Poornima Manco

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foreigner

Half of a lifetime

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Today is a pretty significant day in my life. I haven’t tom-tommed about it everywhere, in fact not even my nearest and dearest know, but I have been thinking about it all day long. Today marks exactly half my life of being in Britain. This was the first day, all those years ago, that I entered the United Kingdom with a work visa in my hand, stars in my eyes and trepidation in my heart.

It was meant to be temporary, no more than three years and then I would’ve transferred to Hong Kong. Three years seemed like a very long time, but here I am, more than two decades later and it seems to have gone in the blink of an eye.

I am a naturalised British citizen now and very proud of the fact too. However, somewhere within me, an umbilical cord still binds me to my birthplace. I miss the seasons, the colours, the clothes, the food and most of all, my family and friends who still remain in India. However, Britain has given me so much as well. I have my own family here, I have many friends, my job, my hobbies, the freedom to be who I want to be, to reinvent myself, to be fearless and experimental, all of these are boons granted to me by this land.

I cannot lie though and say that everything has been smooth sailing. Adopting a new country as your own and adapting to its culture and norms can be quite terrifying. Even being fluent in English wasn’t enough at times, because my accent wasn’t right. The Indians here weren’t like the Indians in India, and I had to learn a new subset of behaviours and beliefs. Similarly, with the Britons, I had to understand that it could take years before acceptance and true assimilation could occur.

In all of this, I have learned to grow, to evolve, to change that which needed changing and hold on to that which I refused to change. My value system is Indian and will continue to be so, but my outlook has broadened enough to see the fault lines in what I left behind.

What would I consider myself today? An Anglicised Indian? I think not. The world is shrinking at a breathtaking pace. Not in terms of geography, but certainly in terms of connectivity. I am fortunate enough to have travelled to many parts of the globe, and if there’s one thing I can say confidently, it is this: I find myself falling in step with a country and a culture almost seamlessly, even if the language, currency, food and features are palpably alien.

Hence, even though I detest labels, the one I would most identify with at this point, is that of a global citizen. A hokey sentiment? Maybe. But one that feels most true to who I am today.

All those years ago, when I left home to pursue my career ambitions, I had no idea where I would end up and what I would end up doing. In twenty-odd years, I have lived a life I could only have dreamed of. A life filled with love, laughter, happiness, sorrow, career highs and career lows. I have been delighted to discover some wonderful facets to myself and been equally dismayed to find that I am also chock full of flaws. I have become a wife and a mother, I have become a teacher and a writer. I have travelled the world and I have retreated into superlative books.

If I am fortunate enough to have another few decades of life left on this planet, then all I could ask for, with humility and gratitude, is more of the same.

The trouble with Brexit (Part 4) – Project Fear: EU Immigration

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As a Dutch person, there is one particular issue about the UK that has had me puzzled for years: Why on earth does the UK, a country that is so obsessed with immigration, not have a national registration system for its citizens?

When our children were younger, my husband and I used to have au pairs living with us at our flat in London. Most of those au pairs were Dutch, and as soon as they arrived, they would usually ask us where they were supposed to register their arrival. “You are not required to get registered anywhere”, I used to reply. “So how will the authorities know where I am?”, they asked. “Well, don’t take it personally, but they’re really not interested! If you were to stay here, and get a proper job at some point in the future, you would need to get a National Insurance number and register with HMRC to pay your taxes. But right now, you don’t have to go to town hall and tell someone where you live, like you do at home. I have been here since 17th September 1990, but that arrival date isn’t registered anywhere in the UK.“

The reason why all of us cloggies were so surprised was because we were used to doing things very differently at home. In The Netherlands, there is one big citizen’s database, which covers the entire population of about 17 million people. No real distinction is being made between people who were born in Holland, or those who moved there later: everyone is required to be registered at their home address. When you move house, even if it’s just down the road, you must inform the authorities.

Everybody also has their own Burger Service Nummer, or BSN (citizen’s service number). You need this for everything to do with your administration, and you will get asked for it on a regular basis. You want to open a bank account, or get health insurance? Not without your BSN. Receive your salary? Apply for benefits? Make a hospital appointment? You and your BSN are inextricably linked.

In contrast, the British system has never been as rigorous. There are some registration structures in place, of course, like the electoral roll, HMRC, or GP patient lists, but there is no Dutch-style umbrella government database that covers everything and everybody comprehensively.  Do you remember Grenfell Tower? Nobody knew exactly how many people lived there when the fire broke out. In fact, ten people managed to convince the authorities that they were Grenfell residents when they weren’t, and received financial assistance that they were not entitled to, because there was no registration system.

So yes, the Dutch way of doing things may be a bit much for anyone who is concerned about privacy and personal liberties. And to be fair, it is a bit like a mix of George Orwell’s 1984 and the 1960’s tv series The Prisoner: Big Brother is watching you, and you are most definitely a number. But at least the authorities know who lives where, how long they’ve been there, and who is entitled to healthcare coverage or unemployment benefits.

Is it the EU’s fault that the UK doesn’t have a citizen’s registration system? Of course not. The UK is a sovereign country, that has made its own decisions. Do other EU countries have it? Yes, many of them do. The UK has just chosen not to.

