News

Imagine. Your country is under a corrupt, tyrannical regime where torture, imprisonment without trial and the vilest atrocities are commonplace; your country has collapsed into anarchy and civil war; your country is a wasteland of abject poverty, disease and famine; your country has been blown apart by other people's wars. You dream of peace, freedom from terror, a job, a roof over your head, food in your belly - basic human rights that people elsewhere take for granted, as they do in Britain. In that ancient democracy ruled by the common will, its people shelter under the protection of legally enforceable human rights. If only you could get there.

You gather up your family, sell everything that can be sold, beg and borrow, then go to the man who knows a man who can get you to Britain - for a price. You do not have quite enough for the fare and the necessary false papers but never mind, the man says: you can pay the balance when you reach Britain - your introduction to the never-never. Full of hope, your faith in human nature rekindled, you embark on your journey. It is a terrifying ordeal. You are holed up in the back of a lorry, fearing for your life, starving, thirsty, ankle-deep in excrement, but freedom is a prize worth any suffering. You pity the countless thousands who perish on the way, like the lorry-load of Chinese people who suffocated to death, but you survive and, as a fugitive from everything the British abhor, you know they will embrace you into their democracy.

But suppose your welcoming committee is another arm of the enormous global business of people trafficking? These "friends" of the man who arranged your passage spirit you away. You disappear into a black hole where your wife and daughters are forced into prostitution, your sons into drug-running, yourself into slavery. And while you try to earn enough to pay off the man, you also make thousands for the apparently legitimate businesses that exploit illegal workers because they come cheaper than cheap. It is called the black economy.

Alternatively, you may fall into the ungentle hands of immigration officials, who simply throw you and your family into prison. You have committed no offence, you have not been on trial; nonetheless, you are locked up indefinitely. Why, when you are within this democracy, do you not have the same human rights as others?

You learn why from newspapers and television. Far from offering salvation, the British want you out - you and your family are cheats, spongers, even terrorists, even though you are intelligent, educated, and may, in your other life, have done important work. The government, when it is totting up the deportations of people like you, seems to use the vocabulary of pest control. You wonder whether its immigration policy is incoherent and chaotic because it is driven by the engine of entrenched xenophobia.


Do the media reflect the will of the people or of the government? Does an unconscious, symbiotic relationship between all three create a zeitgeist that determines the cultural interface of immigration? With black propaganda, the media whip up hatred and incite violence towards you and your kind; only the occasional small voice mentions the devastating global impact of Western foreign policies and trading practices and points to these as the cause of the modern diaspora.

You accept that you may be perceived as an economic threat - a nation is entitled to safeguard resources that are always finite - but you are not here to steal jobs or freeload; given the opportunity, you want to do your best for your new country. Fat chance, you say to yourself, having already mastered the English idiom. Your life is on hold and you are completely at the mercy of faceless, nameless officials whose overriding wish is to see the back of you, who are making plans to detain your kind in remote places or in prison hulks moored off shore.

Meanwhile, you and your family exist behind bars, in squalor, hungry, idle, sinking deep into depression and hopelessness. Uneducated, sickly, bored, your children become hostile, antisocial, dangerously disaffected - brutalised by the system.

There are some officials who go out of their way to help but they have too much work and too little power. Their best efforts are like drops in the ocean. So, you spend your days staring at the high walls around you and realise that you have simply exchanged one despair for another.

Alison Taylor is a novelist, a former senior child care worker and the winner of the 1996 Community Care Readers' Award.