A Long History of Welcoming?
By Lucy Mayblin
Despite their current political views, the British government have been advocates of welcoming migrants and refugees into Britain, in what they claim is a ‘long and proud’ tradition. The recent Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper is no exception, suggesting that Britain is an ‘open and tolerant country which has a long history of welcoming migrants and the benefits they bring, as well as meeting our international obligations to refugees’[1].
So how about this ‘long and proud’ tradition? Is it something that we can trace across time? Unfortunately, not — anyone who has studied the history of immigration to Britain will know that it is much easier to find examples of the state passing new legislation to keep migrants out of the country, steadily reducing their social and economic rights and building walls and special detention centres [2]. Add this to a broader context of hostility towards immigrants, one in which today’s Brexit Britain is generally seen as much more tolerant and welcoming, and the ‘long and proud tradition’ starts to look vacant. When we look at the history of asylum and immigration policy in the UK, we find a history of exclusion, dehumanisation, decriminalisation, impoverishment, and the shirking of international responsibilities.
In 1951 Britain signed the Convention on the Status of Refugees at the UN. The human rights framework was based on the idea that the need for some legal constraints on a state’s sovereignty might be necessary, in order to prevent a repeat of the atrocities committed in Nazi Germany. Before this people didn’t really have any rights aside from their rights as citizens of a particular country, and so, had no right to be protected if the rulers of their country persecuted them. As Hannah Arendt famously put it, when forced to flee their country and effectively made stateless, Jewish refugees found that they had lost the right even to have rights; this was partly because the Jews had been failed.. In 1938, the Home Secretary told parliament that the mass migration of Jews must be prevented in order to prevent the growth of anti-Semitism in Britain.
The Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees was supposed to rectify such inhumane responses which lead to the deaths of millions. As a result of this, refugees now have the right to cross an international border without the proper documents, apply for asylum and to not be sent back to their home country, or a third country, where their lives might be endangered. Whilst our role in the convention drafting is a source of national pride, my own research on the convention negotiations tells a less flattering story. In the late 1940s, British government ministers were in fact strongly against human rights, particularly if they affected activities in the Empire. The cabinet secretary’s notebooks from this era show that there were long discussions between senior British ministers about not wanting to be bound by the human rights conventions, but equally not wanting to be seen to be against them.[3]
The reluctance stemmed from the fact that the so called “coloured populations” were treated as inferior by Britain and the US, despite the British Empire’s rhetoric of fairness and equality. Due to domestic and external pressure, there was little choice but to sign up to the human rights agenda as it unfolded. As a result, a clause was proposed within the negotiations, allowing colonial powers to decide which of its territories, human rights would apply to. Despite holding significant overseas territories, the UK extended the Convention only to the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. What this example shows is the longevity of exclusionary asylum practices. The British government was hostile towards granting non-European asylum seekers refugee rights under international law. It was only in 1967, under increasing pressure from decolonising countries, that the refugee convention was extended to include countries displaced outside of Europe.
So, what about now? Perhaps the tradition is, if not long, then more recently ‘proud’? Unfortunately, not. In recent years the rights of asylum seekers have been steadily eroded. Though the British government was reluctant to sign up to the refugee convention, it remained tolerable. Though conflicts, and indeed refugees, existed outside of Europe, most people did not have the means to flee to the continent — most still don’t. 87% of the world’s refugees still reside in a neighbouring country to that which they have fled [4], and Britain does not neighbour a refugee producing country. The arrival of non-European migrants in any number has always been received as a crisis. If there were more asylum seekers from outside of Europe, this was interpreted as a wave of economic migration disguised as asylum seeking. The result of the ensuing moral panic in Britain was nine rafts of primary legislation in under two decades, which steadily eroded the rights of asylum seekers.
Measures such as detention, dispersal, reporting, fingerprinting, impoverishment, and social and economic exclusion, have since proliferated. Every effort has been made to limit the number of people who are legally recognised as having been persecuted, irrespective of the situation from which they are fleeing. Asylum applicants are largely banned from working and currently receive £36.95 per week in welfare. This represents less than a third of the income of the poorest 10% of the UK population and was set specifically in relation to what they spend on essential living needs. The only place where asylum seekers can work is in immigration detention centres, where they are paid between £1 and £1.25 per hour to undertake jobs integral to the running of the centres that incarcerate them. [5]
In 2012 a national charity, The Children’s Society, instigated a parliamentary inquiry into asylum support for children and young people. It concluded that ‘the current levels of support provided to families are too low to meet children’s essential living needs. Low levels of asylum support were expert witnesses including academic researchers, social workers, local authorities and health professionals who identified symptoms including malnutrition, disrupted education, risk of exploitation and domestic violence as symptoms of living in poverty within factors of forced dispersal and histories of persecution.
