In the last two episodes, I talked about borders and security. We talked about our desire to feel secure within a known community, and our instinctual response to flock towards those similar to us in times of uncertainty.  But interestingly, in neither episode did I ever ask the question, “what are we securing ourselves from?” And that’s what I want to talk about today.

Why do we build towering walls and overbearing fences at our borders? What is the proverbial boogeyman that we are trying so damn hard to keep out? And where is it?

These are two excerpts from Ruben Andersson’s book Illegality Incorporated. Much has been written about this ‘threat’ lurking outside the gates: news stories, documentaries, policy papers, academic tracts, and funding reports in which irregular migrants are followed, scrutinized and probed. From Spanish beaches to American deserts, the “illegals” are massing at the borders of the West. We know it – we see it on our newscasts and front pages. We hear it in our politicians’ stump speeches or in embittered voices from the southern frontier. The wetbacks, ilegales, or clandestins squat in rundown border dens, lurk in forest “jungles” or on dark hillsides, wade across rivers, or clamber over fences erected to keep them out. They mock the state’s sovereign powers and ridicule its border patrols. They carry diseases, strange customs, and a backpack full of poverty. They leech goodwill and resources out of the nation (Andersson 2014, 3-5).

Now, Andersson is being satirical, but I think he really hits on something in these small excerpts. What we are terrified of, as Anderson calls them, are the illegals. You might know them by a different name, ‘boat people,’ ‘traffickers,’ or ‘squatters.’ These are the people who move illegally across borders and states to enter our countries. They are criminals, lawbreakers and above all, dangerous. And they are the people I think we are most afraid of when it comes to the idea of migration.

As Andersson mentions, “The media, populist politicians, and zealous bureaucrats have seized upon the illegal immigrant as a bogeyman, a perennial outsider who in waves and floods invades Western countries (Andersson” 2014, 2). So are our fears valid?

Let’s back up for a moment and, like always, look at the concepts we are dealing with here. Illegal migration is the unlawful entry of a person across a country’s border. Illegal migrants take  several forms, three of which are the most common:

Fraudulent entrants, those who enter a state using fake documents. Visa duration violators, those who are already in a state and overstay their visa, and unauthorized entrants, those who enter another state clandestinely (Papademetriou 2017).

When we talk about illegal immigrants today, I think we think mostly think of the later. The people who are trying to get into our homes, not the people who are already here. But maybe that’s just me.

Entering a state clandestinely usually involves illegal border crossings. In all instances, the entrant wants to avoid detection and hence, inspection.

This is all well and good, but why would someone choose to enter a state illegally? Surely if there is a legal way to enter a country, you would opt to do it that way? It sounds much easier, and safer. Today, we’ll be using Calais, France as our case study, to unpack these questions.

The Calais Jungle as it was called was a migrant encampment in the vicinity of Calais in northern France. The encampment was occupied from the beginning of 2015 to the end of 2016 when it was torn down by French Police. Some 6,400 migrants were evacuated, with the intent of resettling them in different regions of France (Baumard 2016).

These people were here because they wanted to enter the UK, usually via the Port of Calais or the Eurotunnel, and they would do this by stowing away on lorries, ferries, or cars (The Economist, 2015).

Nine months after French authorities closed the Calais camp, around 500 asylum seekers  are still living on the streets and other hidden areas in and around the northern French City (Human Rights Watch, 2017). When the weather is clear, they say it is possible to see the British coast just 30 kilometers away, giving the illusion of proximity to the UK.

Now, I as I do a lot in this podcast, I want to take a second to look at the use of language here. This encampment in Calais was not called an encampment. It wasn’t called a settlement. It wasn’t called a camp. It was called a jungle. And with that implies some sort of wildness in those who live here.

