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

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.

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.