So if there is no real system that tells you who has moved in and out of the country, how does the UK actually measure immigration? Well, you know those nice ladies who sometimes jump in front of you at airports, wanting to ask you a few questions? Believe it or not, but the UK’s immigration count is for about 90% based on those questions, that culminate in the so-called International Passenger Survey (IPS). The IPS operates at 19 airports, 8 ports and the Channel Tunnel rail link, and a sample of passengers get asked where they’re from, why they’re in the UK and how long they are planning to stay. That data is then combined with numbers from the Home Office, the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA), and the UK census (which is carried out every 10 years). Based on all of that, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) publishes a migration update every three months.

As you can imagine, those final figures are more an educated guess than an exact science, but there are a few things that we can deduct from them. One of them is that immigration from non-EU countries, which has nothing to do with Brexit for obvious reasons, has been consistently higher than EU immigration for decades: at the moment, net figures hover around 261,000 a year. And the UK has always had full control over immigration from non-EU countries, of course.

Talking about non-EU countries, whatever happened to Turkey? During the referendum, big Vote Leave posters shown all over the country informed us that “Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU”. Surely that must be imminent by now?

No, it isn’t, because it wasn’t true. Turkey applied to join as far back as 1987 (32 years ago), and in all that time has only managed to get through 1 out of the 35 chapters that it needs to complete in order to join. Negotiations have completely stalled in recent years due to Turkey’s human rights violations, so it really doesn’t look like the country will be eligible anytime soon. And even if Turkey ever does manage to complete the other 34 chapters through some kind of miracle, then every single EU country, including the UK, can use its veto to block accession. So let’s not mince words: the language on the poster was a blatant lie.

Surely the Leave campaign must have known this? So why did it choose to mislead the public like that? Well, it’s probably for the same reason why Nigel Farage’s Ukip produced that famous Breaking Point poster: because the fear factor is such an effective and persuasive tool. Remember that this was 2016, when both Isis and president Assad were committing terrible atrocities in Syria, and the refugee crisis was in full flow. Against a background of tabloid newspapers that had been fanning the flames of fear for years, many people were terrified of the two particular bogeymen du jour: muslim terrorists and refugees. And seeing as a combination of both was clearly about to infiltrate the UK, Trojan Horse-style, we needed a heroic act like Brexit to stop that from happening.

Never mind that the Breaking Point poster showed people who had nothing to do with Brexit, because they were from outside the EU (there was a sea of brown faces, when there is no EU country where most people have brown skin – was this a bit of a dog whistle to racists?). The people in the poster were obviously supposed to be Syrian refugees, and the implication was that the UK would be forced to take in scores of them by the EU. Never mind that the UK only engages selectively with EU rules on asylum and immigration, and is not even part of the second phase of the EU’s Common Asylum Policy. Never mind that even if someone is eventually granted refugee status in another EU country (a painstakingly long process) it takes years to get an EU passport so he or she can travel abroad – 7 years in Germany, for instance. Never mind that the UK isn’t part of the Schengen zone and has full control over its borders (apart from illegal immigration, but that’s already illegal, of course). And never mind the fact that there are about 1.8 billion muslims in the world, and none of us would be here if just one percent of them wanted to blow people up – so let’s keep a little perspective.

Never mind any of that: the simple Leave campaign messages about immigrants resonated with people, even when they made no sense at all, and even if immigration from EU and non-EU countries got completely mixed up in public discussions. Facts didn’t matter; feelings did. It was in this toxic climate of hatred and resentment towards foreigners that pro-migrant MP Jo Cox was murdered by far-right terrorist Thomas Mair, just hours after the Breaking Point poster was revealed.

So let’s now talk about the only type of migration that is relevant in the context of Brexit: migration from EU countries. Net migration from EU countries was around 57,000 in the year up to September 2018 – the lowest it has been in years, and down from 189,000 in the year before the referendum. How much control does the UK have over EU citizens coming into the UK, if any? To answer this question, we must again make a distinction between the free movement of people within the Schengen zone, and freedom of movement as part of the Single Market.

Last time, we found out that the UK and the Republic of Ireland have an opt-out from the Schengen zone, that there is a physical border, and that everybody coming into the UK or Ireland still has to go through passport control. The Schengen zone is therefore pretty much irrelevant in the UK’s Brexit debate, because the UK is not part of it.

What does matter, however, is the famous ‘freedom of movement’ principle. That does apply to the UK, because it is in the Single Market – and in order to enjoy the advantages of the Single Market countries have to adhere to the Four Freedoms:

  1. Freedom of goods
  2. Freedom of services
  3. Freedom of capital
  4. Freedom of movement.

It is this freedom of movement principle that became a big issue during the Brexit debate. For many people who voted for Brexit, it was a no-brainer: we can’t just let anybody come into the UK; there should be some kind of limit to it. Particularly when it comes to people from poorer EU countries, with lower wages and lower living standards, who may be entitled to claim benefits in the much richer UK. “Surely we are not being unreasonable if we don’t want to ‘sponsor’ EU immigrants who are going to sit on their backside and sponge off the state, while the rest of us have to work hard every day and pay our taxes?”, they reasoned. Sounds fair enough, right?

