135. UNLOCKING CAGES - Language, Asylum, Immigration and Abolition
Philosophy is, for better and for worse, frequently about analysing language. While I do not subscribe to the view that linguistic analysis is all there is to philosophy, I do believe that, as language is the tool we use to express what we mean, then it is often the location best placed to identify flaws in our thinking or the sources of clash and confusion. When two people say they want what is ‘best’ for us, for example, but advocate completely different things, there is probably a dispute within their definition of ‘best’ that, if unpacked, will better place us to not only understand the cause of those differences, but also evaluate which approach - if any - is actually more effective at improving our conditions. The words we use are tools, and our choice of tools tell us certain things, as does the way we choose to use those tools we choose. Are we using them in the ‘right’ way? Are we using them as intended, or going ‘off-label’? And are we truly saying what we want to say?
It is my hope, in the case of recent controversies around immigration and asylum, that many people are not truly saying what they want to say. That they are using language that demonises people from another country to our own because they are misguided or mistaken. People who are merely choosing to come here and try to live, either for asylum, or just because they think living in this country will provide them with better opportunities and quality of life than staying in their country of origin, are not people who should be knowingly demonised. That so many actively do use language to demonise them suggests that they really do believe that such actions are wrong. That people shouldn’t move from one country to another. That we should be stuck in the circumstances in which we find ourselves and if we want change, we should fight for that change where we are, not flee to somewhere better. And I think people cannot seriously believe that as the position does not stand up to scrutiny.
By itself, the hunch that one ought to stay in difficult circumstances rather than find somewhere better seems to be a principle we do not carry through in other aspects of our lives within our borders, for example. Especially once we identify the difficulty of the circumstances as being something deeply entrenched in the original location, intractable, and unlikely to change. Just as I might quit one job to seek better employment elsewhere if the values or practices of the original job no longer align with my own, or break up a relationship that is no longer working for me and seek happiness elsewhere, or move from one city to another if my current home lacks opportunity or resources, why shouldn’t I also seek out somewhere different across borders if relevant aspects of my life in my current geographic location are similarly unsatisfactory?
No one actually makes the case above, however. It would be a straw man to presume that they do. Those opposed to such immigration or asylum seeking would usually bring in further supporting arguments. But it is my contention that none of the additional reasons given for why immigration and asylum is a ‘special case’ of movement, different from those similar domestic movements, really succeed in making the alleged wrongness of the action clear. They ultimately all end in the issue of ‘legality’. Transnational movement is currently ‘illegal’ in certain contexts. But this, I hope to show, is circular, being as the legal or illegal status of immigrants or asylum seekers is always changeable, fluid, and itself based on the presumed legitimacy of the prior arguments to wrongness on which the laws criminalising such actions are based. If the laws themselves are based on errors then the laws should be replaced, for the laws, too, can be misguided.
again - we can, after all, move freely within our own borders - from job to job, relationship to relationship, town to town, etc. It is only once the transgression of borders occurs that we start criminalising the position. And not all transgressions are deemed illegal. Legal immigration and legal asylum happen all the time. The distinction between moving across borders wrongly or rightly therefore becomes one of classification. Just as the distinction between seeking asylum in another country and simply trying to migrate to a country is important in determining such legal classification within the current system. They are not the same thing, with asylum seeking holding a different moral obligation on humane countries to grant asylum for those threatened in their own countries far more readily than it grants entry to those simply choosing to live somewhere different or seek new opportunities elsewhere. Already, therefore, we see an unravelling of the idea that cross-border movement is, itself, intrinsically ‘wrong’: clearly it isn’t. It happens legally in a variety of different ways all the time. Especially when we look at businesses, where we actively court transnational businesses to bring their opportunities from one country to another in an increasingly globalised world. So what are the additional arguments that supposedly make the movement across borders of certain human beings so terrible?
