Estelle LuckOne of the key aims of VITA’s #ThisBillHarmsMyPatient campaign, which was launched in response to the Illegal Migration Bill, is to fact-check and debunk the myths surrounding the people who will be impacted by the bill should it be passed and become an Act.
Immigration is, as we know, one of the most contended topics in the media at the moment – and it has been for some time now. Unfortunately, the discourse surrounding the people who make the traumatic journey to the U.K. is often unkind and perpetuates a sense of othering – that it’s them and us. As The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford discovered, articles about immigrants are peppered with words such as ‘illegal’, ‘flood’ and ‘influx’, etc (1), creating the image for readers that there’s an unstoppable force of law breakers turning up on our shores.
The use of this language, coupled with the many statistics that are mentioned in the media and by politicians, works to dehumanise the people on these boats and leads to the mass belief of several harmful myths. In this post, I aim to address two of these myths, using real-life evidence to help bring clarity and truth.
Truth: The government’s own Modern Slavery system confirms that the vast majority of people referred ARE victims of modern slavery.
There is NO evidence of widespread systemic abuse.
As part of its justification for putting forward the Illegal Migration Bill, the government has suggested that at the moment, people who reach the UK on small boats are ‘abusing’ the modern slavery system. But the statistics show otherwise.
In a social media campaign launched in March, the anti-slavery charity Unseen (2) revealed that, according to government statistics, just six percent of people who arrived by boat in the UK in 2022 were identified as potential victims of modern slavery.
Delving deeper than that, the charity also noted that 85 percent of people within the six percent received a positive reasonable grounds decision. In other words, the Home Office are believing the majority of the people who submit these claims to be genuine victims of trafficking.
As Unseen summarised in its social media post, “We have seen NO evidence that the system is full of false claims of modern slavery.”
Truth: The majority of people on small boats are seeking asylum (legal sanctuary) and are fleeing situations of great harm. They are NOT risking their lives merely for improved job prospects.
The rhetoric used by the government encourages people to believe that the people on these small boats are coming from safe countries to the UK for better prospects. But analysis from the Refugee Council that was released in January 2023 states that of the people who arrived in the UK via small boats last year, 60 percent were, in fact, refugees (3). This means that their countries of origin are either war-torn or oppressive and that there is no safe alternative way for them to claim asylum in the UK.
These people aren’t hedging their bets for a better life and a chance to benefit from our welfare system – they’re desperate, willing to risk their lives on the treacherous channel crossing for the opportunity to live peacefully and away from the horrors they’re facing in their home countries.
These myths and generalisations create a narrative about people arriving on small boats that is both harmful and unfair. This narrative is driving our government’s policy decisions. Therefore, at VITA, we want to shine a light on and challenge these myths. We also want to encourage compassion and empathy for anyone arriving on small boats, and any other route that the government deems ‘irregular’ within the Illegal Migration Bill.
Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing anonymised cases of patients who’ve made or have been forced to take this journey. These will be realistic healthcare encounters that you can read via our newsletter, blog and social media. We want to share the real dilemmas that healthcare professionals will face if the Illegal Migration Bill passes – for example, wanting to provide safe care to all without discrimination while being aware of the very real repercussions from identifying and escalating concerns and risk of detention and deportation. Our intention is to humanise the people who will be impacted by the plans set out in the Illegal Migration Bill and share what these healthcare encounters and dilemmas would look like.
Do keep an eye on our social media channels for both these cases and useful resources to help you know what you can be doing on the frontline to help.
Compassion through stories – fiction, non-fiction and poetry
In a blog I wrote last year about the theme of trauma in Christy Lefteri’s ‘The Beekeeper of Aleppo’, I mentioned how useful stories – both fiction and non-fiction – can be as a way of better understanding the ordeal that people such as those arriving on small boats have to face. I therefore want to end by sharing a few books and poetry anthologies about the migrant journey to Europe and the refugee experience in general:
- Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience (Seven Stories Press)
- The Arrival by Shaun Tan
- Outside the Asylum: A Memoir of War, Disaster and Humanitarian Psychiatry
- The Lightless Sky; my journey to safety as a child refugee, Gulwali Passarlay (Atlantic Books)
- The Optician of Lampedusa; Emma Jane Kirby (Penguin)
- Refugee Tales by Ali Smith et al
- Shatila Stories by by Omar Khaled Ahmad,, Nibal Alalo, Safa Khaled Algharbawi
References:
The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford (2013), available from: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/reports/migration-in-the-news/
Unseen: https://www.unseenuk.org/ (social media campaign: https://www.instagram.com/p/CqTcKB4MH2W/?hl=en)
Refugee Council (2023), available from: https://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/latest/news/majority-of-people-on-small-boats-crossing-channel-last-year-are-refugees-new-analysis-shows/