The case for opening the doors to the Calais migrants

I was handed an aerial photograph of Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan the other day, which is home to 100,000 Syrians; it’s a sprawling testimony to the human misery created by the brutal civil war waged by the Assad regime. In terms of size and tragedy it is comparable to the Jalozai refugee camp, home to around 80,000 Afghans when I walked through its tented city on the outskirts of Peshawar in Pakistan way back in 2001.

Since then I’ve visited most of the refugee camps which host nearly five million Palestinians in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Gaza and the West Bank. Some of them have been displaced several times because of wars in the Middle East. All of those camps are still small by comparison to the one hemmed in with barbed wire at Dadaab in Kenya, which has the dubious distinction of being home to the largest concentration of the world’s refugees, with 300,000 people living there, mainly Somalis and some Ethiopians.

Globally the 2015 refugee statistics are staggering and tell a story of a world divided between those who have homes, security and a life to live, and those who do not. Millions have been displaced through war, famine, natural disasters, genocide and persecution; for many, this is a legacy of Western capitalism which for centuries grew fat by looting and exploiting the natural resources of countries which have now become destabilised and economic wastelands.

The refusal by Western governments to even acknowledge the Palestinian call for the legitimate Right to Return, while looking the other way as Palestinian lands continue to be stolen and occupied by Israel, is also a running sore which will not heal until serious attempts to find a just solution are made.

However, if you listened to British Prime Minister David Cameron a few days ago you’d think the Palestinians and the rest of the world’s refugees had all decided to move out of their camps and move to Britain. Never have I felt so ashamed to be British; I posted an apology on Facebook immediately for the language he used. It was probably Cameron’s most xenophobic speech to-date and I was not alone in my views. The Bishop of Dover also criticised the Tory prime minister, as did the UN, several human rights groups and a number of other politicians, for describing migrants seeking to come to the UK as a “swarm”.

Bishop Trevor Willmott called on Cameron to “soften” his rhetoric, telling the Guardian newspaper: “To put them [migrants and refugees] all together in that very unhelpful phrase just categorises people and I think he could soften that language – and that doesn’t mean not dealing with the issue. It means dealing with the issue in a non-hostile way.”

What this serves to highlight is the inhumane asylum and refugee systems in operation in Europe, especially in Britain, which has provided refuge for just a few hundred of the four million Syrian refugees, for example. Developing countries like Pakistan, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Lebanon, which host hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of the world’s 60 million refugees, must listen to the likes of Cameron and wonder at the selfishness of the West.

The reality is that there are barely 4,000 living in a camp called The Jungle just outside Calais who want to come to Britain. When you consider that they have crossed continents to escape death and persecution, and risked their lives – many of their comrades died along the way – to cross choppy, unforgiving seas in rust-bucket boats, it is nothing short of a miracle that they’ve got so far.

These people don’t want to live off welfare and benefits and sponge off the state as the British government would have us believe. They want to work, they want to build new lives and with the determination, ingenuity and guts that they’ve already shown perhaps now is the time to show compassion and let them in to Britain.

Mercifully, not all governments are as heartless as the one in London. Scotland’s government, led by the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, has called for EU member states to do more to tackle the global migrant crisis and help those in desperate need of international protection. Scotland’s Europe Minister Humza Yousaf went to Brussels a few weeks back and reminded member states that they have a moral obligation to help relocate those tens of thousands of migrants who have risked everything to cross the Mediterranean. He said Scotland was ready to play its part and again urged David Cameron to reconsider his decision not to opt into the EU relocation scheme. The prime minister’s response is to send more dogs, build more fences and tighten security, a populist approach appealing to the lowest common denominator if ever there was one.

Now if you are one of those “not-in-my-backyard” people, please consider these statistics. Last year saw the highest global number of refugees on record, topping nearly 60 million people. Every single one of them is a fellow human being fleeing conflicts, war zones and persecution; more than 50 per cent are from Syria (3.9m), Afghanistan (2.59m) and Somalia (1.1m), all countries in which Britain is currently involved in military action, by proxy or otherwise.

In the past 10 years, those immigrants who have managed to make Britain home are estimated to have contributed £20 billion to the British economy, according to a study by University College London. A report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission says that people settling in Britain from overseas are much less likely to claim benefits or live in social housing than those already resident here.

One of Cameron’s boasts, when he’s not scare-mongering over refugees, is that Britain’s economy has started to grow again, which will mean more jobs, which in turn means that the UK will soon need to bolster its workforce. The answer to this labour shortage-in-waiting is to be found across the channel. Who will he blame when industry can’t find the skilled labour it needs? I wonder.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.