a bunch of migrants…

Yup, that’s right.  My very first post is going to be about migrants.  And immigrants.
A topic I know really quite a lot about, because:

a) my mum was an immigrant – she was born in the USA, was a US citizen and though she grew up in the UK from the age of 5, she was sent back aged 16 in 1939, went to university there and returned on a migrant visa (or whatever they were called then) in 1946.  Her younger sister was also sent to the USA a bit later that year, and never returned to the UK to live, but stayed in her native country, the USA, for the rest of her life.

b) two of my brothers are emigrants from the UK, making them immigrants to other countries – one has lived and worked  in mainland Europe for the last 20 years or so, in Germany, then France and now Belgium.  The other lives in Uganda and works all over the place in Central Africa.

c) I’ve officially worked with migrants / immigrants since 2004, but had been involved with helping people in the local refugee communities since 1999.  Specifically, I’ve worked with asylum seekers, refused asylum seekers, unaccompanied asylum seeker children, people with refugee status, their spouses and family members.  Since 2006, when I became an ESOL teacher, I’ve also worked with other non-native speakers of English now resident in the UK but hailing from all over the world, particularly from both the Asian diaspora and the East European diaspora.  Including  (look away now, Islamophobes) Moslems.  Both Shiite and Sunni.  Oh, and Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Yezidis, Zoroastrians, not to mention Christians of every persuasion, including one or two with very dislikable ideas about how to treat people they don’t agree with.  And probably Animists and other religions I might never have heard of.  In fact, I’ve even worked with atheists – Islamic atheists, Buddhist atheists, Christian atheists…..

So what is an immigrant?
It is a yes/no definition – live here, born here, not an immigrant; live here, not born here, an immigrant. Unless and until you gain citizenship of the country you now live in, at which point you legally cease to be an immigrant.  But the perception of the media appears to be that you never stop being an immigrant.  So my mum, resident in the UK from the ages of 5 -16 and 22 – 93 should by Daily Mail / Sun standards be considered an immigrant to this very day.
Oh, hang on.  She’s white.  She went to university.  Aah, I’ll think about that again, shall I?

I very recently had a long conversation with a friend from what was at the time a country in the Eastern bloc, who came to the UK way back when with her husband, whom she’d met and married in her country of origin.  They lived in the UK for several decades but then moved south from the UK to another West European country.  Where he very sadly died.
She vehemently and insistently denied having ever been an immigrant in her life.
She said she wasn’t an immigrant to the UK because she’d come to the UK with her husband, and she hadn’t intended to invade (sic).  And she wasn’t an immigrant to her current country because they’d applied for leave to remain.
She also told me my mum wasn’t an immigrant because she had family in the UK.  And my brothers weren’t because they had jobs in the countries they went to.
I tried really hard to explain that if you live in a country but weren’t born there, you are, by definition, an immigrant till you get citizenship.  So she’d been an immigrant.  I had a very hard job convincing her that the definition of the word immigrant does not carry any a-priori negative connotations relating to the abuse of hospitality, invasion, benefit fraud and theft.  In fact, I’m not at all sure I’ve managed it.

So her indignant response encapsulated very neatly indeed just how successful the rebranding of the words immigrant and migrant by the rightwing media has been.  Her English is fine, if occasionally eccentric; it’s her uncritical assumption that right wing media headlines are telling it like it is that is the problem.  In which, goodness knows, she really is far from alone.    It further demonstrates how seductive the rhetoric is.

The infamous and disgusting ‘bunch of migrants’ quote perpetrated by David Cameron on Holocaust Remembrance Day made me shudder with horror.  My mum was at school with a number of young boys and girls from Germany and Austria.  Jews, the lot of them.  They were the lucky ones – possibly some of them came over on the Kindertransport but I suspect they were from families who saw what was coming early enough to get their children out even if they couldn’t escape themselves.   But all the Western European countries were heaving with Jewish people desperate to get out of the German sphere of influence and get to the UK, the USA, Canada, South America, Africa, Palestine – anywhere out of mainland Europe.  And not just Jewish people.. Socialists, homosexuals, disabled people.   Ring any bells?
And the UK government then, as now, allowed a few in and refused the huge majority with contempt and dislike – Jews were very unpopular as a group….   What would David Cameron have called them? Exactly the same, I strongly suspect, except back then Jewish would have been the pejorative adjective rather than Moslem.  That particular  undeserving bunch of migrants – who really were in enormous numbers – went to the gas chambers.  Our current bunch of migrants – well, we don’t know how many have been killed already but the numbers are definitely starting to be comparable, and we are doing now what we did then.

We really are in a situation very strongly reminiscent of the early 1930s. We are invited to panic at a perceived “invasion”.  It starts with the systematic denigration of one group of perceived outsiders.  and then it spreads, and deepens, and worsens.  Meanwhile people will run for their lives, because that’s what you do when you have no hope of surviving where you live.

This massive diaspora is not happening in a vacuum.  We and our government(s) are complicit up to our necks in the killing fields that the Middle East has become, and in the ongoing desperately dangerous situation in Afghanistan.  Yet we have leaders who express pity for distant refugees but nothing but contempt for refugees closer to home.

Jordan is currently hosting 9 refugees for every 10 native Jordanians.  And it is happy to continue offering an open door and hospitality providing Europe will support it adequately with this insanely enormous task.  Its population is 6.459 million, so it is hosting, give or take, 5,813,100 extra people.  Its population has doubled.  Its doors are still open.  But there are vast numbers still needing help and succour and, yes, asylum (a word that means ‘a place of safety’ and Jordan and Lebanon and Turkey and Greece can’t do it all.
We in the UK, meanwhile, are offering a paltry 5000 places a year and Cameron has the gall to congratulate himself on this. And feel able to call desperate refugees “a bunch of migrants”.