The summer of 2020 has seen an unprecedented number of migrants crossing the English Channel to claim asylum in the UK. The majority are from the poorest and most strife-torn parts of the world, especially in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA). Among the most common countries of origin are Yemen, Eritrea, Chad, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, and Iraq. Many claim asylum upon arrival, while others seek employment, often believing it to be unsafe to apply for a UK work visa from their home countries.
While many migrant vessels are intercepted and turned around by French authorities, the number of people reaching the UK by boat are often in excess of 200 per day. The boats themselves tend to be small, overcrowded dinghies and many passengers are children. The crossing is extremely dangerous, as the English Channel is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. The response from the British right has been a wide-reaching propaganda campaign that paints some of the world’s most vulnerable people as a sinister threat to the British way of life.
The UK receives a far lower number of asylum-seekers than other European countries.
It is crucial therefore to view the figures in perspective. While over 4,000 unauthorized migrants have made it to British shores in the summer of 2020 alone, this makes up less than 1 percent of the annual UK immigration. Meanwhile, the UK receives a far lower number of asylum-seekers than other European countries. In 2019, Britain received 49,000 asylum applications, compared to 118,000 in Spain, 129,000 in France, and 166,000 in Germany. Sadly, policy does not reflect these facts. In an attempt to distract from its own mismanagement of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, the British government has done its level best to whip up a hysteria about the numbers of Middle Eastern migrants currently claiming asylum in Britain.
The UK government, led by right-wing Home Secretary Priti Patel, have responded to the so-called migrant crisis with utter callousness. Patel recently said that the UK’s asylum laws were too lenient and were being “exploited by leftie Labor-supporting lawyers” in order to keep asylum-seekers in the country. The reality is the stark opposite – the UK asylum application process consists of a series of grueling interviews, held weeks apart, during which interrogators search for apparent inconsistencies in the applicant’s story, which can be used as a justification for denying asylum.
Furthermore, under long-standing European Union legislation known as “Dublin III,” the UK can return an asylum seeker to designated safe countries, such as France, if that individual could have claimed asylum in that country. Many asylum-seekers will have a stronger claim in the UK than in neighboring countries, usually because they have relatives who already live in Britain.
Neither the actions nor the rhetoric of the government exist in a vacuum – both are being encouraged by an influential group of far-right actors whose goal is to bring their fringe views in the mainstream. And they have succeeded.
Former UK Independence Party (UKIP) and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has been stoking fear of asylum-seekers.
Former UK Independence Party (UKIP) and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has been stoking fear of asylum-seekers in a transparent attempt to remain relevant after Brexit. Farage has spent the summer traveling out into the middle of the Channel in a speed boat, baiting the migrant vessels that he encounters. He then posts videos of the encounters on social media, claiming that the “invasion” of migrants are part of an elite conspiracy involving the French Navy.
In April 2015, The Sun, Britain’s highest selling newspaper, published an infamous column by Katie Hopkins, entitled: “Rescue Boats? I’d use gunships to Stop Migrants.” “Some of our towns are festering sores, plagued by swarms of migrants and asylum-seekers,” wrote Hopkins, who went on to describe Middle Eastern migrants as “cockroaches.” This language is not incidental – it is part of a conscious attempt to dehumanize migrants so that not rescuing them, and even persecuting and killing them, becomes acceptable.
The column was condemned by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Hussein, who reminded its author of the history of referring to human beings as vermin. “The Nazi media described people their masters wanted to eliminate as rats and cockroaches,” said Hussein, pointing also to similar language prior to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
Donald Trump, who was then a Republican presidential candidate, took a different view on Hopkins. “Thank you to respected columnist Katie Hopkins for her powerful writing on the UK’s Muslim problems,” Trump tweeted in December 2015. Hopkins was later fired by The Sun after a tweet that followed an Islamist terror attack carried out by a second-generation Libyan immigrant in Manchester in 2017. In the tweet, Hopkins called for “a final solution,” invoking the term the Nazis used to refer to the holocaust.
There is no doubt that Donald Trump is the most significant culprit in mainstreaming far-right political ideas. Nigel Farage’s use of language like “invasion” to refer to migration is reminiscent of Trump, of whom he is a devoted supporter. Yet this kind of rhetoric found its way into the supposed political center long before Trump’s election or the Brexit vote.
In July 2015, then British Prime Minister David Cameron referred to the desperate migrants crossing from North Africa to Europe as a “swarm.” While more subtle than the blatant fascist imagery of Hopkins’ Sun column, Cameron’s wording was not a million miles away from Hitler’s description in “Mein Kampf” of the “promiscuous swarm of foreign peoples” that threatened Germany’s way of life.
In 2020, the dehumanization of African and Middle Eastern asylum-seekers has well and truly migrated to the mainstream.
In 2020, the dehumanization of African and Middle Eastern asylum-seekers has well and truly migrated to the mainstream.
Nigel Farage’s sad stunt of filming his encounters with migrants in the English Channel may have once been laughed off as the actions of a fringe lunatic, but his videos now inform conventional media coverage. In an astonishing sequence from August 10, that has been dubbed the “migrant safari,” BBC reporter Simon Jones accosted a dinghy carrying 17 migrants including two children and a pregnant woman.
Speaking from another boat pulled alongside, Jones describes the seas as “pretty choppy” and notes that the migrants’ dinghy is filling up with water. “They are using a plastic container just to try and bail out the boat,” shouted Jones over the sound of the engines. “It’s pretty overloaded there. They are wearing life jackets, but it is pretty dangerous for the number of people on board that boat.”
In lieu of any attempt to help the migrants, Jones then turned around to them and yelled: “Are you okay? Are you alright?” While the migrants were obviously not “alright,” a number of them cheerily (and perhaps ironically) responded: “okay!…okay!” With the air of an awkward Englishman on holiday, embarrassed not to speak any of the local language, Jones continued: “Where are you from?” “Syria!” came the response.
That week, many other channels jumped on the story, sending their own news crews out in boats to gawp at the asylum-seekers in their dinghies like animals in a zoo; their reports looking like an afternoon show at some dystopian version of Sea World. None of the journalists even mentioned that Britain bears a significant share of the responsibility for causing the conflicts from which many of these migrants are fleeing.
None of the journalists mentioned that Britain bears a significant share of the responsibility for causing the conflicts from which many of these migrants are fleeing.
It may well be that Simon Jones and his colleagues possess the natural, altruistic impulse to help desperate human beings, but felt pressured by the increasingly toxic, anti-migrant atmosphere in Britain to simply stand impotently by. Nothing could underline Europe’s current moral crisis more than this.
Simon Jones concluded his report by quoting a right-wing government minister who said that he “understands people’s frustration” at the number of migrants crossing the Channel. “Some people will be wondering,” said Jones, “‘why are [the British authorities] not turning these boats back?’”
Not long ago, the BBC would not have felt compelled to describe the “frustration” that one’s government is doing a tiny amount to help a handful number of desperate people as “understandable.” It is a textbook example of how ideas of extreme nationalism, once considered beyond the pale, have come to form the underlying assumptions of the mainstream.
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