The refugee crisis rages in Europe
by Peter Selby

Our small diocese in middle England seems set to be the focus of a developing crisis as the government becomes increasingly anxious to placate public anxiety about the refugee issue. On a site last used for the incineration of cattle that fell victim to the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, the proposal is to put up what is called an "accommodation center" for asylum seekers (persons having their applications for asylum processed).

We protested at the proposal, on the grounds that the location chosen was inappropriate. The idea of putting an accommodation center for 750 people in a community of only 180, remote from the facilities of the city that might have the facilities they need, and inaccessible both to members of the asylum seekers’ own communities and to members of local communities who want to offer help and support of various kinds, as well as the statutory agencies that need to be involved in the provision of benefits and other services.

We, and the other agencies objecting to the proposal were promptly attacked by Tony Blair as engaging in nimbyism — in his words "wanting asylum seekers anywhere but where we are." Given that our diocesan synod resolution had said that we wanted to offer hospitality and welcome, that was a quite unwarranted accusation. What we want is for the asylum seekers to be dispersed in small enough groups to urban communities able to offer hospitality and volunteer services.

Behind this local matter lies a crisis that is engulfing the whole of Europe and is now said to be the major matter that Europe needs to address. That rests on the assumption that refugees are primarily a security problem rather than a challenge to our compassion. In terms of what the government says to the public, you would imagine that the real difficulty we face is the number of illegal immigrants and "traders in human misery" who batten on to the refugee crisis to make money out of people. Nobody denies that such people exist: Some engage in criminal deception; many more offer services in a perfectly honest way but expect to make a profit from the difficulty they are trying to help people overcome.

It is very easy in all of this for the government to say that unlike the (genuine) refugees who came to Britain in the 1930s from Nazi persecution, we are now faced with a problem of criminality which demands stern measures, locking people up in what are prisons in all but name. The reality is that in the 1930s also there was great suspicion of the Jewish and other refugees fleeing from Germany, and my father, who was one of them, was for a time interned as a possible spy or enemy agent.

Shortly before the last general election, the Caribbean suffragan bishop of Croydon caused the bishops of the Church of England to visit the leaders of our three main political parties and ask that they pledge themselves to keep race out of the election campaign. In the course of the meeting with Tony Blair, which I attended, he was asked why it was that so little national resource was spent in educating the public about the reasons behind the refugee crisis. The absence of that kind of education simply causes people to believe that the problem is false claims to refugee status and the criminal trade in human misery. In the process of encouraging that view of the "problem" you criminalize the entire refugee problem.

In a further twist to this story, the government is preventing the children of asylum seekers taking part in the mainstream school system, preferring to provide (no doubt not very adequate) education in these accommodation centers. What that does is to prevent the new experience, the enjoyment of diversity that is made possible by the presence of asylum seekers’ children in ordinary school classes. Thus the education of all our children suffers as a result of claiming that asylum seekers are the problem

We shall continue as a diocese and as a church to do all we can to offer the hospitality which is the greatest need of people who have often been traumatized in their home country and in their long flight from home. The nimbyism that is happening here is not ours; rather it is the attitude of those who pander to public xenophobia and believe the solution to the world’ s great crisis of migration is to keep people in need away. In fact of course the problems that really need addressing are those of international debt and the inequalities of trade which in turn produce the conflicts that drive people to flee their homes. Addressing those problems, however, is less immediately popular.