The main one usually given is resources. The simplistic idea, trading on an equally simplistic version of the truth, that countries simply ‘don’t have the room’ for new people. On face value this could be right. There is, after all, a finite amount of physical space - houses, etc. - and only so much to go around. Taking the UK as an example, we already have hundreds of thousands of people currently living without houses and many other crowded out of an exorbitant housing market because of a lack of cheap, affordable housing. You could also point to things like the NHS so frequently being reported as being ‘beyond capacity’, with mammoth waiting lists and people unable to get a doctor’s appointment. Then we have people going hungry, needing food banks to eat, and the unemployed unable to find work. On the surface one could look at all that and say ‘we can barely manage to look after all the people here already - we can’t possibly add any more to the mix’. But the entire basis of this pseudo-argument ignores that the lack of resources is a result of economic choices and that a different approach to investment or transformation of laws could change all that overnight. Invest more in healthcare and social housing, make food more affordable and create jobs - or even more radically transform the economy entirely and provide all we need through a universal basic income. Many alternatives are possible. Most importantly, the ‘we are already too crowded’ argument either a) admits a defeat which makes additional numbers irrelevant because we have already gone beyond capacity so why not allow others in to be as miserable as the rest of us too? Or, b) is completely insincere unless accompanied by a similarly principled domestic ban on growing the population. Because as long as you tell me that I, as a citizen, can continue to have as many children as I want and add more and more numbers to the supposedly full-to-capacity internal population without restriction, then I can’t take you seriously about the claim we can’t fit in anymore people.
In the UK currently, about 20% of the adult population are childless, and there is no legal restriction on every one of those adults choosing to have children tomorrow - maybe even more than one. Meanwhile all those currently with children can have two, three, four, five… there are no limits on growth of population there. Which means the argument from resources, by itself, is insufficient to justify making new members of the population ‘illegal’ simply because they come from somewhere else unless we concede a level of xenophobia, racism, or simply bias and favouritism towards people already here which is unjustifiable.
It is important also to talk about the borders themselves, which are invented and changeable too, and how such favouritism towards ‘our own’ people is problematic, even if it might seem vaguely understandable due to our human tendency to prioritise the familiar over the unfamiliar. Over time borders, we know, have changed. Whether we’re talking the original super-continent from which our current continents emerged or the land-masses across those continents divided up conquest after conquest and put onto maps, until maps change yet again, borders are fictions imposed on reality. They may be useful fictions at times, they may not be useful at all, but they are definitely not a ‘real’ thing beyond our collective agreement that they are, which is why different treaties and agreements can make them porous and fluid whenever we choose. Some borders are impassable by many, while those with special privileges agreed to in law are able to pass through with ease. When we are simply inventing the lines on a map you may not cross, we can just as easily decide certain people can cross those imaginary lines if we want to. So if I walk a couple of metres from America to Mexico, or England to Wales, or France to Italy, the legality of my steps is nothing essential in the world, it is a choice, and the choice could easily change. A choice, bringing back the topic of having children, made all the more ridiculous when we consider how unexpectedly giving birth to a baby on one side of that imaginary line or another might grant different life opportunities and different nationalities to your offspring. Or, as in my own case, where I can hold citizenships to three different countries despite never living in two of them. And depending on the period of history in which I was born my legal status in one country or another would be different even if I was born, geographically, in the exact same place. Borders are a fiction, and when we pretend they are something sacrosanct and that crossing them is a ‘crime’ in need of a ‘punishment’ we are taking the fiction into absurdity. Not to mention ignoring that most of the borders are the result of conquest and invasion in the first place - you cannot cross our borders now only because, previously, we crossed them with impunity and took over.
