How two words inspire racist violence

Political refugee vs 'economic migrant'

This is a screenshot I took from the BBC’s live coverage of yesterday’s race riots in Rotherham where a mob attacked a hotel accomodating asylum-seekers. They set fire to a large bin at the entrance of the hotel; some apparently managed to smash down doors to gain entry. They overcame the police and bombarded them with bricks, stones and pieces of wood. It is a wonder that no one in the hotel was killed. The occupants were terrified for their lives.

Over the last few days, there have been similar such scenes in several places in England (not - yet - in Scotland). In other towns, black men were attacked, kicked and punched on the street; mosques were besieged. The aim of the violence was clearly racist. It was organised on and incited by social media. It was a systematic and deliberate attack on refugees and minorities across the country. Some called it a pogrom. The Prime Minister, clearly hedging his bets, called it ‘mindless thuggery’. Mindless it clearly wasn’t. And ‘thuggery’ implies something akin to football hooliganism when in fact these ‘protestors’ (which the BBC continues to call them) had murder on their mind.

These are dark days. Muslims live in fear. People of colour are afraid to go out. No one knows when the violence will stop or if the police, already thinly stretched, will cope. If it continues, the violence will, as violence does, intensify; there will surely be deaths.

There is much to say about these profoundly disturbing events. They are not wholly new. In my childhood there were race riots in South London where I lived. But many commentators, I think correctly, judge that this current bout of violence is unprecedented in its intensity and spread across multiple locations. As I write, there are confrontations between far right rioters and anti-fascists on the streets of Plymouth, a town in south west England not known for unrest or political violence.

In future posts, I will address other often-unmentioned issues in race and violence in the UK. One, for instance, is the deeply-rooted structural racism of society as a whole, of which this violence, perpetrated it seems largely by white working class men and women, is but one, and perhaps the ugliest, manifestation. Part of that structural racism is secretly perpetuated by the middle classes who like to look down their noses at the working class at times like this, thinking themselves superior, when in fact they have a far more influential role in enforcing racist bias in multiple arenas of modern society. And then of course there’s the economics of racism, where poor white working class people are incited to attack poor non-white working class people. What is the covert purpose here but the continuation of a deeply unequal economic status quo? But these are just brief mentions of deeper and more complex issues which deserve more thorough treatment.

For now, I want to look at just one aspect of this. As is usual with the deeper causes of ugly things in our society, it is barely spoken of either.

Here is tableau I ripped from Twitter of recent front pages from the British right-wing newspaper, the Daily Mail, a paper that is supposed to represent the views of ‘middle England’, the conservative (small ‘c’) rump who have ensured Conservative (big ‘C’) government in this country for most of the last few decades, a group whom Nixon might have termed ‘the silent majority’. The Daily Mail is Britain’s second biggest selling newspaper. The Sun, the biggest seller, is just as bad if not worse. Take a look.

So far, so predictable to claim that the right wing press is responsible for whipping up race hatred, Islamophobia and hostility to immigrants. It is.

But something else is going on here, hidden in plain sight on these front pages. It’s in the words, in particular the preponderance of the word ‘migrant’ and the absence of the word ‘refugee’. Because of course in the discourse on immigration, ‘refugees’ are good (well, up to a point, or rather up to a certain number), and ‘migrants’ are bad. Or to put it more precisely, refugees are legal and the UK is legally obliged to take them under the UN Refugee Convention. Migrants by contrast are ‘economic’ migrants and therefore ‘illegal’, and the UK is entitled to refuse them entry and chuck them out if they are discovered.

This distinction is entrenched in the heart of refugee law, most of which dates back to the aftermath of the Second World War. Those fleeing political oppression are legitimate; those fleeing desperate even lethal impoverishment are not. I made the mistake of raising this distinction to a giant in the world of human rights, a man himself a survivor of the Holocaust and a political refugee (and incidentally a man I respect very much). I asked whether the degree of suffering for both categories might in fact be similar and that therefore they might be granted similar rights as refugees. My interlocutor banged his chair with his fist as he cried, ‘Economic migrants are NOT refugees!’. His objection was understandable; he had devoted his life to fighting for the rights of political refugees, a hard enough battle.