Actually, even though there is a perception in the UK that the EU has some kind of open door policy, freedom of movement is not an unconditional right at all. Article 7 of the EU Citizen’s Rights Directive states that after three months, if you’re an EU citizen who moves to another EU country, you must:

  • have a job or be self-employed, earning money and paying taxes (in other words: you are economically active); or
  • have ‘sufficient resources’ in order not to become a ‘burden on the social assistance system of the host country’, and have comprehensive sickness insurance (in other words: you are financially independent).

That’s it. Either you work (or you’re in education), or you’re so rich already that you don’t need to work. In addition to that, immigrants can also be sent back for reasons like public policy, public security and public health, and David Cameron’s February 2016 EU deal gave the UK stronger powers to deport EU criminals.

This is where the UK’s, shall we say, rather lax administration system comes in. Because how can you send people back, if you don’t know who has come in, and where they live? EU citizens who moved to the UK have never been obliged to register at their local municipality, and once they arrive in the country, the authorities don’t really keep tabs on most of them. As long as they keep a low profile, it is pretty easy to get lost in a big city like London.

Sensible restrictions on the freedom of movement principle have always been available under EU law, but successive UK governments have never bothered enforcing them. They have never insisted that EU immigrants had to have a job, or be wealthy enough to support themselves. They have never demanded that they have comprehensive sickness insurance. And they never deported anyone who wasn’t economically active or financially independent after 3 months – possibly because they wouldn’t know how or where to find them!

It’s a similar story regarding the so-called A8 countries: 8 Eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004. It would have been perfectly possible for the UK to impose temporary labour market restrictions on workers from these countries under EU law. However, the UK, Ireland and Sweden decided not to. This meant that there was a sudden surge of Eastern European immigrants, who often settled in rural areas in which immigration was uncommon.

My mum and dad always used to say: “Everything that has too in front of it is not good: too much, too little, too excessive etc.” Everything in moderation, in other words. The arrival of large numbers of migrants 10-15 years ago (too many, too sudden, some would argue) did put an extra strain on schools, housing and GP surgeries in certain parts of the country. This often happened in areas that successive governments had already underinvested in for years. But is worth remembering that the vast majority of those migrants are law-abiding citizens who work, pay their taxes and therefore pay their own way (and the ones who don’t shouldn’t have been allowed to stay after 3 months according to EU rules, remember?). What would really help poorer areas in the UK is not so much getting rid of the foreigners (or the EU, which has invested very heavily in those areas), but some proper government funding for local services, particularly in those areas that have been left behind for decades.

Another common argument is that some (mainly Eastern European) communities should integrate a bit better into British society. That may be true to a degree, but it is a lot harder to integrate when you’re constantly being met with hostility, the locals don’t talk to you and you don’t feel welcome. And isn’t it funny how some of the same people who have a problem with Polish shops love going to the Dog & Duck and that little expat shop that sells hobnobs when they are in Benidorm?

Listen to what Conservative Lord Michael Heseltine has to say about immigration and freedom of movement, and about someone who was Home Secretary for 6 years between 2010-2016. Someone whose name will always be associated with Brexit, but also with expressions like ‘hostile environment’, ‘queue jumpers’, ‘Windrush scandal’, ‘go home vans’ and ’citizens of nowhere’: Theresa May.

“The interesting thing in the European context is that now the overseas immigration from outside Europe is in a different league or scale to those from Europe. And that was the case whilst Theresa May was home secretary for all those years. Why did she do nothing about it, if this was the burning issue? And the reason why I think she didn’t do anything is because our social services depend upon the skills of the doctors and the nurses in the health service that have come from outside that actually make immigration a very important strength to our economy. And the government didn’t want to be put in a position where it is obviously controlling these numbers, creating shortages, lengthening the queues, in a way that would have happened if immigration had been controlled in the way they wanted it to be.” 

Lord Heseltine is absolutely right: immigrants are indeed a ‘very important strength to our economy’, particularly to the NHS. The UK is lucky enough to have an extremely low unemployment rate, which together with an ageing population means that there are shortages in certain sectors of the economy that immigrants – both skilled and unskilled – help fill. 9.5% of doctors are EU nationals, for instance (23% of doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital even), as well as 16% of dentists and 6.4% of nurses and midwives. From care workers to seasonal farm labourers, teachers to abattoir vets, surgeons to chambermaids, EU citizens have been a vital part of the UK economy for years.

And not only do most of those EU immigrants work (83% of those of working age, compared to 76% of UK nationals), there is overwhelming evidence that they actually boost public finances rather than costing the UK money. That is because they contribute more in taxes, and make much less use of benefits and public services than the average British person. And yes, this includes people from those so-called A8 countries I mentioned earlier. Immigrants from these countries often do low-paid work that local British people don’t want to do, such as fruit picking, factory work or cleaning. But their high employment rates and hard work offset the fact that they usually get paid less than either UK citizens or immigrants from the older EU countries, meaning that they still contribute more than they take out.

