The government’s refusal to articulate a balanced story on migration is damaging Britain’s social fabric. The present preoccupation with sounding ‘tough’ on migrants merely stirs up public anxieties and damages community cohesion. It’s about time the government adopted a progressive migration narrative.
The government continues to propose ever more draconian migration legislation. The latest initiative – new fingerprint checks for those applying for a UK visa – was announced last month.
The government hopes that ‘tough’ migration policies will reassure the public that it is in control of the migration system. However, the government’s failure to provide the context within which these measures are implemented is having a detrimental social impact.
The vast majority of migrants hold jobs, pay taxes and uphold the law. Without migrants, Britain would have too few people to clean its offices, nurse its sick, or work on the trading floors of its investment banks. Moreover, migrants have played a central role in the creation of modern Britain. As Robert Winder points out in his book Bloody Foreigners, without migrants, we would be bereft of many quintessentially ‘British’ institutions: from Marks and Spencer to afternoon tea at the Ritz.
Yet how often do we see government ministers painting a balanced, nuanced picture of migration? The government rarely accompanies announcements, such as fingerprinting, with the fact that such initiatives are designed to catch a small minority who try to flout system.
Successive Conservative and Labour governments have strived to appear ‘tough’ on migration. However, this ‘tough-minded fairness’ rhetoric, rather than allay public concern, has merely served to fuel it. Polling by Mori shows that public concern over migration has increased dramatically over the last 10 years, despite the huge amount of political energy expended on passing draconian laws.
The government’s failure to narrate a balanced migration story means it has effectively ceded the issue to the right. The government is dancing to Migration Watch’s tune: migration can only be good when the numbers are down. Constant announcements about ‘tougher security for migrants’, without any contextual qualification, send the public a subliminal message that foreigners are inherently criminal. Recent spikes in support for the British National party in local elections should rightly sound alarm bells.
The real menace of the government’s migration rhetoric is shown by recent research on attitudes towards asylum in five areas of the UK. It concluded that the public widely misunderstands the differences between categories of migrants and their rights and entitlements. The man in the street won’t recognise the difference between irregular migrants, recognised refugees or third generation black or minority ethnic Britons. When the media whip up a frenzy over migration, anyone perceived as ‘other’ suffers as a consequence.
Fortunately the British public is not inherently anti-immigrant. In 2005, Michael Howard’s Conservatives gleaned only marginal political gain from an ugly election campaign primarily based on xenophobic hostility to foreigners. More important indicators, perhaps, are the excellent examples of voluntary and community projects building common bonds between diverse parts of our population.
The Ashiana Community Project in Birmingham is an example of a community group helping to foster solidarity between people of different ethnicities, religions and backgrounds. Ashiana uses local ‘community mentors’ to encourage marginalised local women to participate in one of organisation’s health, education and confidence-building programmes. Women from different communities, who normally might never have met, overcome their mutual concerns together.
These projects highlight that living, working and playing together is possible, regardless of skin colour, religion or cultural difference. However, for every such community project, there are right wing pundits and shock-jocks trying to drive us further apart.
We need visionary politicians to draw the venom from the current migration debate and present a balanced picture. In refusing to offer a counterpoint to the right’s foreigner-bashing, perhaps the government vainly hopes to minimize criticism of its migration policies. Yet by allowing the right to set the terms of the debate, ministers are sacrificing the lamb of cohesion upon an altar of political vacillation.