In the US, economic migrants are denigrated as ‘illegals’. In the UK, the word ‘migrants’ is sufficiently pejorative, as the Daily Mail headlines demonstrate, where the term is used as a dog whistle for the dark ‘other’. Seeking to escape economic desperation is not a good enough reason to be granted refuge. Only escaping a war or oppression is. Over the last couple of years, for instance, there has been (correctly) a lot of coverage of Ukrainians staying with British families as they flee Russia’s invasion. Stories about young Ghanaian men in asylum hostels are rather rarer (in fact, non-existent).

My point, as usual, is obvious. The basic principles of cosmopolitanism require that we give refuge to the needy and suffering, whatever the cause of that suffering, whether that cause is ‘political’ or ‘economic’, a rather fragile distinction in the first place (especially if you’re a Marxist). Every reasonable person would accept the cosmopolitan principle that we treat others as we would be treated (and in fact, this principle is venerated as the so-called ‘golden rule’, a fatuous maxim which I hate for reasons I shall explain one day), but these same reasonable people seem quite happy to accept that ‘economic migrants’ must drown in the Channel as they attempt to enter Britain ‘illegally’ while Ukrainians or Afghans who once acted as translators for British troops are welcomed with open arms (NB not all Afghans are given asylum, despite the horrifically repressive and misogynist nature of the Taliban regime). It shouldn’t escape our attention either that most ‘economic’ migrants come from Africa. Am I wrong to suggest some racism may be at play here too?

To put it simply, all suffering is equal. Morally, our response should be equal too, but in the case of migration it is not, and legally it is not. This is called letting ourselves off the hook.

The pragmatist will argue that we have to ‘draw the line somewhere’, otherwise we will be ‘flooded’ with immigrants. That the line is morally dishonest and indefensible is but a minor problem in this world of arbitrary rules of who gets to come in and who doesn’t. I may accept that there have to be rules, but surely they should be a bit more morally robust. (I will address the argument for open borders in a later post.) Perhaps there should be quotas of some sort. Perhaps, heavens above, there should be some sort of honest political debate about immigration.

Instead, the main political parties compete to demonstrate how hardline they will be in stopping ‘illegal’ migration. The new government promised a new border force to stop ‘illegal migration’, but without explaining how this would make any difference. The former Conservative government endlessly repeated its rhetoric of ‘Stop The Boats’, a slogan notably now to be heard being yelled by the louts trying to incinerate asylum-seekers in Rotherham. This saying of course echoes the three word rhythm of Trump’s ‘Build the Wall!’, as well as its odious simplisticity.

In dehumanising one group into two objectionable words, and preferencing another, the foundations are laid for the kind of violence and hatred now witnessed on the streets of England. Those the governments denigrate, punish and repudiate are legitimised as targets for hatred and homemade missiles. Thus does a legal distinction - a difference of a mere two words - help fuel a pogrom.

Just like the US, both major parties avoid the rather more complicated and - to them - unpalatable truths of immigration: that it will continue in large numbers for a long time to come, and that the numbers are likely to rise, not least thanks to climate change which may force billions to forced to abandon their homes for more survivable cooler climes (the international debate has already begun about whether they should be called ‘refugees’ or ‘migrants’ - guess which most governments prefer?). Our societies are changing fast and will continue to do so. We must get used to it or, as Gaia Vince puts it in her excellent book ‘Nomad Century’, by stopping the climate migrants, we will be committing genocide.

I’m not going to pretend I know the answers to the issue of immigration. I do know that I regard cosmopolitanism is a basic moral requirement to be able to call yourself civilised (by which criterion, most of us are failing). In a moral calculus shorn of the prejudice of race or nation, it is indefensible to believe that we have greater rights than other people simply because of where we were born. I also know that immigration has done wonders for my home city of London, transformed in one short generation from a rather dull monotone conurbation overwhelmingly dominated by one race, to a vibrant and diverse community of hundreds of nationalities and languages. I love it!

At this point, I’m supposed to say that I have sympathies with those who feel that their country has changed in ways they find uncomfortable or unsettling, and that we must ‘manage’ immigration in order to reduce these tensions, but the truth is I don’t feel such sympathies (I guess this is one of many reasons I won’t be Prime Minister). I’m lucky that I’ve lived all over the world, and have come to see the central unity and essential sameness of humanity, but there are plenty of people who feel the same as me and they haven’t lived in Germany, Afghanistan or Kosovo. And I trust (hope?) that they outnumber the mobs chanting and throwing bricks at asylum hostels. It is clearly overdue for those people to speak up to celebrate the many virtues of difference and diversity. If we don’t, things are going to get very ugly indeed. Cosmopolitans Unite!