As Joseph Harker wrote, “Chances are, your image of a jungle dweller ranges from the savages and headshrinkers of the old Tarzan-era movies too – If you’re more 21st century – the isolated peoples of the rainforest.” “It evokes images of primitive, uncontrolled brutes, of barbarians at the gates, as they try to gain entry to the UK. Who could possibly want these kinds of people tarnishing our green and pleasant land?” (Harker 2016).

But before these people even set up camp on the border, they first need to get to Calais. And with that comes a potentially dangerous journey. In 2014 The Guardian found that the migrant community consisted mostly of individuals from Eritrea, Somalia, and Syria (Guardian 2014). Many of them paid smugglers to get them to Calais via boat, risking their lives at sea. In 2016, the UN estimated that at least 5,000 people died or disappeared at sea while trying to reach European soil (UNHCR, 2016). These are the invisible deaths at Europe’s borders.

While I was in Europe, I had the chance to visit part of what was left of the Calais encampment with the organization Care4Calais. Care4Calais was started by a dynamic woman named Clare Moseley, and we’ll hear a bit from her later.

Care4Calais is comprised of volunteers from the UK and Northern France, and they support refugees by providing fresh meals, warm clothing, heating and chances for social interaction. They run out of a warehouse, where they collect together donated clothes, food, bedding and camping equipment. They’re not politicians, they say, they are people who simply believe that every human has the right to be treated in a fair and dignified way.

For refugees, life in Calais is rough. Since the closure of the Calais migrant camps, these refugees have no shelter at night or regular food supply. They don’t have access to even basic sanitation, and may not be able to change their clothes for weeks at a time.

Since the main camp was torn down in 2016, the refugees have been forced to live in small dispersed groups. We park the Care4Calais truck in a seemingly random location, and over the span of half an hour, a small congregation of men arrive and gratefully accept the care packages. Many stick around, playing games with the sporting equipment the volunteers hand out, while others simply sit since there is really nowhere else to go.

Like many before them, these people are trying desperately to get to the UK. One man explained to me that he had tried seven times to enter the UK, and each time he had been pushed back to Calais. Before he was forced to flee, he was a PE teacher at a school in Syria.

This all begs the question, why is claiming asylum in the UK so hard?  Here, Clare unpacks the problem:

“If you want to claim asylum in the UK you have to be in the UK to apply for asylum. But there is no legal way to get there. So what you’re expected to do is to get on a plane or a boat illegally”

So to claim asylum in the UK, you have to be physically present in the country. But for the refugees wanting to claim asylum, there is no legal way actually to get to the UK do so. As a result, refugees gather at points close to the UK and risk smugglers and illegal means to gain entry to the country.

The next question I had was why those in Calais wanted to apply for asylum in the UK, rather than stay in France and apply for it there. Clare again had an answer to this:

“The most common reason is that because they have family in the UK. So, if your fleeing from violence or persecution, and you’ve got family in the UK, it kind of makes sense that you would want to get to them.

Imagine being in Afghanistan, or Sudan. Everything is foreign to you. The culture is foreign to you, the food is foreign to you, the language is foreign, the people are foreign. Everything feels wrong, everything feels different. So if you’ve got a family member in the UK, it makes sense that you would want to get back to that bit of familiarity, that bit of safety

The other reason is that there is something about the UK that they have a tie too. So, for example, people from the colonies probably have a strong tie to the UK because we went there and taught them that strong tie. We went there and told them a lot about the UK. And now after telling them about the UK, we don’t want them.”

Another reason, not mentioned by Clare, is that many of those at the camp speak English, but not French. So really, the UK is the most logical place for many of these people to begin building a life.

Finally, for many of them, the mere idea of applying for asylum in the UK is more appealing than the reality of applying for it in France. French asylum law prevents applicants from seeking employment for months and in some cases years. What’s more, it is said by many that the condition of accommodation for asylum seekers in France is worse than it was living in the ‘Jungle.’

