On Outsourcing

The idea that Britain is “overcrowded” is an oft-repeated mantra for those who want to see massive reductions in the numbers of immigrants arriving in the UK.  Now, Julian Brazier - the MP for my home town, Canterbury -- has offered the latest thinking on how to rid our "Overcrowded Land" of unwanted immigrants, including outsourcing asylum.

Certainly, some facts are true.  In the first decade of the 21^st century, the UK population grew by 7%.  Between 1991 and 2010, half of the UK population’s increase could be directly attributed to the effects of migration, an extra 2.4 million people. 

Yet while growth undoubtedly demands better governance – more investment in infrastructure, better public transport, the building of new houses – it is laughable to suggest that land is a “zero-sum game” or that overcrowding is an absolute truth.  We aren’t the Malthusian peasants of the 14^th century: as others have pointed out civil engineering, public health and modern architecture are powerful tools for development.  Nor do we actually live in the concrete jungle of our imaginations: in fact, only 10% of England is currently urban (and 80% of those urban areas aren’t built on).  Brazier’s polemic twists half-facts with unfounded assertion to arrive at a dystopian vision that ignores the economic realities of how much the UK needs immigration. The demographics can’t be ignored. Unless we all start having many more expensive (in both environmental and economic terms) children, that positive net migration figure is what will prop up your pension and pay for your state-subsidised care in old age (never mind staff the care home).[1]

Brazier’s claims are spurious and ill founded. Yet what has made me most angry in reading this particular “Conservative Way Forward” are his conclusions. In particular, the assertion that:

We must consider making treaties with democratic Third World countries with plenty of space (few are as crowded as the UK) and establishing two or three processing centres abroad. For example, if we could secure a deal with Kenya, it would be worth our while to make a considerable payment per capita to them to provide a haven for Somali asylum seekers, sent from Britain to have their cases examined...

This measure is necessary, apparently, because new plans to prevent people being able to appeal immigration decisions until after they’ve been deported are going to lead to ‘all detected illegal immigrants pos[ing] as asylum seekers’.

For now, I’ll leave aside the baffling leaps of logic required to arrive at this claim. I want to focus instead on the suggestion that we can – and should – ship our Somali asylum seekers to Kenya. Such a move ignores the fact that the vast majority of Somalis in the UK are not illegal immigrants or even asylum seekers (only 663 Somali asylum claims were submitted in the UK in 2012), but instead are legal residents and even British citizens. However it also displays a real lack of understanding about either Kenyan politics or the current sufferings of Somali refugees in Kenya.

Although Britons may believe that we host a disproportionate number of refugees and asylum-seekers, they’re wrong. 80% of refugees are hosted by developing world states. Kenya alone currently hosts close to a million refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons and internally displaced people (a reminder that Kenya’s democratic peace is a fragile one). That’s around 2.35% of the total Kenyan population. It hosts 568,000 registered Somali refugees.  Dadaab – the world’s largest refugee camp – is also the third-largest city in Kenya. Refugees and asylum seekers comprise just 0.33% of the UK’s population.

The market evangelists may argue that this proposal wouldn’t add to Kenya’s refugee “burden” (although Dadaab actually contributes $14m into the regional economy each year), because in Brazier’s terms, it’s a mutually beneficial economic transaction, with UK development cash flowing in alongside UK asylum-seekers.  Yet the objections are obvious. Turning refugees into commodities stretches the moral capacity of market-based solutions beyond what is reasonable. And while neither the proposals nor the objections are new – Australia’s Malaysia deal, struck down by its High Court on human rights grounds, would have operated on pretty similar principles – the choice of Kenya, whether framed as ‘dumping ground’ or ‘migration management partnership’ suggests an extraordinary level of ignorance on Brazier’s part.

For Kenya is a country where anti-migrant – and especially anti-Somali – sentiment is virulent. I first learned of Brazier’s plans when a friend sent me a link to an East African news site.  Many of the comments below the line would make Britain’s far-right proud.    It seems like Kenya is already “full” too.

