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Broadcaster and leading Brexiter Nigel Farage called it an invasion. Which is stretching it.

He is right that over the past three years, an increasing number of migrants have crossed the English Channel, landed somewhere on the Kent and occasionally Sussex coastline, and entered the UK illegally. In 2018, the Home Office said 297 people were known to have used this route. In 2019, the figure stood at 1,890. By May this year, the figure already stands at 1,590. Its a significant development, although one no doubt exacerbated by the pandemic-induced closure of other migration routes.

But both in size and intention it does not constitute an invasion. At the height of the European migrant crisis in 2015, Italy alone had received over 50,000 boat-borne migrants by June that year. The UK, so far as we know, has received just over two per cent of that figure. And as for the migrants intentions, its safe to say they are not interested in conquest. Many are simply and understandably seeking a better standard of living than that offered by their often wartorn homelands (which are usually the historical recipients of Western military intervention), let alone the miserable migrant camps in which they found themselves at Calais.

There is undoubtedly a problem here, though. A combination of the UN Refugee Convention, international maritime law and French authorities willingness to move a problem on, means that UK border forces end up in the position of being legally obliged to escort hundreds of migrants a year into UK territory, where they will then wait months and years for their applications for asylum to be processed. And thats just the ones who get caught. There are likely to be many more a year who escape the attentions of the UK Border Force, rendezvous with traffickers in the UK before being put to low-to-no paid work in, say, a city-centre carwash. The principal and possibly sole beneficiaries of this infernal arrangement are not the migrants, of course theyre the human-traffickers charging several thousand pounds a head for the crossing, and their criminal associates, extracting more and more in the course of these undocumented individuals precarious, black-marketised existence.

But painting this as an invasion is unhelpful. It overstates and misrepresents the problem of illegal migration. And it dehumanises the migrants, transforming them into a malign force, indeed into invaders.

Yet those willing to dismiss and ignore Farages concerns, as yet more proof of the bigotry, xenophobia, racism etczzz of the wider Brexit vote, are the bigger problem here. With assorted charities to the fore, such as Refugee Action and Care4Calais (which once blithely tweeted the quote Brexit, Donald Trump and facism make these such dangerous times), this constituency consistently presents those making the perilous Channel crossing as helpless victims. Victims of the traffickers. Victims of the countries from which they were forced to flee. And, above all, victims of those across the world, and especially the UK, whose prejudices, nativism and sheer closed-mindedness have erected real borders between people. Or as one commentator put it of the inhabitants of Kent: Brexit has cracked us open, allowed our strongest feelings to come out There are still people who offer help and welcome [to migrants], but they are not running the country.

So while some on the right are using the so-called UK migrant crisis to showcase their patriotism and concern for the nation, their opponents are also using the migrants. Theyre using them to showcase their openness, their compassion, their superior virtue. Indeed, theyre using these bedraggled figures, collapsing on to Englands shorelines, as symbols both of the folly of borders and nations, and of the cruelty and narrow-mindedness of all those who cleave to them. If some on the right have dehumanised those crammed perilously into small dinghies for five grand a pop, then so too have their opponents. And whats more, in doing so, in encouraging others to make that same crossing, they play into the hands of the traffickers and all those who seek to profit from migrants desire to make a better life for themselves.

Thats the problem with this rather confected outrage over illegal immigration in the Channel. It exemplifies the way in which immigration has been turned into a means of political showmanship. On one side, the virtue-signalling cosmopolitan; on the one other the flag-waving patriot.

But at least the flag-waving patriot is on the right path namely, defending the importance of borders. For these were never merely lines arbitrarily drawn on a map, dividing and antagonising us for ever more. Rather, like the boundaries between humans and animals, and good and evil, they indicate something substantial. They are the territorial expression of a political community, a means by which we as a people constitute ourselves as such, the means by which we judge what we value and what we dont. They are the bounds within which the laws, mores, and, deeper still, the everyday rituals and features of our public life and culture develop and bond us to one another. A national territory is not merely a physical space. It is the domain in which citizenship from our rights to duties pertains and has real meaning. Get rid of the borders, or render them meaningless by encouraging and even celebrating their transgression, and you undermine what it is to be a citizen. Indeed, you undermine what it is to belong to anywhere at all.