A major study on the impact of 20 years of immigration (up to 2015) by the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance concluded  that “EU immigrants pay more in taxes than they use public services, and therefore help to reduce the budget deficit. Immigrants do not have a negative effect on local services such as education, health or social housing.” The report found that rather than being the fault of immigrants, these problems were the result of the 2008 cash and the slow economic recovery. Another huge study found that European migrants made a positive net contribution of £22 billion to UK public finances between 2000-2011. A research paper published by University College London states that immigrants from the European Economic Area (EEA) paid 34% more in tax than they took out, whereas UK-born citizens paid for only 89% of the benefits and services they received through taxes, costing the state £624 billion between 2001 and 2011.

In other words: EU immigrants actually sponsor British society, not the other way round.

The reason for this is that they are much more likely to be of working age than the general population. Think about it: until we are, say, around 20 years old, we cost society money, in childcare and education costs. We then start working, hopefully for several decades, and instead of taking, we start contributing to the public coffers instead. Our income taxes pay for schools and hospitals, teachers’ salaries and the police. At the end of our lives, when we need more medical attention and draw our pensions, we become expensive again.

Likewise, your typical Polish builder arrives in the UK fully educated and immunised, so the expensive early part of his life has been paid for by his home country. He works and pays his taxes to his host country during the long productive years of his life, so the UK benefits from him and gets pretty good value for money. And quite often, he retires ‘back home’ before he needs a care home or a hip operation.

The UK needs immigrants to fill jobs. Some people seem to fantasise that British workers will replace them all after Brexit, but evidence suggests otherwise. Many EU citizens have already left the UK in recent years, and this has not lead to a sudden uptake of jobs by British workers, but to fruit rotting in the fields, and to 100,000 vacancies in the NHS. Some of those vacancies are having to be filled by temporary staff, which costs the NHS more money, and it is likely that EU workers will simply be replaced by non-EU workers. Will the NHS really be any better off when your doctor comes from Argentina instead of Spain, or from China instead of Malta?

So how do those 3.6 million EU citizens in the UK, and the 1.3 million British citizens in the EU-27 countries feel about Brexit? A total of nearly 5 million people, most of whom didn’t even get a vote over their own future during the referendum? Well, some of their testimonies have been documented in two poignant books called “In Limbo” and “In Limbo Too”. This is how one Italian lady in the UK expresses herself:

“One morning, after years and even decades, you suddenly feel unwelcome, unwanted, betrayed. Your certainties, your life and your security are gone. Through no fault of your own you are stuck in a painful limbo.” (Elena Remigi)

Sadly, it sums up how a lot of people feel. For years, many decent EU citizens have been portrayed as freeloaders and parasites by the Leave campaign and the British press, even when the opposite was true. Some have even been mixed up with terrorists or refugees in the public mind. Foreign simply equalled bad. It is one thing to be under appreciated, but it is quite another thing when your presence in the country is the second biggest reason why people all around you voted to leave the EU.

We are not just talking about anonymous immigrants here. These EU citizens are our neighbours, friends and colleagues, who have jobs, spouses, children and social lives in the UK. It’s the lady who looks after your parents in their care home, the guy who fixed your roof, your Amazon delivery driver. People who contribute to society, both in taxes and in services, and have often done so for many years. They exercised their right to move to another country in good faith, and have now found that the rules have suddenly changed. Some are not even sure if they will be entitled to Settled Status (a brand new registration system that only applies to EU citizens) because they may have taken a career break to look after children or a sick relative, and now the government suddenly and retroactively demands to see proof of comprehensive health insurance – something it never mentioned before.

And freedom of movement works both ways, of course: Brexit also takes away the rights of British citizens themselves to live, work, study or retire in any of the other 27 EU countries. Something that a lot of voters, particularly older people, may not have taken into consideration in 2016. It means that their own children and grandchildren will now be denied the chance to enjoy any of the benefits of the freedom of movement that they themselves had access to, like living in Prague for a year, or studying in Sweden under the EU’s Erasmus programme. The British people essentially voted to lose their own rights in this respect, because they will be stripped of their EU citizenship.

For years, successive governments have only been too happy to join in the populist blame game against immigrants. Nobody has been brave enough to go against the grain and articulate the benefits of immigration and the work that EU citizens do, or the advantages of free movement for UK citizens. Perhaps it suited them when the victims of austerity and government policies blamed the foreigners lower down the social ladder for their plight, rather than the politicians making the decisions higher up the ladder. Is it any wonder that in this hostile environment, there has been a rise in hate crimes against EU citizens, and against all immigrants in general?

In a sensible Brexit deal, there will be some kind of safety net, and the rights of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU-27 countries will most likely be protected. But the UK has deliberately left the option of a No Deal on the table during the past few years, meaning that those rights are in no way guaranteed. This is what has led to 3 years of uncertainty and anxiety. Not only do 5 million people still not know exactly what their residency rights will be after Brexit (and thankfully, most EU countries have been very generous in this respect), they also don’t know if they will be able to keep any of the associated rights regarding employment, frontier work, education, health and social care, pensions and voting rights. 5 million human beings without a voice or vote, who didn’t deserve to be used as bargaining chips in some cynical political game. But sadly, that is exactly what has happened to them.

