Refugee rights, and the ones who walk away from Omelas

Today on Facebook, the Student Action for Refugees community page informed me of the ongoing case of Rabar Hamad, a young asylum-seeker from Iraq who fled to the UK after his parents were murdered in a bomb attack. Hamad, who claims to be a teenager, is facing deportation to his home country after Wigan Council social workers decided (on what basis, we are not informed) that he had been untruthful about his age. In August, he fled custody to avoid deportation, eliciting a predictable foaming-at-the-mouth rant from the Daily Mail.

We can't, of course, know with any certainty if the young man in question is, in truth, sixteen or twenty. But, either way, I see no rational justification for returning him by force to war-torn Iraq. And - in light of the tragic and as-yet-uninvestigated death of Jimy Mubenga, an Angolan refugee who died in the custody of private security contractors while being forcibly deported from the UK - I would venture to suggest that we should all take a look at what our own government is doing, in our names, to the vulnerable and powerless. 

The way that asylum-seekers are treated in this country is nothing short of appalling. Large numbers of asylum-seekers are detained in asylum "detention centres" like Oxford's Campsfield House, in worse conditions than prisoners, for years at a time while their claims are being processed. Children are detained, too, at the notorious Yarl's Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire, scene of a hunger strike earlier this year in which some 70 women, many victims of torture and rape in their home countries, protested against "unfair and degrading" treatment and against their forcible separation from their children.

... the women's testimonies are strikingly similar and they stand by their accounts. Most were locked in an airless corridor for up to eight hours, without access to food, water, toilet facilities or medical care. Four others – accused of being "ringleaders" – were locked up in separate rooms. Many women collapsed, two were left vomiting and two were injured after guards with riot shields tried to stop them from escaping out of the window into a yard, they claim. Some were racially abused, they say.

The coalition government has promised to cease the detention of children, but the rest of Yarl's Wood will remain open for business - and it is a business, being run for profit (like most of Britain's detention facilities) by a private security contractor named Serco. The whole arrangement seems eerily reminiscent of the Victorian workhouse, herding the voiceless and marginalized into institutions out of public sight, in the custody of warders motivated by financial gain.

And, of course, for those asylum-seekers who are unable to satisfy the authorities that their claims are meritorious, their fate will be deportation back to a war-torn country - if they don't die en route in the custody of security contractors, as Jimy Mubenga did. Considering that refugees typically speak little English and are unlikely to be especially familiar with our legal system, the immigration tribunal process is somewhat daunting - and the forthcoming cuts to legal aid aren't really going to help with that.

Why do we do this, exactly? It doesn't serve any rational social objective. Asylum-seekers are a tiny fraction of the total number of migrants to this country. They are, by and large, vulnerable and powerless people with nowhere else to go. Despite what the Daily Mail would have you believe, they aren't "taking your jobs", either: even if not detained, they are not allowed to work while their claims are being processed. It's rather hard to see against what danger the forbidding fences of Yarl's Wood, and the army of private security workers employed at taxpayer's expense, are protecting us.

Rather, the way we treat asylum-seekers in this country can only be explained by the willingness of this government, and the last, to pander to the mindless xenophobia promoted by the popular press. Refugees are an easy target - a powerless, voiceless, disenfranchised, deeply unpopular minority. Successive armchair-warrior Home Secretaries can gain easy political capital by macho posturing on "border security". For a politician, there is, after all, nothing to lose: asylum-seekers themselves can't vote, and most of the voting public are either unaware of, or indifferent to, their suffering. Those few of us Ivory-Tower PC Liberals™ who actually care about such matters are vastly, vastly outnumbered by the horde of angry Mail readers, who applaud the idea of putting torture victims and their children behind bars. Britain for the British, they say. After all, we live in a world where one's human rights seem to be largely dependent on the accident of where one is born.

Our society is, in so many ways, deeply twisted. I'll leave you with an excerpt from Ursula Le Guin's short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. Ponder, perhaps, whether we are so very much better.

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is.
The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good, " it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer...
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.