Every year, thousands of people die trying to cross borders.
At times, the stark reality of this becomes front page news
like the picture of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, lying face down on a Turkish beach,
or when 39 people were found dead in a lorry in Essex.
But the same old logic seems to hold: that stricter border checks and a more hostile
asylum and immigration system, would stop people from making these dangerous journeys.
We must not encourage people who want to become refugees in Britain
to come over the oceans.
But some say stronger borders are actually the problem, not the solution.
To understand why, let’s look at how asylum works.
When someone flees their home country because of war or persecution, they’ll likely try
to seek asylum in another country.
Being given asylum means being able to stay and live your life in this new country.
This is covered by the Refugee Convention, which defines what a refugee is and is the
basis for refugee rights internationally.
In most cases, you must be in the destination country to ask for asylum, which means you
have to get there first before you apply.
But getting to that country in a safe and legal way can be near-impossible.
Visas and checks make it difficult for people seeking asylum to move, and globally, countries
are building more walls and fences along their borders.
In Europe, governments have closed down legal routes and made deals with other countries
to stop people from getting to the EU.
Really strict border controls do literally stop people from arriving and being able to
make an application for asylum. But on the other hand, it doesn't make them somehow disappear.
The most vulnerable people are seeking for safety so strengthening the borders makes
things much more dangerous
People die. They drown in the sea. They die in their tents in Calais.
One network of human rights groups has said that more than 36,000 deaths can
be put down to “border militarisation, asylum laws, detention policies and deportations.”
Tighter borders are making it more difficult for people to safely claim asylum,
forcing them to rely on smugglers and risk their lives.
‘I wish that there was somehow a way to get to our destinations legally'
So why are governments still arguing stronger borders are the answer?
If we look at the UK, they say it’s about pull factors.
"We must be aware of pull factors"
"The potential pull factors"
"Remove all these pull factors"
Pull factors are the supposed things that attract people to move to a particular country.
"You’ve got a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, wanting to come to Britain
because Britain has got jobs, it’s a growing economy, it’s an incredible place to live"
Although the UK has a tiny proportion of refugees, the asylum system has been made stricter
to dissuade people from coming.
That means as well as making it more difficult for people to get here, from the 2000s onwards
policies have been made harsher for people when they are here.
For instance, since 2002 people waiting on their asylum claim aren’t allowed to work
and for those eligible they are entitled to only £37.75 per person, per week.
And as well as that, there’s often a high burden of proof to show you’re a refugee.
There is a culture of disbelief in the Home Office which means that if they make a slight
error in dates retelling their stories again and again to so many different agencies then
they are penalised and there’s no understanding of the psychological trauma.
One of the women that I spoke to said, 'It's not what happened to me in my
home country that broke me, but what happened to me here'.
Politicians claimed stricter rules would deter people from coming.
But this doesn’t add up.
While there’s plenty of proof of push factors - things like war, genocide and human rights violations
that force people to leave their home - there’s little evidence for pull factors.
Studies have shown people usually don’t come here with prior knowledge of the asylum system
or to take from the system.
One of the weird things about the pull factors is this idea of people who seek asylum as being
people who are in country A and they have access to perfect information about all possible
places they could go and they have the resources to go to those places. When in reality people
have extremely constrained resources, constrained information, then when they set off, along
the way they’ll meet all sorts of people who will change their journeys in various ways.
So it’s not that people are out to get what they can - their decision to try to get to
a particular country can be driven by all kinds of complex factors, including very basic needs,
like having family there or knowing the language.
Yet funding for search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean was cut because they
were seen as a pull factor - encouraging people to make the dangerous crossing because there
was the possibility of being rescued.
But getting rid of those patrols hasn’t stopped everyone from attempting the journey.
In 2019 an estimated 1,317 people died trying to cross the Mediterranean.
So the argument that asylum can be understood through 'pull factors' seems weak.
I've interviewed a lot of civil servants, in fact, about this,
and they know that there is no evidence, but they just say the politicians are very committed to it
because it makes common sense to the public.
People decide to take these risks because there are no formal or safe ways of trying
to get to a country.
You have people putting you in the back of the lorries sometimes in the fridges and the freezers.
And then people start coughing and then freezing, this is where you have to knock
and knock and knock and be at the mercy of the smugglers to come and get you out.
This isn’t only an issue for people seeking asylum. People who have to move because of
poverty or climate breakdown aren’t covered by the refugee convention. But they’re also
faced with borders, and countries hostile to them.
Solutions could include huge international resettlement of refugees and making routes
of travel safer and easier.
It’s often said that countries like the UK aren’t ‘doing enough’ when it comes to people
making dangerous crossings.
But the reality is, they’re doing a lot - it’s just that they're making movement
more difficult and so more dangerous.
Thank you for watching this video. There's a lot that we couldn't include in what is a complex subject.
But one of the things often obscured in the debate is that it is people who are making these journeys,
and their humanity is often lost or forgotten about when talking about asylum.
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