Next time, let’s examine the number one reason why people voted for Brexit: sovereignty.

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Johanna Brunt was born and raised in The Netherlands. She has spent half her life there on the continent, and half her life in the UK. After studying English and European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, she moved to London where she started working for an international airline. She is married to a Brit, and they have three children together.

The trouble with Brexit (Part 3): Project Fear: non-EU immigration

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Where were you born?

And what did you do to deserve that?

If you are reading this, there is a pretty good chance that you grew up in a relatively rich country, possibly a Western democracy. It is probably safe to assume that you have never experienced hunger or war. You are likely to be well-educated, well-travelled and well-fed. You have probably never been tortured for your beliefs.

What would life have been like for us if we had been born in Rwanda, Iraq or North Korea? Would we be completely different people now? Or would we still essentially be ‘us’, but just with a different religion or skin colour?

None of us get to choose where we are born. It is all down to luck. For far too many people in the world: bad luck. For some of us: good luck. Our sons are not child soldiers; our daughters have not been raped by intruders coming into our village at night. We are the lucky ones. Tonight, thank God it’s them, instead of you.

Sometimes, it’s good to not only count our blessings, but also to remember that it’s only through a fortunate accident of birth that we ended up in a First World country, and not through any merit of our own. So let’s have some sympathy for those less fortunate than us. Let’s treat other people with a basic level of respect and compassion. Yes, even migrants and refugees.

Unfortunately, some British newspapers seem to disagree with this premise. If you are one of their regular readers – in particular, if you read the Daily Mail, the Daily Express or, to a slightly lesser degree, the Sun – you will be very much used to headlines like these:

  • “EU killers and rapists we’ve failed to deport” (Daily Mail)
  • “Migrants milking Britain’s benefits” (Daily Express)
  • “Fury over plot to let 1.5m Turks into Britain” (Daily Mail)

The first thing you notice is the fact that migrants are usually painted in an extremely one-sided, negative light. Emotive words such as ‘invasion’, ‘flooding in’ and ‘scroungers’ provoke instinctive feelings of fear or anger inside us, and are used again and again. It is ‘us’ – good, decent, law-abiding citizens – versus ‘them’ – the nasty others, who threaten our way of life.

Sometimes, media hostility goes even further than that. In an article in the Sun in 2015, columnist Katie Hopkins compared refugees fleeing war zones to “cockroaches”. And: “Some of our towns are festering sores, plagued by swarms of migrants and asylum seekers, shelling out benefits like Monopoly money.”

In 1930’s Germany, Nazi media also compared Polish people to cockroaches (an ‘East European species of cockroach’, to be precise), and Jewish people to rats. “German Jews pouring into this country” was the headline of an actual Daily Mail article in 1938. It was ‘us’ – good, decent, law-abiding citizens – versus ‘them’ – the nasty others, who threaten our way of life. Years and years of anger and fear towards those ‘others’ eventually led to yellow stars on coats, and piles of human hair in Auschwitz. Sadly, history teaches man that man does not learn from history.

This inflammatory language in the British media has not exactly gone unnoticed. In 2015, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights urged the UK media and regulators to tackle tabloid hate speech, saying “History has shown us time and again the dangers of demonising foreigners and minorities. It is extraordinary and deeply shameful to see these types of tactics being used, simply because racism and xenophobia are so easy to arouse in order to win votes, or sell newspapers.” In 2016, Cambridge University found that “Mainstream media reporting about Muslim communities is contributing to an atmosphere of rising hostility towards Muslims in Britain.” In the same year, Leicester University warned that a wider surge in hate crimes against migrants had been “fuelled and legitimised by the media”. A campaign called Stop Funding Hate urges advertisers and other companies to stop associating themselves with tabloids that spread fear and division.

It was against this background that the EU referendum took place in June 2016. Whether their fear was real or imagined: many British people were so concerned about immigration, that it became the second biggest reason why they voted for Brexit. And who could blame them? ‘Taking back control of our borders’ seemed to make perfect sense, and the right thing to do.

So was their fear real, or had the media really been unfairly ‘demonising foreigners and minorities’ for years? Surely these newspapers just report the facts, and we shouldn’t expect them to NOT write about crimes that have been committed by ‘foreigners or minorities’, just out of a misplaced sense of political correctness?

Sure, that is absolutely true. We shouldn’t censor the news, just because it doesn’t fit in with our own biased point of view. Surely it is not a racist thing to say that there is a strong link between pedophile grooming gangs and men of Pakistani heritage, for example? Isn’t that just a fact? Don’t we have a right to know about high proportions of crimes being committed by certain ethnic groups?

Of course we do – and perhaps it is also perfectly understandable that when we now hear about that particular crime, we tend to make a mental association with certain Pakistani men. That is based on several criminal cases that we’ve read about in the news during the past few years. But it does raise the question why we don’t make the same link with white men. When it comes to child abuse and pedophilia as a whole for instance, nearly 90% of pedophiles are white, and 98% of them are men. Do those crimes get underreported, and do the crimes committed by Pakistani men, Muslims or asylum seekers get over reported? Is that the reason why we don’t have newspaper headlines telling us how dangerous white men actually are?

