This place called home: protecting, respecting and standing with migrants after the pandemic.
Humans were born to move.
Across the road, across town, across the country and, yes, sometimes across seas and borders. It’s who we are and it’s what we do. Doctors, sisters, nurses, parents, drivers, neighbours, bakers, friends – humans.
We move for love, for opportunity and for adventure. Sometimes we move because we have no other choice. And, if we are lucky, we find a place called Home. It’s more than four walls (as we’ve all learned these past weeks) or a patch of soil and it isn’t always the place you were born, nor even the place where the grass is greener. “Home”, as the writer Naguib Mahfouz reminded us, “is where all your attempts to escape cease”. It’s wherever we can be safe, be ourselves, be loved and belong. It’s what we hope to find at all our journeys’ end.
Wherever we’re from and however (or whenever) we came to be here, we all deserve to live with dignity, security and some amount of certainty. But for years, our system for managing migration has been designed to treat the motives of those who wish to move here as suspect, to reduce over time the rights of those who arrive, and – wherever possible – to disrupt people’s chances of maintaining their status or settling here. All rooted in the assumption that hostility, conflict and exclusion are the only appropriate responses to the movement of people. As with the Windrush Scandal two years ago, the pandemic has laid bare many of the most critical, perhaps even fatal, flaws with this approach, while pointing clearly to the solutions we must embrace if we are to recover.
All workers deserve respect and protection
When we clap on a Thursday evening for those on whose shoulders we have placed this nation’s hopes and fears, how many of us realise that at least one in every eight workers in the NHS was born somewhere else?
A quarter of a million healthcare workers (one in three doctors and one in five nurses) are not British. One in seven care workers came to Britain from abroad to tend to our aging population. In some parts of the country, 40% of nurses and midwives are from BAME backgrounds, meaning that at some point either they or their ancestors moved here from somewhere else.
So how do we reconcile the exhortation to clap for our carers with the fact that just weeks ago we were told that anybody from overseas who earns less than £30,000 is ‘unskilled’ and, therefore, unwelcome? With the fact that care workers, domestic workers, cleaners and other key workers are made vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking by a visa system that ties them to their employer and leaves them at risk of becoming undocumented every two and a half years (risks which will grow exponentially under the proposed short-term work visa system for low-paid workers)? Or with the reality of staff at all levels of the health service who live with permanent anxiety about the next time they have to renew their visa – the forms, fees and official culture of suspicion designed to trip them up and find a reason to throw them out rather than supporting them to stay?
Beyond the NHS, how do we reconcile the thinking behind the proposed ‘points based system’ with the fact that it was the delivery driver, the bus driver and the warehouse worker, not the dotcom entrepreneur, the management consultant or the salaried executive, whose physical presence and underpaid labour helped keep our economy afloat and our communities running?
How do we express our gratitude to undocumented workers while we continue to deny them access to housing, healthcare and a pathway back to documentation? These questions take on even greater salience when we consider the risks to which low-paid migrant workers, documented and undocumented, have been exposed, with no recourse to public funds, limited routes to challenge exploitation and, therefore, no choice but to continue working through the pandemic – often in dangerous conditions.
As Andrew Pakes has argued compellingly in his essay here, we need dramatically to rethink the way we value work. Britain’s workers deserve nothing less than a New Deal. But what would this look like for migrant workers? As a starting point, measures we must consider include:
Jettisoning the artificial distinction between ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled work’;
Providing all migrant workers with recourse to public funds so that nobody is forced to work when it’s too dangerous to do so;
Decriminalising work and strengthening worker protections so that undocumented workers are not at risk of exploitation and trafficking;
Making the pathways to long-term settlement more accessible, so that workers can build their lives with stability and security and without the risk of becoming undocumented.
Hostility is Lethal
For the better part of a decade, the Hostile Environment has sought to starve out people with irregular status by denying them the right to work or to access housing and healthcare. These measures have been buttressed by wide-ranging data-sharing agreements with the Home Office which have meant pregnant women attending doctors’ appointments and victims of domestic violence going to the police are at permanent risk of being swept up by enforcement officials, detained and deported.
These are dangerous policies at the best of times – and the Windrush Scandal showed just how deadly they can be when targeted at people who cannot show you their papers. But when the dust settles after the pandemic, we will almost certainly find that the rigidity with which these measures have been defended and maintained will have worsened outcomes and led to completely avoidable tragedies.
