those borders. As a result, no, you’re not going to be able to get rid of people smuggling. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Personally, I feel one way of undercutting the smuggling business is to provide a system of legal access to countries like Britain. If you provide a legal route, or if you provide a realistic prospect of formal resettlement from, say, Turkey to Britain, then it makes it less likely that people would put their lives in the hands of smugglers. This is one way of bringing down the reliance on the smuggling business. We need to change the paradigm in the way that we think about migration and about refugees. At the moment, we think of migrants or refugees as people that need to be kept out. We don’t think about what the benefits could be of extending our hands to other human beings, not just for humanitarian reasons, but for practical reasons. Refugees are workers, they are academics, they are mechanics, they are engineers, translators, journalists, tailors. Whoever they are and whatever qualifications they have, they have, nevertheless, something to offer. They can be of economic benefit to the country that they are arriving in. For me, it is not enough just to think about how we crack down on people smuggling. To decrease people smuggling, we have to completely rethink the way that we conceive of human migration. We need to think of it as something that can be of economic benefit to everyone — both the people that are coming and the people that are receiving them. “We need to change the paradigm in the way that we think about migration and about refugees.” In Western societies, we have decreasing populations. We have a working-age population that is getting smaller, and a retirement population that is getting bigger. There are more people to care for and there are fewer people to care for them and to pay the taxes that are needed to pay for the institutions that look after people in their old age. For that reason, people from other parts of the world can be a solution to this kind of challenge. Once we start to think in those kinds of terms, that will lead to Western countries making it easier for people to cross borders and, in But, obviously, in the current climate, with Trump on the rise, with Marine Le Pen on the rise, with Viktor Orban on the rise in Europe, and UKIP in the UK, we are a long way from the ideas that I’ve just set out. But if people are genuinely interested in cutting down smuggling, then personally I find it a bit disingenuous to talk in terms of arresting smugglers, or smugglers being the cause of migration. Smugglers are the side-effect, and the smuggling business that he says is worth between 5 and 7 billion dollars, is a side-effect of Western policy and Western thinking about human movement. For me, that’s not actually that many if you think about it. That number is a bit higher now, in fact it is probably several times bigger than 80 million. Either way, for me, the fact that tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people are living outside the country of their birth is not something that should alarm us. It’s still a small fraction of the world’s 7 billion population. I think some people might read that and think, ‘Gosh, that’s a big number.’ But, in fact, it is a small number that should be very easy for other countries to deal with. If you have 80 million people within a population of 7 billion, this is a small fraction. There is this whole debate at the moment about what we should call people who are on the move. Personally, I feel that anyone who’s on the move should be described as a migrant because migrant should be a neutral term that describes the act of movement, rather than the intention of the person who’s moving. So a migrant could be someone who’s fleeing a war, it could be someone that’s fleeing persecution, or it could just be someone who is trying to get a better job. There doesn’t have to be a stigma attached to the description, ‘migrant.’ “Movement can be a benefit to everyone if it is managed properly.” But there are other people who feel that migrant has become a dirty word, and, therefore, we need to refer to people on the move as refugees. I think that’s linguistically a bit problematic because when you see a group of people on the move, there’s no way of knowing exactly what their background is or what their motivations are, and so it is better just to refer to them with a word that describes their actions rather than their intentions. I think, also, the minute you start differentiating between refugees and migrants in everyday speech, you start to create a two-track process of sympathy. You start to assume that there is no good reason to be on the move unless you are fleeing a war. Now, people fleeing wars are among the people that need the most amount of help in the world, but there are also many other valid reasons to be moving from place to place. I think we should avoid getting in a situation where we are basically saying, ‘You only have the right to move if your house has literally been bombed yesterday.’ I think we need to move more towards a situation where we recognise that there are lots of valid reasons to move and that that movement can be a benefit to everyone if it is managed properly. In the future, in the decades to come, there’s going to be a lot more movement because of climate change and the cuts to resources that climate change will precipitate. Because of this, we need to be more open minded about people moving. If it is going to happen more and more, we need to be less prescriptive about who can move because it is going to happen whether we like it or not."