During my time with Care4Calais, one thing really stuck with me. While Care4Calais does take out food, offer blankets and provide clothes to refugees, probably the most important thing they do is provide a place for refugees to charge their phones. Clare, along with her team, constructed a portable mass charging board essentially out of some plugs, a generator, and a piece of wood. This board allows for what I could only guess was 50 electronic devices. When we set up the truck for the afternoon, the first thing that the refugees did was take out their phone chargers from their pockets and set up their phones on the charger.

It’s something so simple, but it challenged my idea of what a refugee was. These people, many are not from underdeveloped places. They’re from developed ones, with technology and infrastructure. What they need is a place to charge their phone, so that they can reconnect with the world, and maybe contact loved ones, or even family relations in the UK.

But Clare explains that even what Care4Calis does is not enough:

“What we do here is we take out the plates and the food and the blankets, but at the end of the day that’s not what they need. What they need is a safe haven, and the only way that can happen is by reaching change.”

Which brings me back to my original question. What are we so afraid of?

The term illegal immigrant is stigmatizing, and even incorrect, implying as it does that migrants are criminals when they have usually only committed an administrative infraction. It’s strange to me that we’re now encouraged by politicians and the media to label people as illegal, rather than their actions. And I think this suggests something quite insidious. When we fight against illegal immigration, we are fighting a war against people, not actions.

The twenty-first century has witnessed the systematic closure of ‘legal’ routes of access for the poor, the vulnerable, and victims of persecution (Maley 2017, 80). As James C. Hathaway has explained, “most refugees today cannot travel to the developed world to seek recognition of their international legal right to protection” (Maley 2017, 80-81). And Matthew Gibney explains this a bit further, “we have reached a contemporary paradoxical attitude towards refugees. Western states now acknowledge the rights the rights of refugees but simultaneously criminalize the search for asylum” (Maley 2017, 81).

And so what we are seeing is the selective exclusion from authorized or approved routes of migration for those of whom states would prefer not to have to accommodate (Maley 2017, 80). So really, the fight against illegal movement has very little to do with saving people’s lives. Afterall it is not the minority of refugees who die on the journey that pose a challenge for policymakers; its the majority who don’t (Maley 2017, 100).

Bibliography

Andersson, Ruben. Illegality, Inc: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014.

Baumard, Maryline. “Jungle De Calais : Le Démantèlement Débutera Lundi à L’aube.” Le Monde.fr. October 22, 2016. Accessed July 18, 2018. https://www.lemonde.fr/police-justice/article/2016/10/21/jungle-de-calais-le-gouvernement-detaille-l-operation-de-demantelement-qui-debutera-lundi_5018279_1653578.html.

“Calais Mayor Threatens to Block Port If UK Fails to Help Deal with Migrants.” The Guardian. September 03, 2014. Accessed July 18, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/sep/03/calais-mayor-threatens-block-port-uk-fails-help-migrants.

Harker, Joseph. “Stop Calling the Calais Refugee Camp the ‘Jungle’ | Joseph Harker.” The Guardian. March 07, 2016. Accessed July 18, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/stop-calling-calais-refugee-camp-jungle-migrants-dehumanising-scare-stories.

“Learning from the Jungle.” The Economist. August 06, 2015. Accessed July 18, 2018. https://www.economist.com/europe/2015/08/06/learning-from-the-jungle.

“Like Living Hell,”Human Rights Watch 26 July 2017

“Mediterranean Sea: 100 People Reported Dead Yesterday, Bringing Year Total to 5,000.” UNHCR. November 23, 2016. Accessed July 18, 2018. http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/briefing/2016/12/585ce804105/mediterranean-sea-100-people-reported-dead-yesterday-bringing-year-total.html.

Papademetriou, Demetrios G. “The Global Struggle with Illegal Migration: No End in Sight.” The Global Struggle with Illegal Migration: No End in Sight. March 02, 2017. Accessed July 18, 2018. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/global-struggle-illegal-migration-no-end-sight.