Refugees and migrants – particularly Somali refugees – have for over 20 years been a convenient scapegoat for Kenya’s ills.  This is in part a reflection of Kenya’s own national history and lingering suspicion about the allegiances of its own Somali minority.  Somalis are subject to suspicion, discrimination and exploitation, particularly at the hands of corrupt Kenyan police. In December, the Kenyan government announced that all urban refugees would be required to leave the city and live in (severely overcrowded) camps.  Though this decision has not been enforced, several thousand Somalis have fled Kenya in fear of forced relocation and possible returns to a still insecure Somalia. Given the disruption to the billion-dollar Somali economy centred in Nariobi, it appears to be another case of migration politics trumping global economics.  I suspect Brazier knows very little of this.

And while Kenyans may agree with Brazier about the malevolence of asylum-seekers in general, they are opposed to his plan in particular. Britain doesn’t want them: we don’t want them either.  The sun set on Empire fifty years ago.  To suggest that Kenya should take those we do not want – even for a price – is unavoidably tainted by the wrongs of the colonial past. 

The easy response, of course, is that “it will never happen”. Brazier is a backbench MP: his comments aren’t intended to lead to actual policy, only to pull the current UK debate on immigration still further to the right and persuade UKIP voters to back the Conservatives. Yet Brazier’s comments will fuel already toxic fires, both at home and abroad. For they confirm the idea that asylum seekers are the “scum of the earth”: people to be detained, contained, deported, whose value can be calculated – like some form of human toxic waste – in their safe removal and storage. And in having an impact in Kenya, they also underline how the poisonous potency of “overcrowding” myths – peddled here by petty nationalists for Daily Mail readers -- actually form part of a global anti-migration narrative that should shame us all.

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[1] This is not to suggest that migration can cure the social system – for that, we’d need one million migrants a year.  But it does suggest that cutting the working-age population isn’t exactly rational policy…

Through the looking glass: California, Thatcher and the promise of things to come

I’ve recently moved (temporarily) to California.  Six months in Palo Alto, at the heart of Silicon Valley, where the geeks have already inherited the earth (and drive the fast cars to prove it).  California living has already coined too many clichés, but at times cycling through Stanford in the past 10 days there have seemed few other adjectives appropriate to catch this golden, sun-filled privilege, or the hard-edged relentless marketing that means this town is dead by 10pm.  

I’m neither migrant nor tourist – I’ll accept my US Immigration label for now and call myself a long-term researchvisitor – but somewhere between participant and observer, I’ve endless fascination for trying to unpick the cultures of Silicon Valley.  I’m learning American English: the words clumsy as I try and catch the cadences, the rising intonation. In conversations I can hear long-dormant Canadian vowels inflect my sentences.  There are the horrors of the supermarket (endless aisles of high-fructose corn syrup) and the delights of the farmer’s market (fresh, local strawberries in April).  It’s a world at once immediately familiar from the cultural imprints of a thousand hours of American TV, and utterly bewildering. We keep turning up at restaurants as they close the doors at 9: the mirror image of those American early-evening diners that perplex all good European waiters. All contradictions and confusions that throw into sharp relief my own British, European identity.

Yet the cultural reflection is also cultural refraction. I’ve been surprised how far away the UK feels. Not family or friends – ye gods of Facebook and Skype have long since tied those bonds across distant time and space.  But the wider social fabric, the political project, the “imagined community”. This is on the one hand magnified by the very obvious ways in which I do not belong here, and on the other diluted. Like watching a play through smoked glass, news events unfold at a distance. You wake up, and today’s news has already happened.  Read in slow-motion and at arms-length, you see both the emptiness stretching between a thousand comment pieces endlessly dissecting the same event and the bleak narratives they conceal, that few journalists or politicians are brave enough to articulate; Austerity.  Inequality. Decline.

