Source: The Guardian

Nation states are a relatively new concept; migration is as old as humanity. By Gary Younge.

At that age I reflexively rejected most dominant narratives about race, class and nation. During a period of sus laws and anti-union legislation, I already understood there had to be another version of freedom out there that included me, and I was busy piecing together the fragments of my own worldview. And yet no amount of rationalisation could shake my conclusion that people whom I disagreed with about pretty much everything else were right about the wall.

Clearly, built with the deliberate intention to trap people in a place they might not want to be, the wall was heinous – not just a bad idea, but morally wrong. As such, it was the most obscene symbol of the broader case against the eastern bloc. The fact their governments would not allow residents to travel to the west was prima facie evidence of their lack of freedom: they were understood to be like open prisons.

Not long after the wall came down, this entire logic went into reverse. As country after country shed its Stalinist overlords and went into free-market freefall, the case for their peoples’ right to leave was eclipsed by the fear that they might actually come. In the west their “freedom” was welcomed; their presence was not. While they were demolishing the wall, we were building a fortress. Politics kept them in. For more than a decade, before they gained admission to the European Union, economics would keep them out.

“A map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at,” wrote Oscar Wilde. “For it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.”

The map of my utopian world has no borders. I believe in the free movement of people. As a principle, I think we should all be able to roam the planet and live, love and create where we wish. I could squander the rest of this column parrying caveats and concerns regarding everything from security to wages. But it is the last in a series on utopian thinking: that demands imagining beyond what is possible and practical to what is desirable. So why dream small? Martin Luther King could have climbed the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and called for a 10-point plan for better legislation. But then who would have remembered that?

Benedict Anderson once famously described nation states as “imagined communities”. I’d like to imagine mine without border guards, barbed wire, passport control, walls, fences or barriers. The world would be a better place without them.

Some of this stems from personal history. I am from a travelling people. My parents were born and raised in Barbados, a small island in the Caribbean caught in the crosswinds of colonial ties and postwar labour scarcity. I have 14 aunts and uncles. Along with my parents, nine of them left Barbados for lives in Britain, the US and Canada. I have cousins scattered across the globe. Borders are no friends to diasporas. They privilege form-filling over family.

“Do you plan to work while you are here?” the UK immigration officer asked my grandmother when she came to see us one time. “You have cane here?” she asked wryly – she who worked in the canefields her entire life.

Like my granny, though for different reasons, borders have always been a tense issue for me. With those in uniform struggling to match the colour of my face to the crest on my passport, how could it be otherwise? To be black and on the move in the west is to be an object of suspicion. The documents are supposed to speak for themselves; but somehow there was always more explaining to do. And these personal objections are intimately connected to a more sweeping philosophical and political opposition.

Borders exist, by definition, to separate us from others. The primary two issues then become which “other” that will be, and on what basis we should be separated. As such they are both arbitrary and definite. Arbitrary because they could be anywhere and often move – just look at how Europe’s borders have changed over the past century. Definite, because wherever they are we have to deal with them, and because the process that determines who is allowed to move where and why is exercised with extreme prejudice.

America’s 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the White Australia Policy – a series of measures lasting 70 years – or Britain’s Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 are among the more crude filters. But while the “othering” changes with time – the shift from race to religion as grounds for suspicion over a generation has been breathtaking – the fact of it remains the same. Some people won’t be welcome, not because of what they have done but because of who they are, even if the groups of people in question may change.

This has long been true and long been a problem. Recently, however, it has been compounded by the fact that even as borders have become tougher for people, they have all but been lifted for capital. Money can travel the globe virtually without restriction, in search of regulations that are weaker and labour that is cheaper.

When it does, it often displaces people: sucking investment and resources from one place at the flick of a switch; shutting down factories and shifting them to the other side of the world; or introducing automation that renders some professions obsolete. But those who find their lives turned upside down by the free movement of capital are often prevented from moving country and looking for work. People should have at least the same rights – or more, since humans are more valuable than money.

Sadly, that is not a principle that underpins the system we live in. The rich can buy themselves citizenship in about 20 countries, cash down. Meanwhile, desperate people are turned away at borders all the time. Others are incarcerated for having the audacity to cross borders we have created, to escape wars we have started, environmental chaos we have contributed to, or poverty we have helped create. Others die trying.

It is a fact, rarely stated but generally acknowledged and accepted, that the global poor should not be allowed to travel. That’s most of the world. As such, from the refugee camp in Calais to the rickety vessels on the Mediterranean, from Trump’s wall to the Berlin wall, the border stands as an ultimate point of confrontation in the broader dystopia we have made possible.