A different supporting argument against immigration or asylum entangles the desire for a better life with notions of fidelity and patriotism, and can be made analogous with the arguments some people - often the deeply religious - use against similarly moving on from one relationship to another. While many of us see no problem in rejecting a relationship that no longer works for us, those who advocate that people stay in bad marriages or other abusive or unpleasant relationships because they believe morality demands such a commitment once certain vows are made, might see leaving one country for another as some sort of a betrayal. A broken commitment to a common cause. But hopefully the foolishness of such a position is as clear when it comes to patriotism as it is when it comes to familial fidelity upon analysis - some circumstances are irreconcilable and become too mentally and physically damaging to maintain. The argument from fidelity and patriotism fails as soon as we ask someone choosing to leave one country for another their reasons for doing so: a failing of their country of origin to provide whatever has made them seek it elsewhere, or seeming inability for them to change the behaviours of their country of origin, mean the other partner in the relationship has already broken their end of any commitment that might plausibly exist (a social contract in this case) and therefore no fidelity should be owed beyond initial attempts to see if the relationship can be saved. Once those attempts have been considered futile (which the desire to leave already suggests that they have) then loyalty to a broken-down relationship becomes a moot issue: we are already operating in a position beyond loyalty.
While people are free to choose self-sacrifice and martyrdom if they wish in order to stay in a personally damaging scenario for some greater principle, no one can be coerced to stay in a relationship that will harm them. Sometimes leaving is the only option if we value individual autonomy. And it is essential if we recognise the harm it might be causing and care that people can escape harm.
Again - seeking asylum somewhere and choosing to migrate there are not the same thing, and are treated different legally - but the entanglement throughout my essay here is intentional because the entanglement is a legal reality that makes the entire enterprise of legislating against human movement in this way morally problematic. This is because: so long as we put legal barriers up against certain kinds of immigration, we will always have legal suspicions in place against those seeking legitimate asylum; we will assume some asylum seekers do not qualify for that legal migration and are, in fact, illegal immigrants. And, most importantly, so long as we focus only on legality, and our only response to illegality is prisons, punishment, and deportation, then we will be systematically predisposed to criminalising asylum seekers and treating them in harmful ways because we will always be receiving asylum seekers on the suspicion that they are criminals in need of punishment.
As you are no doubt unsurprised to learn, my impetus for writing about this topic this week are the recent events in the UK surrounding asylum and immigration. In the last week alone we have seen a far-right suicide bomber attack an immigration centre in Dover, had depravities and inhumane conditions exposed at Manston asylum processing centre in Kent, seen other detainees from Manston dumped into central London at night without accommodation or money, and heard our Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, continue to use incendiary language (hate speech which could have directly influenced attacks like the one we saw in Dover), by referring to an ‘invasion’ of asylum seekers coming to the UK. When one takes a step back and realises that amidst all the language of ‘asylum seekers’, ‘detainees’, and ‘illegal immigrants’ what we are really talking about is human beings, it is hard not to hang your head in shame at the way our country routinely treats certain human beings. When our response to human beings seeking to enter our country is to cage them - even if we call what we are doing ‘processing’ to avoid the comparison to concentration camps based on ethnicity - we have already lost sight of what is important. The need to ‘process’ immigrants of any kind is never really about processing, after all, it is about terrorising and punishing the people we don’t want to ‘let in’. ‘Processing’, if necessary, might mean getting a few forms signed so that everyone has what they need to get on with living here. We are not ‘processing’ immigrants, we are criminalising them - seeking out those who ‘shouldn’t be here’ and therefore are criminals. And as criminals, because of our flawed criminal justice system being based on notions of retributive suffering, we believe they can and must be punished. Treated poorly. Treated as less than human. The same disgusting way we treat the current inhabitants of our domestic carceral population. By assuming criminality and continuing to create a ‘hostile environment’ for both those seeking asylum from us, or those just seeking a better life as an immigrant, within a criminal justice system which is built on intentionally inhumane punishment and penal degradation, we are ensuring that every human being entering ‘illegally’ into the country, whether a legitimate asylum seeker who will ultimately allowed to stay, or an immigrant we will ultimately deport, is treated poorly. Caged inhumanely. Punished instead of welcomed.
