We must challenge the dominant negative discourse around migration, argues Martin Franklin

You don’t need to be a historian to find examples of politicians and governing elites using xenophobia and prejudice to generate support or to bolster a weakening grip on their legitimacy.  It’s a reliable tactic currently evident in the Government’s rhetoric and legislative efforts to stop ‘illegal migration’ and the ‘small boats’.  

Ministers are reviving the numbers game, promising to reduce immigration and announcing further restrictions on entry.  Never mind that meeting reduction targets on net migration have previously proved impossible or that it makes no sense when sectors of the economy and welfare system are short of labour.  Making migration an issue distracts from inflation, a crumbling NHS, profiteering and polluting water companies, etc., and governmental dysfunctions. 

And migrants serve as scapegoats for society’s ills. Without effective opposition to this cynical and socially divisive politics, we risk entering an authoritarian era from which we will struggle to escape.

Migration is central to human history.  DNA tests reveal that we have ancestors from distant lands and all our ultimate origins lie in Africa.  Analysis of relationships between languages and archaeological evidence of ancient cultural and technological exchanges across regions and between continents, reveal the movement of people and goods over thousands of years.

In The Dawn of Everything  Graeber and Wengrove describe the connections between communities during the late Stone Age (between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago). People travelled great distances and travellers would receive hospitality despite language differences. For sure, some individuals could experience hostility but free movement was the norm for millennia.

The contemporary world of nation states involves boarders, restrictions and conditionalities on people moving into and across territories. Federations like the United States or the European Union allow free movement within them but their borders are policed vigorously. 

In his novel The Wall, John Lanchester describes a future Britain enclosed by a ‘National Coastal Defence Structure’ – a massive wall around the coast.  Global heating has resulted in sea levels that have engulfed most land on the planet. The Wall is a dike but its other function is to repel desperate migrants trying to enter the country. Younger citizens are conscripted to serve as guards and, should migrants succeed in breaching the wall, the ‘defenders’ of that section are exiled to take their chances of survival on a vast ocean roamed by murderous, plundering pirates.

Lanchester takes inspiration from Trump’s ‘build the wall’ slogan and develops his vision of the future in relation to the current political discourse on migration and the consequences of a failure to arrest planetary heating and sea level rise.  The novel describes an eco-dystopia where liberal democracy has been displaced by an authoritarian and brutally xenophobic politics.  Migrants are dehumanised and subjected to merciless violence and failed ‘defenders’ are treated little better.

Demonising migrants is not new in Tory politics.  One could go back further but we can start with the Smethwick election campaign in 1964 through to Enoch Powel’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech, on to Home Secretary Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ and the resulting Windrush scandal. This is the background to the current politics of migration.

Xenophobia was a potent element in the Brexit Leave campaign.  It was explicit in the Breaking Point poster which carried an image of thousands of refugees crossing the Slovenian boarder. Voters were told, “We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.”

It was also falsely claimed that Türkiye was poised to join the European Union and that this would open the UK to millions of Turks carrying with them a potential crime wave and national security risk.  ‘Sovereignty’ and ‘taking back control’ were slogans that mobilised nationalist feeling and resentments about the power of foreign bureaucrats over UK law, and unrestricted immigration that threatened British identity. These themes were carried forward in the promise to ‘Get Brexit done’ which was central to the Tories winning the 2019 general election and they are determined to use them to win the next one.  

With Brexit ‘done’, sovereignty and control are now being deployed against the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) with the aim of removing the rights of migrants under international law.  The ECHR is inhibiting the Government’s plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda and the passage of the Illegal Migration Bill.  The cause of sovereignty softens the xenophobic aspects of the Tory’s policies by combining them with the authoritarian aim of eroding human rights.  The legal wranglings over the Government’s migration policies are spun to promote an image of them defending us against an invasion and foreign interference.

The rhetoric of right wing politicians and their media allies is combining racist, xenophobic and nationalist sentiments into a ‘structure of feeling.’   Members of our governing party now use language previously limited to the racist far right.  The Home Secretary’s description of asylum seekers entering the UK as an invasion has contributed to a mood that encourages physical attacks on them.  

The political landscape is peppered with culture war attacks on ‘wokeism’, and bewildering combinations of conspiracy theories about environmental policies, Covid vaccinations, mixed gender toilets and so on.  The recent National Conservative Conference in London saw many of these aired by some leading politicians.

The persistent framing of news stories and discussions about immigration as a problem is rarely challenged. Yet despite the barrage of negativity, public opinion is less influenced than might be supposed.  Attitudes to immigration have been shifting positively over time and concerns about the cost of living and the NHS have a higher priority.  

This indicates that a challenge to the negative discourse on migration has a chance of success if a concerted campaign is organised.  So far no such campaign has materialised. Indeed, responses from the mainstream opposition parties have failed to challenge the framing of migration issues set by the Daily Mail and similar right wing news media.

A hundred years ago in 1923, Weimar Germany struggled with multiple crises and faced a surge in virulently racist politics. Despite these circumstances Hitler and his supporters failed to win over the majority population who supported democracy at that time.  The resistance to racist agitation and propaganda by left and liberal politicians, who recognised the threat, played a crucial role. 

Today a well-coordinated and sustained campaign from an alliance of migrant support, human rights and other civil society groups should provide an alternative positive celebration of migration and the contribution of migrants to society, as well as the importance of empathy and respect for human rights. 

Population displacement due to conflict, commercial encroachment and environmental degradation of land is escalating. It is estimated that environmentally displaced migrants could reach 1.2 billion by 2050, and 1.4 billion by 2060. After 2050, that figure is expected to soar.

Recent climate events indicate that change is unpredictable and heating is faster than past projections anticipated.  Unless we work to change the political climate and challenge the dominant discourse around migration, aspects of Lanchester’s dystopian vision in The Wall will come to pass.

Martin Franklin is one of the Environment officers for Islington North CLP.

Image: Migrants welcome here GJN banner. Author: Global Justice Now, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.