tank the Institute of Race Relations has kept the most accurate record possible of all those who had passed through the UK’s immigration and asylum system and subsequently died by suicide.42 Robertas Grabys, Saeed Alaei, Nasser Ahmed, Souleyman Diallo, Shiraz Pir, Mariman Tahamasbi, Mohsen Amri and Sirous Khajeh are just some of the people who feature on their records between 2000 and 2002.
In 2010, ignoring the police who tried to talk him down from the railings of a seventh-floor balcony in Nottingham, and as others taunted him from below, Osman Rasul died by suicide after nine years of trying to get status. ‘His life was governed by an interminable waiting’, one of his friends said after he died, ‘for meetings with solicitors, for correspondence with the Home Office, above all for an end to the paralysing uncertainty in which he had lived for the best part of a decade.’43
Borders seem as natural as day and night; firming up territories by demarcating where the nation state begins and ends. We tend to treat them as if they’ve always been there and always will be. But borders are created and recreated. They are policed and enforced within countries. Transcending the very things they seek to fortify, expand and sharpen, politicians work together across borders to make it more difficult for people to move, while capital is allowed to flow freely. The border you’re born within can determine the conditions of your life and death; what rights and resources you can access and where you can go. If only we spent the same amount of time scrutinising borders as we do championing their importance, then instead of pandering to the demands of those who complain about people desperate enough to leave their home country to cross them, we might try to dismantle them.
Seen as representing strength and protection, they are, if you look at them more closely, violent and discriminatory in all kinds of way. Borders are not only where the lines on the map tell us they are. They are also drawn between people, with the use of words like ‘migrant’ and ‘citizen’. By crossing a border, you can cease to be a human being to the people around you, becoming an (‘illegal’) immigrant or a (‘bogus’) asylum seeker. These words we use to talk about people aren’t just descriptive or neutral categories; how they’re used doesn’t always and only coincide with their legal meaning; they’re laden with other associations.44 Just look at the term ‘migrant’.
Twisted to apply to specific groups of people at particular times, there is no hard and fast rule of who is an immigrant and who isn’t. In the public debate, ‘immigrant’ comes to mean all kinds of different things; messy and shifting, it is, at times, conflated with race or ethnicity, and it’s applied to people seeking asylum or who have refugee status.45 Immigrant has, then, become this catch-all term, referring to all kinds of things at once. In 2016, journalist Liz Gerard found two of the UK’s tabloid papers ran 1,768 articles about migrants – which made ‘an average of more than three per issue for the Mail and two for the Express (which has far fewer news pages)’ – and according to Gerard, almost all were negative.46
For something talked about so much, there’s a lack of clarity about what immigration refers to; between who falls or is pushed into the category ‘immigrant’, who resides on its edges and who, despite moving across borders, never comes anywhere near to it. Race, class and gender decide how so-called non-citizens are seen, because they certainly aren’t all seen the same way. When people talk about immigrants, they aren’t usually thinking of white, wealthy Americans.
There is no universally agreed-upon definition of who constitutes an immigrant. The UN describes a long-term international migrant as someone who moves to another country, which essentially becomes their residence, for at least twelve months. But even this explanation has its problems. ‘The time frame of one year is arbitrary,’ Professor Bridget Anderson points out, ‘change that and you can drastically alter how we understand and measure immigration … If, for example, one chooses to define a “migrant” as a person intending to stay away for four years or more … Britain has been experiencing negative net migration for many years.’47
And despite definitions like this one, movement is complicated and so the distinction between refugees and migrants isn’t always a straightforward one. Someone might flee war in their home country, arrive in another as an asylum seeker, and be granted refugee status. But after months or years of trying to find work or survive in this new country, they might decide to move somewhere in Europe, where they’re told there’s a chance of work, or where their family lives. Then they might be seen as a migrant.48
The ground is constantly shifting under people’s feet; like a carousel, the debate moves from ‘good refugee’ and ‘bad migrant’ to ‘bad refugee’ and ‘good migrant’, as politicians reacting to and feeding global and national events determine who’s acceptable and who isn’t. Rarely is one category of people considered entirely welcome, and there aren’t always unambiguous distinctions between asylum seekers, refugees and migrants, especially not in the public debate, where the potential differences and similarities between different people and their experiences are muddied; the sheer complexity of it all is lost.
Anti-asylum language feeds anti-immigrant narratives in an ongoing negative feedback loop, and regardless of their legal status, everyone who is seen as an ‘illegitimate’ outsider becomes a threat to the nation. Particular people are deemed undesirable, as the media and politicians conspire to give the impression that people who have come to live in the UK are undercutting wages, driving down conditions and diluting ‘British culture’.
But often, amid all this complexity, liberal politicians, some of whom are relatively relaxed about advocating for more refugees to be allowed into the country, claim to have some kind of clarity: the real problem, they say, is economic migrants. Even some parts of the immigration sector have helped sustain a ‘hierarchy of migrants’, Fizza Qureshi, director of Migrants’ Rights Network, says. Some organisations more comfortable with advocating for refugees have sometimes failed to tackle the stereotypes about migrants irrespective of what job they do, where they’re from or how much they earn.
‘Economic migrants’ are thought to choose to move for better wages or a better standard of life, and it’s according to this logic that they’re problematised; it’s assumed they are here to ‘take’ from the UK, out of no real necessity. Not in the country ‘illegally’, they’re still considered illegitimate. But overlooked in the mix of hostility and hysteria about ‘economic immigration’ is an understanding of why people migrate to begin with.
Relocating all over the world, packing up their possessions, making journeys within countries, across oceans and whole continents, people are complex, there isn’t always one single reason they emigrate. It might be for adventure, a new job, to be with family or a change of scenery. They are making these trips with their loved ones or leaving family behind to settle in countries entirely new to them or cities they’ve known only from news bulletins. Choosing whether to leave can be as much to do with where you are as it is with where you want to go.
Money in its most crude form of notes and coins isn’t the only motivation for migration. If all movement were just a case of following the money, author and professor Arun Kundnani writes, ‘everyone in Greece would have moved to Luxembourg where they could instantly double their wages’.49 Many people can’t scrape together enough money to move, and many others might not want to move in the first place. The frenzied discussion about ‘mass migration’ ignores that the vast majority of people stay where they are or move within countries. In 2016, estimates suggested only 3.2 per cent of the world’s population were international migrants; in 1960 it was 3 per cent.50 The world’s population has grown substantially in this period, so although this amounts to more people moving, it’s not a significantly higher proportion than in the past. What’s also changed over this almost sixty-year period is that the countries people leave are more diverse and the number of destinations is far smaller. The EU, one of the richest parts of the world, is one of the most popular destinations.51 But, even then, only a small proportion of the