Nation states are a relatively new concept; migration is as old as humanity. Borders seek to regulate and restrict that basic human custom for the distinct purpose of excluding some and privileging others. They discriminate between all people with the express intention of then being able to discriminate against some people. They do not simply set boundaries for countries, but are metaphors for the boundaries of how we might think about other human beings. Immigrants are not the problem. Borders are.

17 Feb 2018 | National Day of Action celebrating the contributions of migrants to UK society | Details

Source: The Guardian

Every Sunday, opposite the church, a bus bound for Bucharest waits for passengers. The journey to eastern Europe takes the best part of two days. But many just send cargo. Big boxes, bound together by thick tape and a prayer, are weighed and paid for, so that family can pick them up at the other end. Since Britain voted to leave the European Union, some eastern Europeans are now wondering if they should be hitching a ride. One man across the street, who declines to give his name, is waiting for a minivan, also going to Bucharest, that will take him home for good. He says life has become too stressful since the referendum.

At the coach, two young women whose boxes are being weighed have received worried calls from their families back home. “They heard news about a Romanian shop that has been broken into in some city in the UK, and vandalised,” one tells me. “And also about people being sworn at, told to go home, generally being treated badly.” The women have experienced none of this and have no intention of leaving. “No, I’m fine,” says one. “In Bristol it’s OK.”

The issue of immigration and immigrants dominated the EU referendum, with much of the focus on eastern Europeans who arrived following EU expansion in 2004. When the result came in, many of them felt the country they now called home had rejected them. A sharp increase in racial attacks was reported across the country. In the first week, London was averaging around three an hour; elsewhere, things were even worse. On Saturday 27 August, in Harlow, a 40-year-old Polish man, Arkadiusz Jóźwik, was beaten to death in the street. It’s not known yet what any motive might have been, but one line of inquiry for police was the possibility of it being a hate crime. “After the Brexit vote it has got worse,” said his brother, Radek. “I have seen people change – it is hard at the moment.” Five boys aged 15 and one aged 16 were arrested on suspicion of murder, but released on bail until 7 October pending further inquiries.

Even though Bristol voted overwhelmingly to remain, it has not been immune. In mid July, Alex Raikes, director of the Bristol-based anti-racist group Stand Against Racism and Inequality (Sari), told me: “We’ve had eight referrals in the last 11 days, so that’s nearly a referral a day of an eastern European family or individual. It’s ranged [upwards]from verbal abuse, and nearly all of those people have been told to go back to where they come from, or ‘go back home’, and I haven’t heard that kind of language in quite a long time. They’ve had eggs thrown at them, windows smashed, cars vandalised. We’ve had people being verbally abused on the bus, we had a horrible case of a family being attacked in a park – the adults and children threatened to set their hair on fire and even kicked them.”

As well as animosity, there have been expressions of solidarity. Friends of Arkadiusz Jóźwik have organised a unity march through Harlow in his memory on Thursday. In Bristol, the Playfull toyshop offered a rose and an apology to all immigrants – a gesture that made the news around the world. “My friend just thought: ‘I want to do something small, something local,’” says owner Kerstin Price, who was away when it happened. She didn’t think that it would be a “mega, mega response”.

In Kopernick, a Polish shop in Sunderland, its shelves stacked with herring, hams, vodka and dried mushrooms, Marina says things have been fairly quiet. Sunderland may have voted leave, but the only response she has encountered has been people coming in to commiserate. “They came to say sorry because they voted to stay, and they’re sorry for us. But I didn’t hear anything nasty, not yet.”

Yet bad news travels fast and far. Marina has heard that things are worse in the factories and everyone coming out of the Romanian church in Bristol knows someone who has faced it.

“Statistically, of course you know this isn’t happening to everyone,” says Jon Fox, a senior sociologist at Bristol University. “But it’s not just the statistics, right? My wife is Hungarian. We speak Hungarian at home. We were in a playground last weekend and I half jokingly, half not-jokingly, said to her: ‘Can we speak Hungarian here?’ We’ve been to that playground loads of times. But there’s … a heightened sensitivity which is reflected in the reporting of the crime statistics. There is more hate crime now, and there’s more reporting of it too, because people are tuned into it.” And alongside the visible “other” of race, there is now the audible “other” of language.