The problem mainly lies with the interpretation and reporting of facts. When a small proportion of ethnic minorities (‘they’) commit certain crimes, we hear about it everywhere. As a consequence, we tend to associate the entire group with that crime. But when a small proportion of ‘regular white folk’ (’we’) also commit certain crimes, we don’t hear about it as much – and if we do, we are sensible enough to keep things in perspective, and not blame the whole group. We just don’t generalise as much. Most Pakistani men are law-abiding citizens, and so are most white men, so we are talking about very small percentages of both groups that commit crimes. But public perception is totally different in both cases, and so is the language that we use.

There seem to be completely separate standards for separate groups of people. Foreigners who settle in the UK are immigrants, for instance, whereas British people who move abroad are expats. ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Pet’ was a series about British guys in Germany, who work hard to support their families back home – but Polish builders doing the same thing in the UK nowadays are stealing local people’s jobs. What’s the difference, really? Where are the headlines about British expats stealing local people’s jobs whilst living abroad?

And when it comes to Brexit and ‘those foreigners’: did we really need to take back control, and from whom exactly? Did the UK ever even lose control of its borders in the first place?

In order to answer these questions, we first need to make a distinction between two different terms within the EU immigration debate: freedom of movement within the Single Market, and free movement of people within the Schengen area.

As we saw in part one, the Single Market is the biggest and most prosperous free trading area on earth – so much so, that out of only 35 wealthy countries  (or ‘advanced economies’) in the world, 27 are inside the EU. Freedom of movement is an integral part of the success and prosperity of the Single Market, along with freedom of goods, services and capital. It is also one of the reasons why the US economy is so successful, as workers can go wherever they are needed at any given time.

These so-called four freedoms make trading within the Single Market that much more efficient and frictionless, by radically reducing red tape and border queues. At the moment, an EU driver who arrives in Dover with a truck full of goods only has to show his passport and a CMR form, and off he goes – he doesn’t need a visa, and the contents of the truck do not need to be checked if they originated in an EU country. Contrary to popular belief, freedom of movement is not unlimited though. It is just that the UK, for reasons best known to itself, has chosen not to enforce any EU-recommended limits to it (more about that next time).

The Schengen area may greatly overlap the Single Market/freedom of movement area, but it is not the same thing. This is particularly true for the UK, which is part of the Single Market, but negotiated an opt-out from the Schengen area along with the Republic of Ireland. Schengen, named after a small town in Luxembourg where the treaty was signed, is basically an area where you can move freely from country to country without having to show your passport. Imagine driving from Germany to Spain, for instance: you would drive through several countries, but there are either no checks at all or just minimal checks –  which is particularly helpful for the 1.7 million people who commute to work across a European border every day. Incidentally, those internal borders can be restored on a temporary basis during special circumstances.

At the same time, Schengen countries do have strong controls on their common external border, and have established a European Border and Coast Guard Agency called Frontex. They also have a joint Schengen visa. Apart from that, the Schengen Information System (SIS) allows them to share data on criminals, missing people or stolen property. Even though the UK is not part of Schengen, it still enjoys close police cooperation with Schengen countries, and it uses the SIS to exchange information on law enforcement.

Now that we understand both freedom of movement within the Single Market and the Schengen zone a bit better, let’s have a look at some groups of immigrants on whom the Brexit vote will have absolutely no effect, but who often get mixed into the whole debate anyway.

Let’s start with regular non-EU migrants. This one is easy: the UK has complete control over anyone who enters the UK from a country that is not in the EU.

Next: refugees. A refugee is defined as someone who is officially recognised as a person who is unable to live in his or her own country because of war or natural disaster, or owing to a well-founded fear of persecution – for instance because of their race, religion or sexual orientation. I would highly recommend that you read the harrowing poem Home by Warsan Shire, a young British woman of Somali origin. In it, she explains that “You have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat, unless the water is safer than the land.” About 85% of the world’s refugees live in poor, developing countries, often in camps. The country hosting the most refugees is Turkey, followed by Pakistan, Uganda and Lebanon. Around 4.4 million Syrian refugees are being hosted by just two countries: Turkey and Lebanon. Famous refugees include Gloria Estefan (who fled Cuba with her family when she was a toddler), Albert Einstein (who fled Nazi persecution), Freddy Mercury (whose family fled to the UK from Zanzibar in 1964) and Rita Ora (who came to the UK as a refugee from Kosovo). Once a refugee is in a particular Schengen country, it is illegal for him or her to travel to another one, and it reflects negatively on their asylum application if they get found out.

An asylum seeker is someone who is still awaiting a decision on whether or not they will be granted refugee status. In the UK, around 32% of asylum seekers’ claims are successful, going up to about 47% on appeal. It is not illegal or ‘bogus’ to be refused asylum; it just means that you haven’t been able to meet the very strict criteria to prove that you are a refugee. The number of asylum seekers in the UK is relatively small compared to some other European countries: there were only around 26,000 applications for asylum made to the UK in 2017, whereas Germany had around 198,000, and Italy had 126,000. They formed only about 5% of total immigrants in 2018.

