Andy Beckett on the troubles of refugees and economic migrants
Keep out … a National Guardsman watches over the US border with Mexico at Nogales, Arizona. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images
Andy Beckett
The Guardian
Near the end of this tightly-coiled, unpredictable book, a border guard invites the author to try scaling a fence. The fence is one of a pair intended to stop illegal immigrants entering Ceuta, the Spanish city surrounded by Morocco which is a favoured way into Europe from Africa. Overcoming this barrier, Hardingdiscovers, “took about 45 seconds. Balancing for the turn at the top, where the only handhold is a straight line of clipped wire, I cut both hands.” The guard is unmoved: “[He] said he had watched migrants take both fences in less than 20 seconds.”
In an era of footloose capitalism, stark inequality between countries, and ever more information about foreign job possibilities, it is not hard to present the fortifying of national frontiers against immigration as essentially futile. Harding sees restricting migration this way as a “morose task”: the European Union, he points out, has a land border of “nearly 9,000km” and a coastline of “another 42,000km”. Ingenious people-smugglers and indefatigable would-be migrants talk to him in stranger-than-fiction, concrete detail about their schemes for gatecrashing the rich world. One regular breacher of the Mexican-American desert border endured a three-day, not untypical crossing: “He was flayed below the knees by cacti and when his shoes came to pieces … he walked the last day barefoot over red rock, a coarse oxidised sandstone … The soles of each foot [became] a single blister from ball to heel, like a gel pack. [From America] he was deported again… [He made] his next attempt shortly afterwards …”
Yet apparently doomed government policies can still have large consequences. Harding’s panoramic volume, an expansion and updating of his 2000 bookThe Uninvited, surveys the vast military-industrial complex that has grown up to police immigration across the rich world. In recent years, the economic slump has made immigration even more politically sensitive than during more confident eras. His underlying stance is liberal: broadly supportive of the migrants, highlighting the human cost when their desires are blocked. But as a longstanding writer on the ambiguous relationships between rich and poor countries, he is too streetwise to be pious. He is alert to the complexities of a world where refugees and economic migrants are not always easy to tell apart – even in the minds of the immigrants themselves – and where the same traffickers smuggle people, willing and not, and other illegal cargoes. “Nothing in the world of unauthorised migration,” he writes early on, “is quite what it seems.”
His first frontier report is from the narrow sea between Albania and southeast Italy. Riding in an Italian police speedboat, he sits in on a night pursuit of a people-smugglers’ inflatable. In the hands of a more macho writer, the encounter would be all hardware and adrenaline, with the politics of the situation lost in all the spray and tight turns, but Harding keeps the action to a single taut paragraph. “A chase is dramatic,” he writes, “and largely symbolic.” The smugglers get away.
Harding is more interested in loitering and listening in the migrant camps on both sides of the rich world’s borders. In government detention centres for captured immigrants, and more sympathetic charity-run compounds, and muddy, improvised illegal settlements, he speaks to people from Afghanistan and Albania and Ethiopia, carefully using indirect quotation and only first names. The Afghan (“young, personable … spoke fair English”) is a former soldier in the western-backed Afghan National Army: “Early in 2011, going home on leave, he was called to account by local Taliban as a collaborator and told he would have to take part in a car-bomb attack on a nearby hospital if he wanted to redeem himself.” He refused, left his family behind, and made his way to northern France. From there, he hopes to steal further north to Birmingham, to join his recently arrived cousin, who has also fled Afghanistan for political reasons. “The west’s exertions on far-off battlefields, shaping a world in its likeness,” writes Harding, have helped prompt the great northward migration so many western politicians fear and decry. “In ways we fail to acknowledge, we issue the invitation and map [the migrants’] journeys towards us.”
Harding makes his ambitious, continent-crossing arguments in economical, sometimes elegant, usually understated prose. Occasionally, he is so understated that the book becomes an erudite murmur when it should be clearer and louder. Two middle chapters on immigration law and the slowly evolving attitudes of western officialdom, while authoritative, become a little airless: you start to crave Harding’s return to the border.
Once or twice, he abandons his cool, observational tone to let off a potent bolt of anger. A steely sentence is aimed at the age-old tabloid spectre of the immigrant “scrounger”: “Social security entitlements come low on the list of priorities for the survivor of an ‘anti-terrorist’ operation in Turkish Kurdistan who leaves his village on horseback … raises the cost of a passage to sanctuary … buys a place on a boat to Albania and, three months later … is invited to step out of a lorry on the A3 and make his way to a police station in Guildford.”
In Arizona, author becomes participant-observer as Harding helps push wheelbarrows of water containers to a desert water station, set up by a pro-immigrant charity, Humane Borders. Drawing a clever, resonant parallel, he notes the similarities between America’s intensifying efforts against illegal Mexican arrivals – only intermittently reversed by Obama – and the country’s wars abroad: ever-bigger fortifications; the detection, pursuit and forced deportation of wily-seeming foreigners; the dusty, mountainous, hard-to-control landscape. As with the “war on terror” – another reason for the west’s anti-immigrant turn – this semi-war on illegal migrants has eroded civil liberties, with anyone Mexican-looking quite likely to be harassed by officialdom for the most minor civil offences, or on no pretext at all, to see if they have the correct immigration status. Harding fears the EU is hardening likewise: into “a federation of police states” for migrants.
However, he is not starry-eyed about the alternative promoted by “libertarian elites”, usually free-market absolutists or businessmen wanting cheaper labour, of an immigration free-for-all. While respecting their consistency – it is the many free-marketeers who demand unhindered movement for goods and capital, but oppose it for people, who really draw his scorn – Harding is not an anarchist. He thinks states have the right to meaningful borders. And he is frank about the increased competition for resources that immigration can bring. At his own children’s north London primary, with “dozens” of pupils from the former Yugoslavia, “a sour parental anxiety stirs … at the thought of language difficulties in the classroom and the diversion of resources to cope with them.” He does not wholly exempt himself.
Refreshingly for a liberal, Harding does not present migrants solely as victims, but as assertive, sometimes selfish, sometimes on their way to becoming powerful. It helps that he knows well most of the countries they come from. Having detailed the cruelties and absurdities of much western policy towards them over the last decade and a half, he only offers the briefest sketch of a better approach. It would involve “rethinking the economic relationship between richer and poorer countries”, using migrants as economic “ferrymen” to carry money and energy and ideas between the two worlds, much more equally in both directions than currently, and with far greater government assistance.
It sounds ambitious. But it’s probably less far-fetched than expecting the west’s half-built anti-migrant fortress to hold for the long term. Besides, by then, the immigration issue may have changed shape entirely. Harding quotes the Dutch migration expert Hein de Hass: when western countries are genuinely caught up by the big emerging economies, the “question will no longer be how to prevent migrants from coming, but how to attract them.” Nothing reveals that a city is dying like a lack of foreigners.
• Andy Beckett’s When the Lights Went Out is published by Faber.
.