Kuba Jablonowski, who came to Britain from Poland a decade ago, was reluctant to leave his house in Bristol after the vote. He worried the country he had come to love was a mirage, and that he would now have to face a reality he had not reckoned on. “I went to my local Polish shop and they said they had three people come in and report racial abuse and ask what should they do. They said it was absolutely unprecedented. And the guy there said that when he was going down the street to work he was looking at people and thinking: ‘Was it you who voted out? Was it you who voted out? Was it you who voted out …’ Everything changed and nothing changed, all at the same time; it is all about perceptions.”

In this climate, it’s not surprising that many eastern Europeans have started to ask themselves if they want to stay here. But another question mark hangs over whether or not they will even be allowed to. When running for the Conservative party leadership, Theresa May would not guarantee the rights of EU citizens to remain in Britain post-Brexit. On a recent trip to Slovakia and Poland, May suggested this right to remain will hinge on whether British citizens have reciprocal rights in their countries. There is no official position. But there are human consequences. And so, for all EU citizens in Britain, anxiety about their future fills the void. “I’m redecorating my kitchen at the moment,” says Kinga Goodwin, a Polish-born academic who lives in London. “And every now and then, even though I’m married to an Englishman, I keep asking myself if it makes sense.”

At an eastern European women’s group meeting at the Wellspring Healthy Living Centre in Bristol’s Bexton Hill, Anja tells me that her daughter, who had planned to put down roots here, is having second thoughts. “She was hoping to buy a house with her fiance but the day after Brexit, he was approached on the street by a British person saying it was time for him to go back to Poland. The next day they were supposed to be going to see a house they planned to buy, but they cancelled the visit … they don’t know what to do because of the Brexit situation.”

In Sunderland, the referendum result was less of a shock. Daniel Krzyszczak, a manager at the International Community Organisation of Sunderland, which works mostly but not exclusively with eastern Europeans, notes the rise of Ukip over the past few years, and points out that anti-immigrant sentiment simply intensified following the Brexit campaign. One factory worker, who would not give his name, shows me a poster that was put up in his changing room a couple of days before the referendum, stating: “Vote out EU, come on England, get the cunts out.”

Brexit didn’t introduce xenophobia or racism to Britain, but it has complicated our understanding of both. Like immigrants from former colonies after the second world war, the east European migrants thought they were coming for a short time, stayed longer, did work others wouldn’t and started families. There is also much in the nature of the hostility that chimes with previous scripts. In keeping with the tropes of prejudice and bigotry, they have been depicted simultaneously as welfare scroungers and as workers who “steal” jobs from local people and refuse to integrate.

This is not the first time white people in Britain have been racialised on account of their distinct religious, national or cultural affinities. Jews, Catholics, the Irish and Gypsies have all been, and can still be, discriminated against because of who they are.

In the wake of the Brexit vote the distinction between racism and xenophobia blurred. “It’s not just eastern Europeans facing the abuse,” explains Raikes. “I had a dual-heritage family with a mum and her 11-month-old baby going past the pub the day after the referendum and a load of guys shouted at them and said: ‘Now we’re leaving the EU, go back to where you came from,’ and spat on them.”

And if bigots weren’t making the distinction, neither black Britons nor eastern Europeans were necessarily seeing the commonalities between their experiences either. Examples of Black and Asian voters complaining about eastern European immigrants in the runup to the referendum were legion. And one of the reasons why so many eastern Europeans were shocked by the response post-Brexit is because they thought racism didn’t apply to them.

“European groups who live here don’t necessarily see race equality organisations as representing them,” says Omar Khan, director of race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust. “They don’t necessarily frame their experiences as racism. Often they think they’re white and Christian and so are British people and aren’t we all European. I think also we have to be frank in saying there are real tensions between these groups sometimes. Black British groups can feel that, compared with when they came over, Europeans have better access to benefits; they may also feel that eastern Europeans are more racist than white British people. Obviously, to the extent that they feel that way, it’s a barrier to working together to eliminate discrimination.”

One of the most egregious attacks in Newcastle was against a young black Polish woman who was harassed on a bus. When she got on, a youngster shouted: “I’ve never seen a monkey on a bus.” Then they started talking about Europe. “Something about stealing jobs and things like this,” the woman says.

Then she started talking to her friend in Polish. The boys carried on shouting. When she ignored them, one of them set her hair on fire.

“Do you think that was about you being black or Polish?” I ask her.

“How would I know?” she shrugs.

• Gary Younge’s Eastern Europeans in Brexitland is broadcast on 5 and 12 September at 8pm on BBC Radio 4. It is repeated on 7 and 14 September at 11am.