And we should be ashamed.
We could, and should, open our arms and our borders entirely because borders are not real. Every country should do this. There is no defensible reason for keeping them closed. As most people don’t choose to migrate elsewhere, doing so will still mean most people will want to stay where they are, where they know and feel comfortable, while those who don’t will be either exposing significant problems in their countries of origin which we, as a whole world, could seek to tackle through better global distribution of resources, or they will simply be freely moving to somewhere else they would rather be. There is plenty of space and plenty to go around so long as we rethink our current problematic approach to distribution which, it is worth reminding us, already fails to provide to all who need it within our borders anyway. We have always benefited from immigration, in all kinds of ways, and most of us have some sort of historical immigration making up part of our origin story for how we came to be born where we were. To be scared of immigration is to be scared of human beings we do not know. That is all. The more we allow it, the more we will start to know instead of fear each other.
I said at the start of this (admittedly long and rambling) piece that philosophy is frequently about analysing language. What I think the current scandal around UK asylum and immigration shows is that when we use those words - ‘asylum seeker’ or ‘immigrant’ - we are attempting to erase the word ‘human being’ from our thoughts and equating both ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘immigrant’ with the word ‘criminal’, which shows us also that the word ‘criminal’ in its current use equally attempts to erase the ‘human being’ from our thinking and that our approach to dealing with criminals - prison, detention, punishment, sanction - intentionally dehumanises and abuses in ways that are incompatible with our expectations of how a ‘human being’ ought to be treated. When we say any ‘human being’ is ‘illegal’ in a world where ‘criminal’ means ‘dehumanised’ then we are doomed to treat anyone labelled in this way - either accidentally or intentionally - in ways we do not think a ‘human being’ should be treated.
The problem is not limited to asylum seeker or immigration ‘processing centres’ (another word which actually means ‘prison’) but to all of our prisons and prisoners with their equally circular logics of treating those warehoused inside them as less-than-human because they have been given the name ‘prisoner’ or ‘criminal’ instead of ‘human being’. Instead of ‘person’. Because ‘human’ too, is just a classification designed to allow different cruelties to those deemed ‘non-human’, whether they are ‘criminal’, ‘animal’, ‘savage’, etc. We use language to mask our atrocities and legitimate all the terrible things we do. What we do to ‘detainees’ at ‘prisons’ or ‘immigration processing centres’ we would never allow to happen to ‘citizens’. Just as what happens ‘over there’ in the places asylum seekers are fleeing from is something we can allow to happen far more easily than the injustices which take place on our own doorstep, even if it turns out our own money or even governments might be involved in some of those overseas or over-borders injustices. We can always find the resources to cater for ‘our’ children and for ‘us’ over ‘here’, but not for ‘their’ children or ‘they’ who came here from ‘over there’. We call them ‘borders’ when we want to keep people out, but ‘visas’ or ‘treaties’ when we want to get in. We are using language daily to lie to ourselves about the continuing gross mistreatment of persons - both those entering our countries and those already stuck in them since birth - because if we spoke the truth with our language - that too often ‘human beings’ are suffering for entirely preventable reasons due to a failed system of resource distribution, power, and government - then we would actually have to stand up and do something about it. Endorse radical changes. A global revolution, perhaps? It is easier then - and so much morally worse - to continue to put people and places into boxes, or cages, which allow us to turn a blind eye to their suffering and our continuing injustices. To make false delineations between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and shrug our shoulders at how terrible it is what ‘they’ are doing right now from the comfort of our illusions of safety and citizenship.
People like Suella Braverman might actively stoke the fires of hatred and division with their public platforms of hate speech, but we are all complicit in the everyday hate speech of using language which erases the humanity of certain groups and allows us to keep them in cages. Until all such prisons are abolished and the routine dehumanising of our fellow human beings is overcome, the people we should most be fearing within our borders are the people already here and allowing such systems to persist: us.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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