Maybe it’s just a trick of the light that makes any of us ever feel we’re much more than an audience for the political games of a chosen few. But in the past few days I feel I’ve become a double observer. I watch American life with curiosity, tempered with occasional envy (oh the sunshine!) and bouts of utter incomprehension (guns, the death penalty, the Evangelical right). But, removed from the immediate vicinity, I’m also watching Britain, observer not participant. This temporary relegation to the side-lines is disarming. From eight hours away, the minutiae of everyday life are muted: what are left are the broad brush-strokes, the grand narratives of history. In contemplative moods, this suits me: as anyone who has ever had the misfortune to edit my work will tell you, I am not a details person.

All these thoughts coalesced as I watched the (British) story of the week, and found myself wondering – 10,000 miles away from the frenzy – exactly what that story was. Yes, Thatcher’s dead.  I was born as warships sailed for the Falklands; I remember drinking milk in Reception Class in Newcastle (though, hating to drink milk, this was probably my first experience of the dilemmas you face when politics clashes with personal preference).  My politics was shaped in the shadows her policies cast. I distinctly remember at least one childhood nightmare in which I tried to escape a chasing Thatcher figure and her relentless, swinging handbag.

And yet - Thatcher’s dead: but Thatcherism lives on. Privatisation; individualism – for ‘who is society? There’s no such thing’. And above all else, the Market.  For the hard, unpalatable truth is that she won.  Not just those three general elections: she won the political war.  We live in a Thatcherite Britain today, with our privatised NHS, our hollowed-out welfare system, our greed and inequality. What was once radical is now mainstream orthodoxy. There’s no surprise that Ed and Tony honour her politics: they’re Thatcher’s children too.

Hardly revelatory or original thoughts. But perhaps this is ultimately a story less about past legacy and more about future vision. As (most) of the Establishment rush to conform to social norms and pay “respectful tribute”, and the anti-Establishment celebratea phyrric victory-of-sorts, I’m left wondering where this leaves British politics now.  

The making of hags and hagiographies can’t disguise the fact that one woman is not, alone, an ideology.  But history is ultimately written by the victors. And that’s why I’ve found the outpourings of anger at the wreckage left by some of Thatcher's policies, and the defiant celebrations that have met the Right's pious memorialising uplifting.  Because they suggest that before this political memory is written, there’s still something left to contest, something beyond the technocracy of Westminster.  A clash of convictions, a sign that Britain has not yet surrendered its soul entirely to Thatcher's market-driven norms. Requiring official acknowledgement that Thatcher's undisputed legacy is not just a transformed, but also a divided Britain.

The challenge now must be, surely, to go beyond the street party, to turn the grave-dancing into a real campaign that dismantles the toxic Politcal Orthodoxy and takes us beyond the shadows of Thatcher.  For dead demons (just like dead Saints) shape our culture and our historical memory of the past. But they don’t control our future.  That’s up to us: do we choose to stay Thatcher’s children, or not?

And that takes me from Thatcher to Marx (I know, quite a jump). But making sense of California, making sense of Britain – is it enough?  The point, after all, is to change it. Yet it seems to me that, more than ever right now, we need the philosophers too.  New ideas.  Broad sweeps.  Before we worry about how we get there, we first need to know where we want to go.  And that’s reason enough to spend some time here, observer not participant. The sunshine - just a lucky bonus.  Honest.

Natural Humanitarians?

Today is International Women’s Day: the day after tomorrow, Mother’s Day (in the UK). A juxtaposition I find unsettling.  Not because mothers don’t deserve flowers or breakfast in bed – or recognition for all the work they do in bringing us up to be sentient human beings – but because too often, it’s still wife and mother that are viewed as the only socially valid identities. In a world in which an estimated 150 million girls are victims ofsexual violence every year, in which women are still denied access to basic political, civil and human rights, the label ‘wife and mother’ can be a sentence as well as a celebration.