It may be worth noting that according to the Association of Chief Police Officers, there is no evidence that asylum seekers commit more crime than anyone else. They are actually more likely to be victims of crime because of who they are; getting threatened and spat at on a regular basis. In fact, islamophobia, anti-semitism and hate crimes in general have all been on the rise in the UK since the Brexit referendum.

Illegal immigrants are people who enter the UK unlawfully, or who stay longer than they are allowed to. They are likely to be removed if their immigration status is discovered by the authorities. A report by The Migration Advisory Committee estimates that the numbers are very small: around 2,366 in 2016-2017, and around 1,832 in 2017-2018. This include people who arrive by boat, as well as those who stow away on ferries and lorries. Generally speaking though, illegal immigrants will only come to the UK if there are employers (often British) who are willing to illegally employ them.

Contrary to some reports, the UK asylum system is actually pretty tough. Asylum seekers do not have the same rights as refugees or British people: they are not allowed to work or claim benefits for instance. If they have no other means of supporting themselves, they can receive asylum support of around £5.39 a day, which is less than £2,000 a year. Illegal immigrants and asylum seekers are not entitled to, and do not get, benefits from the UK’s welfare system.

It is ironic that a hard No Deal Brexit will probably have some side effects that its supporters may not be aware of. When the UK leaves the European Union, all treaties between the two parties will cease to apply. This includes something called the Dublin Regulations, which basically allows European countries to return asylum seekers to the country where they first entered the EU. There, their fingerprints would have been taken (determining the country of first entry), and these fingerprints would then have been entered into an EU database called Eurodac. In a No Deal scenario, UK will lose the right to return asylum seekers to other EU member states because the Dublin Regulations will no longer apply. It will lose access to Eurodac as well. Apart from that, it also means that the UK’s rule-making power in the EU’s Common European Asylum System (CEAS) will end.

Even though we have all learned an awful lot more about the EU during the past few years, it is amazing how much misinformation is still out there. Also, in a country where ‘stranger danger’ stories are so prevalent and persuasive, it is easy to see the similarities between certain elements of the British press and the Leave campaign. Both rely heavily on the fear factor, and both have also been getting the facts wrong or distorted on a regular basis. Cue Nigel Farage’s infamous Breaking Point poster, and the fact that the Daily Mail has been banned as a source by Wikipedia due to its “poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication”.

It is also quite remarkable that both the popular press and the Leave campaign have focused so much on non- EU immigrants, who don’t have anything to do with Brexit. As we have seen, the UK has complete control over its borders when it comes to non-EU migration – and the numbers of refugees, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants are really pretty small. And crucially: the UK is an island, that is not part of the Schengen area. There is an actual, physical border with border checks, where everyone gets stopped and has to show their passports.

So yes, it may well be understandable that Mrs Outraged of Peterborough is extremely scared of foreign criminals. But we really should tell her that not only are the monsters under her bed not as big as she might imagine, Brexit is also not going to help her get rid of ‘those Pakistanis’ in her town. They probably have British passports – and besides, Pakistan is not in the EU, so it is totally irrelevant in this debate. And maybe, just maybe, she should try actually talking to some of those monsters. She might find out that that ‘they’ are actually not that different to her after all, and that The Others are really just human beings too.

Let’s end with the words of Michael Palin, who says: “I’ve actually been very reassured by travelling. It has made me feel the world is safer than you think it is, if you just read the news. Most people want to bring up their children, build their houses and live peacefully with their neighbours. They don’t want to kill anybody. Travelling is a very good way of confirming that the world is not a beastly place at all, but a place full of opportunity and great people.” Amen to that, Mr Palin.

Next time, let’s have a look at something that actually does matter in the Brexit debate: EU migration, and whether or not Turkey really is set to join the EU. Still a lot more Project Fear to come.

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Johanna Brunt was born and raised in The Netherlands. She has spent half her life there on the continent, and half her life in the UK. After studying English and European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, she moved to London where she started working for an international airline. She is married to a Brit, and they have three children together.

Can we talk about the R word?

by

I was asked recently whether I thought racism had increased post Brexit. That’s a difficult one to answer. You see, one person’s experience cannot comprehensively cover every person’s experience. Yet one person’s experience can provide valuable insight into uncovering a wider, more insidious problem.

Racism is a troublesome word to associate oneself with, whether as a victim or as a perpetrator. I am not talking about the in-your-face skinhead trolls that wear their bigotry like a badge. I am talking about the more common, run-of-the-mill, ordinary, everyday, pedestrian racism that a foreigner is likely to encounter. The one that is impossible to articulate without sounding as though you have a chip the size of a boulder, on your shoulder. Yes, that one.

Let’s begin with the more virulent kind. The kind where hijabs are ripped off women’s heads, where men are beaten up for being the wrong colour, where a child is bullied for his accent… Has that increased? I cannot say for sure, but someone added me to a Facebook group called ‘Worrying signs’ and a skim through its page revealed enough racial hatred to get my stomach heaving.

I guess the question then needs rephrasing to- did it ever go away?

For someone like myself, who grew up in India, I had only known of racism in an academic way, as something that happened to other people in other countries. When I moved to the UK, and lived in an Asian area, I didn’t encounter it for obvious reasons. In my job, there was such a mix of backgrounds, ethnicities, religions and colours, that discrimination really had zero chance of flourishing.