Elsewhere in the world, governments were quick to recognise that whatever their thoughts about irregular migration, the duty to protect life should not be tempered by a person’s immigration status. Portugal granted automatic, temporary leave to remain to anybody residing within its borders, guaranteeing access to healthcare, welfare support and housing. Across the US, many city and state governments launched public information campaigns guaranteeing that people without paperwork could access coronavirus testing and treatment without any repercussions. They recognised not only that this was the most ethically sound response to the pandemic, but also that nobody can be protected until everybody is.
In the UK, a small, temporary change to the NHS Charging Regulations allowed for the treatment of coronavirus without charging. But there has, to date, been no attempt to publicly reassure people that they can access healthcare safely, nor has there been any effort to amend or repeal the arrangements which see patient data automatically shared with the Home Office. Quite frankly, the steps taken are roughly what you get when a minister asks “what is the very least that we could do?”.
Two weeks ago, Elvis was found in his home, having died of coronavirus, simply too scared to go the doctor. He worked as a cleaner and his widow is a domestic worker. Whatever his paperwork said, this was his Home. He will not have been the only person to have met such a fate and these deaths will have been completely avoidable. The only appropriate course of action is to end the Hostile Environment once and for all. Nobody should be scared of their doctor or of reporting a crime to the police. Nobody should feel afraid in their Home.
Family Matters
Most of us fortunate enough to live with loving families will emerge from this crisis grateful for their company, their support and their care. Those with non-nuclear families will be grateful for the chance to sit down together again. To hug, laugh and cry together again. To mark all the birthdays we missed in lockdown and to mourn together those we lost. However high the camera definition is, Skype and Zoom just don’t cut it.
Yet in countless Home Office decisions, the division or separation of families has been justified for years on the basis that “modern methods of communication” mean that being forced to live on the other side of the world from your loved one doesn’t violate your right to a family life. You can Skype your wife while she gives birth to your child, attend your grandmother’s funeral on Zoom or give your daughter away at her wedding on Snapchat. Now that one third of humanity has participated in a two-month experiment to test this, I think we can conclude that nobody buys it.
We’ve all learned just how important it is to be close to those we love and how devastating it can be to be forced apart. We must make it easier for families to live together. Rules on adult dependent relatives joining family in the UK must be revisited and we must abolish the minimum income requirement which prevents 40% of British citizens (including many nurses and care workers) from being joined in the UK by a partner. With economic storm-clouds gathering, it’s more important than ever that the right to a family life is not tempered by income.
Division threatens us all
As with any laundry-list of policy failures and hardships in our immigration system, we will not get far if we avoid the question: how did we even get here? From the 1971 Immigration Act, introduced with the explicit goal of curtailing the rights of "coloured people", to the passage of the "hostile environment" laws in 2012 and 2014, there has been no shortage of effort from concerned groups and experts to try to work with government to do and be better than this.
But for as long as there have been migrants in this country, it has been a sound political strategy to blame all ills on them. If there is underinvestment in the health system, we can blame it on those arriving from overseas, despite the fact that if you find yourself in a hospital, you are more likely to be treated by a migrant than to be queuing behind one. And we can give teeth to our rhetoric by announcing performatively punitive measures, even when the experts tell us they are cruel and pointless. And we can hope that a big enough wedge of focus-grouped marginal voters will look away from other policy failures and blame the foreign born.
These policies have a real cost, they affect real lives, and the pandemic has highlighted just how high that cost can be. Because when we use migrants as a scapegoat, as the lightning rod for our insecurities and anger, we are all left poorer. We can already see the wheels turning. This crisis, and the coming recession, will be blamed on migrants as a distraction from policy failures.
As we all count our dead and wonder how many lives could have been saved, ask yourself this: do you feel any safer or healthier knowing that an undocumented Filipino man was left to die at home? Did hostility and cruelty to migrants bring a single person comfort and care when they were sick, lonely or afraid? And would we have been better prepared if we had spent more time asking why our hospitals were being shut down and less time perpetuating the convenient myth that migrants are a drain on the NHS? Wasn’t all of this conflict and division just utterly draining and, in the end, completely senseless in the face of a real crisis?
A just recovery requires us to be brave, to be ambitious and to confront these questions. One day (hopefully soon), we’ll be able to move again. We’ll see our friends, our colleagues and our families. In time we’ll forget what it was like to be grounded, to have a border at every front door. And though the end of the pandemic will allow us to leave Home, a just recovery must enshrine, advance and protect the rights of those who have moved to find it.