In July 2013 the charity Freedom from Torture, which supports torture survivors, published a research report on poverty amongst asylum seekers and refugees. In his foreword Juan Méndez, United Nations Special Reporter on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, wrote:
“The research [documented in this report] demonstrates that torture survivors living in exile in the UK are pushed into poverty by government systems that are meant to support them as they pass through the asylum determination system and beyond. I know through the work of my mandate internationally that many torture survivors who manage to reach and claim protection in States such as the UK may not have directly experienced these levels of absolute or relative poverty before (Pettitt 2013:2).” [6]
One single justification has been given for these policies of impoverishment: that welfare and work act as pull factors for disingenuous asylum seekers coming to the UK. Yet, there have been 23 peer reviewed studies on pull factors since 2002 but not one has found a long-term correlation between welfare, work rules, and numbers of asylum seekers. In short, the policy of impoverishment is not based on any evidence but is rather driven by the imperative to be systematically unwelcoming to asylum seekers.
It is within this policy context that we arrive at Britain’s response towards the crisis of refugees. The then-Prime Minister David Cameron and Home Secretary Theresa May explained that sharing the burden with their European counterparts would act as a pull factor. The Conservative government, therefore, opted out of an EU plan to offer resettlement to a limited number of refugees and have accepted only small numbers taken from camps in the Middle East as part of the UN resettlement programme.
The claim that Britain has a long and proud tradition of protecting refugees from persecution is, in conclusion, mere rhetoric. There have been moments of hospitality but scratch the surface and they have often been late in any given crisis. Britain was a reluctant signatory of the 1951 refugee convention, and the exclusionary impulse continues today. In fact, we might conclude from this brief overview that Britain has a long history of seeking to avoid being seen as too generous, too welcoming, lest people seek asylum here.
[1] HM Government,. (2018) Green Paper on Integrated Communities Strategy, available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/696993/Integrated_Communities_Strategy.pdf, accessed 23.04.18
[2] Bhambra, G. (2016) Brexit, the Commonwealth, and exclusionary citizenship, Open Democracy, https://www.opendemocracy.net/gurminder-k-bhambra/brexit-commonwealth-and-exclusionary-citizenship
[3] See also Mayblin, L. (2014). Colonialism, Decolonisation, and the Right to be Human: Britain and the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees. Journal of Historical Sociology, 27(3): 423–441
[4] OECD (2017),. Perspectives on Global Development 2017 International Migration in a Shifting World, available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cxG0DQAAQBAJ&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=87%25+of+the+world’s+refugees+still+reside+in+a+neighbouring+country+to+that+which+they+have+fled&source=bl&ots=-asQzy5dKn&sig=5QddR0O8zr_RmJeeQPzI7qUnpC0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiW0pKVttDaAhVlJcAKHa4bB-0Q6AEIfjAJ#v=onepage&q=87%25%20of%20the%20world’s%20refugees%20still%20reside%20in%20a%20neighbouring%20country%20to%20that%20which%20they%20have%20fled&f=false, accessed 23.04.17
[5] OECD (2017),. Perspectives on Global Development 2017 International Migration in a Shifting World, available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cxG0DQAAQBAJ&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=87%25+of+the+world’s+refugees+still+reside+in+a+neighbouring+country+to+that+which+they+have+fled&source=bl&ots=-asQzy5dKn&sig=5QddR0O8zr_RmJeeQPzI7qUnpC0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiW0pKVttDaAhVlJcAKHa4bB-0Q6AEIfjAJ#v=onepage&q=87%25%20of%20the%20world’s%20refugees%20still%20reside%20in%20a%20neighbouring%20country%20to%20that%20which%20they%20have%20fled&f=false, accessed 23.04.17
[6] Bales, K. Mayblin, L. (2017) ‘Paid Work’ or Underpaid Labour? The Labour Exploitation of Detainees within Immigration Detention, Discover Society, Issue 47, available at: https://discoversociety.org/2017/08/02/paid-work-or-underpaid-labour-the-labour-exploitation-of-detainees-within-immigration-detention
Originally published at https://www.rowmaninternational.com.