My first encounter with racism came when I moved to a predominantly white area. At that time, I would have been hard pressed to describe it exactly so. One time, I was sat in a pew in the church, waiting for an Easter performance featuring the school my daughter attended. Not a single person came and sat next to me, despite it getting quite busy in there. Not one person. All sorts of thoughts went through my head. Did I smell? Was I difficult to converse with? Was there something wrong with me?

Over time, it became apparent that this was not an isolated incident. I was often treated as a pariah in the school playground. If I made any attempt at socialising, I was tolerated but rarely welcomed. People were polite, but nearly always, I stayed on the peripheries. Marginalised and largely ignored.

Was this racism I asked myself? After all, no one was being abusive or horrid. No one had mentioned colour, or asked me to go back to where I came from. So, what was it then? Was it me?  Was there something fundamentally wrong with me?

When one is educated, fluent in the language and reasonably assimilated into the culture, it is doubly shocking to discover that none of that matters. All that matters is your colour.

I have heard it said that India is amongst the worst countries when it comes to discrimination. After all, we have the caste system. We have the huge inequities that exist between the rich and the poor. We also have the multiple languages, regions and religions and divisiveness is rife, in one way or another. I have heard this being used as a defence anytime racism emerges as a topic of conversation. Yet, can two wrongs really make a right?

‘Using the race card’ has become yet another weapon to subvert an honest discussion. Yes, the ‘race card’ has been misused and overused, but it is a legitimate concern, and dismissing it as the fall back position of the disgruntled is, once again, disservicing those who are unable to vocalise the sheer helplessness of being on the receiving end of discrimination.

Have you ever been treated like dirt? Have you ever been looked at as though you are something that’s crawled out from under a rock? Have you ever had your pronunciation or your accent mocked? Have your abilities ever been doubted because of your provenance? No? It’s quite illuminating, I can assure you. It makes you look at yourself in a completely different light.

Call it a chip, call it a boulder, call it being hyper-sensitive, the fact of the matter is that most foreigners will attest to feeling disliked and unwanted at some point in Britain. This, in a country, that is known the world over for its tolerance and inclusion. I shudder to think of what it maybe like elsewhere.

I get it. It’s nice to stay in your comfort zone. Surround yourself with people that look like you, speak like you, have the same norms and customs as you. It is so much harder to step out of that zone and extend a bit of kindness to those who don’t. So often I have wondered at those who go completely glassy eyed in my presence, if it would kill them to acknowledge me as another homosapien that shares this planet with them?

I have become quite adept at hiding the hurt. There are times that I react, there are times that I step back and re assess, but every single time, I smart from the unfairness and unkindness of it all.

I have been lucky enough to not have to face the overt discrimination and bigotry that my black friends tell me is their lot. A long conversation with my colleague left me reeling. This is something he has lived with from day dot! Yet, he is polite and gracious at every given turn. What right do I have to complain if a bunch of bored housewives close ranks on me? I have seen nowhere near the level of abuse or segregation that so many others have.

At this point it is important to clarify that I am talking about a small percentage of people who indulge in this kind of behaviour consciously. We have all been guilty of inadvertently ignoring or snubbing someone when in a rush or preoccupied. But to do it, fully aware of one’s own actions and the damage it may inflict, is quite simply unforgivable.

You see, because it is so very subtle, it is also extremely difficult to pinpoint or address. How can any reasonable person say “You were just smiling at the people in front of me. Why the dead pan expression with me?” It sounds churlish and unreasonable and slightly silly. Yet, both the perpetrator and the victim are well aware of what has just passed between them. A snide little put down that whispers- you are not one of us, you don’t belong, I don’t like you, I wish to have no interaction with you. All that subtext in a single exchange.

Now, multiply this exchange several times over, in several different versions and tell me that I am imagining things. Can you?

They say, to feel another man’s pain, you need to walk a mile in his shoes. A white person may face all other kinds of prejudice based on their gender, their class, their education, even their accents but no white person will ever understand what it’s like to be discriminated against on the basis of colour.

So, coming back to the question my friend asked me. Has racism increased post Brexit? No, I can’t say that it has, purely because I don’t think it ever decreased. It just hid behind the veils of politics, laws and economic requirements.

Now, what has changed is that the people in Britain feel freer to express their opinions against foreigners. They have had enough of ‘bending over backwards’ and ‘political correctness’. Now they have the carte blanche to tell an innocent check out girl that she should trip and break her head open. (A true exchange between an old lady and the Asian girl serving her). They have the carte blanche to vilify, demonise, insult, disparage and dehumanise. Brexit has given them permission to.

Why? Because it feels good to air all the ugliness that had been building up inside, in all those years of political correctness. It feels good to tell these foreigners to ‘eff off’, it feels good not to have to put on a mask of politeness because one has to, it feels good to dispense with the token multiculturalism, it feels good to indulge in the casual cruelties of mocking and insulting, it feels good not to have to make room at the table for someone else regardless of how much food may go to waste. It feels good and it feels liberating. Doesn’t it?

Tell me, how else will Britain become great again?