Prepare the following article for translation (in the tutorials) .
Fear of foreigners is political Viagra for our limp leaders
Check their teeth. The lying “hulking”
children let in from Calais. That small handful are not children at all. Use
computer software to determine their true age, these quasi-criminals. Tory MP
David Davies wants their teeth X-rayed. That’s right. While thousands of
people have been festering in the camps about to be demolished, the public is
being told we have overextended our “famous hospitality” by letting in these
boys. We don’t want to be a soft touch.
I note that no one is talking about
the Eritrean girl who was also let in this week, because she is a girl.
Because God knows that the women and girls in the camps qualify as vulnerable.
Some are forced into sex work. Many dress as boys or stay in the tents to avoid
the smugglers, but let’s not bother with details here. They, too, could be
lying. Check their teeth. Like you would with a corpse. Or a cow. This is when
dental records are actually used to determine age. But, again, why bother with
details? Living or dead. Human or animal. Toxic discourse around migrants has
gone mainstream – even if teeth checking has now, thankfully, been
ruled out by the Home Office as unethical.
Davies, would-be Teeth-Checker General, argues that people in Britain want
to help children, “but we don’t want to be taken for a free ride”. He surely
missed a trick here. While checking their teeth, we could also see if they own
gold fillings and remove them. Or is that going a little too far? Is that a
little too reminiscent of the unmentionable? Of course it is and Britain is a
kind, caring nation. Fair, gentle, decent. We pride ourselves on these values.
We claim them even as the gutter overflows with sulphurous racism dressed up as
realism.
The discourse around migration ebbs and flows. They are “vermin”
or “cockroaches”. These people have no place. The
great anthropologist Mary Douglas defined dirt as “matter out of place”, and
so these people with no place become dirt themselves. No longer human to us:
simply threatening and other. There have been murmurs of empathy despite this.
Oh, look, here is a drowned toddler and a sinking ship of people, whose names we
will never know. Oh, look, there is an interminable war in Syria and children
smattered with blood and dust sit half alive and we think something should be
done. But it’s far away and it’s complicated.
Calais is not very far away, but it is complicated. Some of the people there
are seeking asylum, some are migrants. Some are adults, some are children, some
will die trying to get here and will never settle in France. Some have
burned off their fingerprints so as not to have to settle in their country
of entry.
So the divvying up of these people into vulnerable and not vulnerable enough
(they live in tents in the mud?) is a way for us to ration our compassion. The
value of compassion has plummeted
like that of the pound. What is deemed valuable now is hardness. Stay hard
for ever. Permanently hard. Hard Brexit. This is delusional, but it is a bravado
whereby the weak and the vulnerable must be punished for reminding us that they
exist. This fear of foreigners is political Viagra for a set of limp leaders.
Those who speak up for migrants are often those in possession of some actual
facts about the situation. The migration of displaced people is massive and
ongoing. Yes, more will come, however many fences are erected; yes, immigration
has effects. It is no good simply saying that we are a rich country and can
afford it, when so many feel very far from rich. The Brexit vote is being
interpreted by the extreme right as a referendum on immigration. I continue to
believe it was much messier and more complex than that. But alarm bells are
ringing because of the flood of racism that is now permissible.
It is shameful that reuniting some teenagers with their families has caused
this latest outpouring. It is shameful that the only moral leadership is coming
from the church (and a few good Labour MPs) – although, historically, we know
the church will step in when the Tories become too reprehensible. It is
shameful, too, that we are now arguing over whether teenagers are teenagers, as
if anyone over 18 has no rights at all.
There is now a trap where we talk of the good and bad immigrants,
as Nikesh Shukla, editor of the book The Good Immigrant, has said. The good
ones win
Bake Off or long-distance races or save your aunt’s life in hospital. There
are deserving and undeserving migrants. If someone has got from Afghanistan to
within 22 miles of our coast, what category are they? There are the innocent
ones – little children, maybe a few Syrians – so the rest must be guilty? In
their years of journeying, some may have lied to survive. Wouldn’t you?
The reaction to this handful of people is sickening. Maybe some cannot
imagine ever having to flee. Maybe it is better to be hard of heart and mind.
But this hatred is a brittle creature. Check its teeth, find its age, you will
indeed find it a very old thing, rotten to the core, stinking of decay.
If this is what governs our country now, you are welcome to it.