I’ve not rehearsed the worthy arguments about gifted immigrants enriching host cultures – it’s obvious they do – but I hope this book will remind readers that poorer migrants who may not excel at a sport or have a theory of relativity in their hand luggage are nonetheless responding to urgent needs of their own when they decide to cross a border, even if they have no rights in the eyes of others; that they move because of circumstances which richer economies have conspired to create; and that migration tends to redistribute wealth more efficiently than overseas aid programmes. Similarly asylum seekers – a group of disadvantaged migrants who benefit in theory from the duty of states to offer refuge – are often in flight because of political decisions approved in the UN Security Council. Though there are fewer asylum seekers now than there were when I was reporting from Europe after the Balkan wars, this is no guarantee that numbers will continue to fall. And numerous or not, they deserve a spirited defence.
The first two sections of this book, written in the 1990s, still tell us where we are now, even if they do so through the prism of the recent past. Older statistics have been refreshed where it seemed in order. Journalism dates, yet the harshest aspects of unauthorised migration remain unchanged and some of these original sections read as though they had just been filed. The story begins in Italy, where thousands of migrants were making their way by sea from Albania. There are two new sections, covering the European Union’s growing reluctance to countenance immigration from other parts of the world and the battle between Hispanic migrants and right-wing border politicians in the US. They record the growing emphasis on militarisation, detention and deportation on both sides of the Atlantic. The final part of the book returns to the 1990s, and the border fence in Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta, which African migrants journeyed for months to reach and then waited patiently for a chance to cross. Most sub-Saharans who succeeded ended up in mainland Spain, after being held and processed through an improvised camp. Here, as elsewhere, detention was the order of the day, but it was not the systematic instrument of policy that it would shortly become in Europe and North America.
Chapter 1
After the French, I had to contend with the American police. On landing in Puerto Rico I discovered two things: during the two months which had elapsed since we left Marseille, the immigration laws in the United States had been altered and the documents I had with me … no longer complied with the new regulations … After being accused at Fort de France of being a Jewish freemason in the pay of the Americans, I had the somewhat bitter compensation of discovering that from the American point of view I was in all likelihood an emissary of the Vichy government and perhaps even of the Germans.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques
In the mid-1970s, about eighty million people – roughly 1.5 per cent of the world’s population – were living outside the country of their birth. The figure in 2012 is closer to 215 million, or 3.1 per cent, according to the International Organisation for Migration. One in every thirty-three human beings: this does not seem a lot, but the extent of human movement across borders is hard to monitor – and the figures are a mystery for those of us who have no idea how many people move in and out of our own neighbourhoods in a single day, or a year, or the course of a decade.
Migration is not a simple affair and migrants themselves are as diverse as people who stay put. The banker from Seattle who signs a five-year contract for a post in Berlin is a migrant; so is the programmer in Paris who moves to Moscow to work for a Russian Internet company; so is the labourer from Indonesia or Thailand who is subcontracted to a building site in the Gulf; so is the teenage boy from Shanghai indentured to a Chinese crime ring in New York. Refugees, too, are migrants. Often they share their route to safety with others who are not seeking asylum: the smuggling syndicates known as snakeheads, which induct Chinese women into a life of semi-slavery in Europe and the US, also ran dissidents to freedom in the retreat from Tiananmen Square. These things are largely a question of money. Refugees are not necessarily poor, but by the time they have reached safety, the human smuggling organisations on which they depend have eaten up much of their capital. In the course of excruciating journeys, mental and physical resources are also expended – some of them non-renewable.
In the past, the states of Western Europe have shown a generous capacity to take in refugees. The response to forced movement on the Continent itself, from the 1880s to the end of World War Two, might fairly be seen as impressive. So might the absorption of refugees during the Cold War: far fewer, of course, and mostly from South-East Asia, in keeping with the Cold War commitments of the West. But by the mid-1980s, when numbers started to rise again, states in Western Europe were reviewing their duty to provide asylum. The change was connected with the new availability of one part of the world to another – with the expansion of global access, not least as a result of airline price wars. It occurred at a time when France, Germany, Britain and others had made up their minds that the postwar experiment with immigration from the South was over. Refugees have paid a high price for this decision.
They have also paid for the new prestige of the North American social and economic model – unrivalled after 1989, but all the more conspicuous for its subsequent failings. The racially diverse society is a deeply troubling notion in Europe. The shifting and grinding together of peoples – the tectonic population movements that defined the European continent – were already well advanced, and largely settled, by the time the New World became a battleground between the empires of Europe and indigenous Americans. For Europeans, the multiracial model of the United States, founded on waves of relatively modern migration, including slave migration – the most lucrative case of human trafficking in history – is flawed. The Right in Europe thinks of it as a triumph of capitalism for which multiculturalism has been a high price to pay. The Left thinks of it as a qualified multicultural success which can never redeem the cost of that triumph.
In both views, the milling of cultures and races and the whirlwind of capitalism are indissociable. Everyone pays grudging homage to the American model of cultural diversity, but European governments of all persuasions are dour about its advantages and alert to its dangers: cities eroded by poverty and profit; the cantonisation of social space; urban and rural societies doubly fractured by ethnicity and class; most forms of negotiation dragged along the runnels of identity politics. And if governments incline to the gloomy view, so do many citizens.
Europeans have different ambitions for their social fabric, bound up one way or another with a lingering faith in regulation. Yet those who call for greater control of the global markets and the movement of capital are easily derided, while the wish to restrict free access to wealthier states for people from the South and East is seen as perfectly reasonable. Often the very people who think it a sin to tamper with the self-expression of the markets are the first to call for lower immigration from poorer countries, though in all probability it would take decades of inward migration to bring about the degree of ‘cultural difference’ that a bad patch of international trading, a brisk downsizing, or a decision by a large corporation to start outsourcing can inject into a social landscape in a year.
It is nothing new for the non-white immigrant, or would-be immigrant, to have to bear the cost of Europe’s fears for its own stability, but the EU’s wish to keep out asylum seekers is a striking development. Under the International Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, they are distinguished from other migrants by their ability to demonstrate ‘a well-founded fear of being persecuted’. Many who do not qualify for ‘Convention status’ are protected by other agreements and various forms of temporary asylum, awarded on ‘humanitarian grounds’. In practice, however, the distinction between asylum seekers and other kinds of disadvantaged migrant – a distinction designed to shield the refugee from prejudicial factors such as low immigration targets in host states – has been worn away. In Western Europe, refugees have begun to look like beggars at the gate, or even thieves. Since the 1980s, they have lost most lawful means of access to the rich world.
To governments aiming at low levels of immigration from poorer countries, asylum is an exemption that allows too many people past the