Step forward International Women’s Day – which began, let’s not forget, as International Working Women's Day.  Except it is sometimes still implied that the jobs we should wish to do are the ones that suit us because we’re women.  Even by those who should know better – like Valerie Amos, who declared this week in Stylist magazine that ‘women are natural humanitarians’.

Humanitarian work undoubtedly attracts many empowered, articulate women. And I’ve writtenbefore about the obvious and overwhelming gender bias in the humanitarian classroom – 75% of my students are women.  In the NGO workshops and research conferences I attend, it’s not unusual for female participants to outnumber the men.  This engagement of women in humanitarian issues should be recognised and celebrated, not least because it provides a powerful impetus for change to crack that glass ceiling which mean Amos’ rise to the top of the humanitarian pyramid is still so unusual.

Yet so many things are wrong with Amos’ statement that it is hard to know where to begin.  But let’s start with the idea that it’s women who are “natural” humanitarians.  Is the implication that men aren’t? Surely humanitarianism speaks, if nothing else, to the idea of a common humanity.  So either the claim’s redundant – because all humans are humanitarians – or it places the weight of alleviating human suffering in conflict, crisis and disaster upon women, exculpating – and excluding – men.

But "women nurture, women care" I hear the Daily Mail cry. And isn’t that what humantiarians do? Feed the starving babies of Africa? Humanitarians, after all don’t do politics – they do assistance, they do 'nurture and support'. So it’s a very suitable job for a woman. This is the double danger in Amos’ words. 

First, the implication is that, even in venturing outside the home, women should remain in the soft caring professions – and outside the hard political sphere.  Because this, after all, is what women do best. And it’s precisely this sort of framing that diminishes many women’s ambitions: the idea that somehow, we’re hard-wired to care, not to think.

But second, Amos implicitly selling humanitarianism – and the women who work as humanitarians -- short too.  Humanitarianism isn’t nurture, or charity: not when it’s done well.  It’s an exhausting, demanding, exhilarating job that often pulls you far away from relationships and family life. It demands confrontation both with impossible moral dilemmas and hard bureaucratic realities.  It’s not “natural” sentiment; it’s professional skill.

Humanitarianism should not be reduced to the “natural” outcome of a “natural” emotional empathy that is apparently shared by only half the world’s population.  That’s not something to be celebrated. That humanitarianism isn’t ‘unstoppable’: it won’t get us anywhere.  It echoes the old ideas that women are best placed outside politics. It reduces humanitarian action to charity and emotional empathy.  Worst of all, in playing to the idea that gender roles and talents are hard-wired, it undercuts the notion of common human responsibility as the bedrock of humanitarian action and its capacity to effect change.

The powerful are responsible for the wars and atrocities and terrible death tolls that cling to modern history.  And most of the powerful are not, have not, been women. So yes, our interests lie in challenging the structures of inequity and injustice and in reaching through politics.  But we have to recognise this in order to understand how our interests align with the disempowered, with changing and not just joining power.   That’s why – on International Women’s Day -- we should reject the idea women are “natural” humanitarians, and instead laud the women – no nurture, no nature about it – who have made humanitarianism a conscious, political, choice.

A tale of two Eastleighs...

The people of Eastleigh go to the polls today, to cast their verdict on coalition government and disgraced politicians. Watching with the rest of the political chorus, it looks like an ill-tempered campaign to fit with the bitter grey February skies: rows over education, Europe and an ‘infestation’ of immigrants.  Only UKIP can apparently save us from moral catastrophe: this despite the fact that the 2011 census shows that Eastleigh is 91.8% White British, and that the greatest area of population growth in the past decade has been among the over-65s.  92.6% of Eastleigh’s residents were born in the UK: 3% in Europe.

Many would argue that the result is moot: that it gossip for the Westminster village, yes, but – whether the victor is yellow or blue –  the result will change nothing. Yet in reading about the daily manufactured dramas of the by-election campaign, my thoughts keep turning to another Eastleigh.  In this Eastleigh, there’s another tale of migration and electoral politics unfolding. And here the election result may matter hugely, and the politics around migration foretell a serious humanitarian crisis.

Welcome to Eastleigh, Nairobi.  This Eastleigh is roughly same size as the one in Hampshire (population 2011: 125,200). Yet, unlike its UK namesake, here the migration is very real.  This Eastleigh is home to tens of thousands of Somali refugees (as well as some Ethiopians and Rwandas): objects of police exploitation and public suspicion.  Are Somalis terrorists? A fifth-column inside Kenya? Or just extraordinarily effective businessmen and traders?

Eastleigh is certainly sometimes a place of crime, chaos and poverty: but studies would suggest that economic livelihoods for the majority of the population here are far less fragile than in many other Kenyan neighbourhoods.  For the real story here is one of extraordinary economic dynamism. For ‘Little Mogadishu’ is the centre of global trade network and has seen investment of at least $1.5 billion annually, the commercial realisation of transnational commerce fuelled by remittances.  The twenty-first century’s future lies here, not in the greying Eastleigh of Southern England.

But on 18 December 2012, Kenya ordered all refugees to leave the city.  Somalis were told to return to Dadaab: the overcrowded refugee camp, beloved of TV news reports, which already holds 500,000 Somali refugees. Although the Kenyan High Court has since issued a temporary staying order upon plans for forced evictions from Nairobi, fear is rife that this is the first step in a plan to push Somalis from Kenya altogether.  Many Somalis – up to 20,000 – have already left, many gathering the financial capital to move to other more tranquil settings in the region, particularly Kampala.  Rents have dropped in Eastleigh as Somalis relocate and the economy is dismantled.

Why dismantle this business hub? Electoral politics are certainly part of the answer here too. On Monday, Eastleigh Nairobi – like the rest of Kenya– will also go to the polls.  Immigrants – especially the sort that undercut Kikuyu businessmen. and may include a terrorist or two in their numbers – are easy prey for politicians concerned with short-term race for nationals votes.  The result – if the Kenyan government forces through its plans in the run up or the aftermath of the election – is a potential humanitarian crisis and an economic disaster. As Refugees International's report on the consequences of this uncertainty notes, the only undoubted beneficiaries are the Nairobi police, whose own Eastleigh economy – extracting bribes from the Somalis without strict legal right to be there – has just received an enormous boost.  Which informal economy would you prefer?

It is clear – it has been for many years – that corralling refugees in camps is not an answer except in the language of short-term politics.  It ignores the fact of integration, the virtues of self-reliance and practises the expensive economics of dependency.  The fact of migration cannot be undone: national security will not be served by creating an underground population forced to live beneath the state or face potential encampment and an early return to Somalia.  This is not just a humanitarian crisis though: it makes no sense in the language of economics to hollow out Eastleigh and its transnational commerce.

But is there anything that connects the Eastleigh of Middle England to the Eastleigh of Middle Kenya’s imagination beyond a shared name? At surface level, no. The Somali refugee crisis in all its multiple dramatic acts unfold far away from Hampshire.  We do not encamp Romanians, however much we may resent them.  Yet look more closely, and you begin to see how the narrow parochial interests that paint migration as a bogeyman translate from one Eastleigh to another: a shared language of suspicion that points the finger at foreigners and that ignores the economic contributions made by real migrants – not those we imagine.  

We need to see these linguistic connections: global hostility reinforces itself, legitimises actions that are contrary to law or common sense.  We know Dadaab isoverstretched, under-resourced, insecure. The UK should be condemning Kenya’s assault on asylum: but it’s hard to do that when you’re running on a similar ticket yourself. Better to send aid to a refugee camp.  But in the long run, it is the voters of both Eastleighs who will be the losers: for if you focus on migration, make that the policy problem, poor governance can go unnoticed, declines in service provision unchecked. Keeping out or kicking out the migrants may win votes: but oh, what small-minded, anxious votes, and at what cost.