That, in a sense, is the predicament in which we find ourselves. Too many, thinking it the right-on, woke thing to do, oppose borders. They see them in terms of Trumps much-trumpeted wall, as a bigoted means to keep them out. And they therefore see migrants as a means to undermine these expressions of bigotry and closed-mindedness. But in doing so, in green-lighting the transgression of borders, they imperil the very meaning of citizenship and civic belonging.

Ironically, if we are to have an open and generous immigration system, one which wipes out the market for human traffickers, it needs to be something citizens of a post-Brexit UK support. It needs to be something democratically agreed upon. Something that a political community values. And for that you need the very thing the virtue-signallers decrying borders are undermining a citizenry.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.

Picture by: YouTube.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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The shallow exploitation of the migrant crisis - Spiked

Railway officials found the body of a migrant labourer lying in a toilet of a Shramik Special train in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh, The Indian Express reported on Friday. The officials found the body while cleaning the train in the Jhansi railway yard on May 27. The worker had boarded the train on May 23 to travel to Gorakhpur.

The Jhansi-Gorakhpur train left Jhansi on May 23 and reached Gorakhpur on May 24. Its rakes were then sent back to Jhansi for maintenance and sanitisation on May 27, the officials said, according to PTI. The deceased was identified as Mohan Lal Sharma, a resident of Basti district of Uttar Pradesh. His family members said he worked in Mumbai. On the route from Jhansi to Gorakhpur, Basti comes before Gorakhpur.

We got information around 10 pm Wednesday regarding a body being found in a train at the Jhansi railway yard, Jhansi Government Railway Police Inspector Anjana Verma said. We immediately rushed there along with a medical team. The body was found in the toilet of the Shramik train and it had decomposed and was smelling. His face had swollen and we kept the body at the mortuary.

Railway officials added that at no point during the trains journey did any railway authority receive any call from the train for medical help. The Government Railway Police have sent Sharmas body for an autopsy, and have taken samples for testing for coronavirus infection.

Railway officials said Sharmas Aadhaar card, some documents and cash were found on his person. The first opportunity for maintenance and sanitisation for the railways was when the rake reached Jhansi on May 27, when the staff recovered the body, North Central Railway Spokesperson Ajit Kumar Singh said.

Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers began a long journey home on foot after March 25, when the Centre imposed a nationwide lockdown to combat the Covid-19 crisis. However, some died on the way. After much outcry, the Centre started Shramik Special trains from May 1 to ferry migrant workers. However, some labourers still continued to travel home on foot or in private vehicles. The fourth phase of the lockdown will end on May 31.

There have been reports of migrant workers dying in terrible circumstances. The Patna High Court on Thursday took note of a widely-shared video of a child trying to wake up his dead mother at Bihars Muzaffarpur railway station.

The video that went viral earlier this week showed the child playing with a cloth covering his mothers body as announcements of train arrivals and departures continued in the background. The woman, identified as Arbeena, had reportedly died of extreme heat, hunger and dehydration. They had arrived in Bihar from Gujarat in a special train for migrant labourers and her family claimed she had fallen sick on the train due to lack of food and water.

Read more:
Migrant crisis: Labourers body found lying in toilet of special train four days after he boarded it - Scroll.in

Everything about the Indian governments policy towards the countrys large, vulnerable population of migrant workers has been a mess, we wrote at the beginning of the month. As India approaches the end of Lockdown 4.0, this unfortunately still holds true.

The current phase of the tragic botch-up is even more baffling.

There is no doubt that the question of whether large-scale movement should have been allowed from urban areas to rural ones and from rich, better-equipped states to poorer ones was complicated, even if the Centre resolutely ignored compassion as a consideration in its decision-making process.

But on April 29, it decided to permit the operation of trains to take stranded migrant workers back home. By April 29, after more than a month of lockdown, the government had plenty of time to figure out what to do about the migrant workers who wanted to go home, a concern that had become apparent from even before lockdown was announced.

Instead, the result was chaos. There was a convoluted procedure for those who hoped to register for trains. No one was given clear information The Centre at first did not want to be involved in the operation or pay for the tickets, leaving it to states to coordinate between themselves. Then, suddenly, after the problems were highlighted by the Oppostion, there was a complete u-turn with the Centre taking charge this time without any coordination with the states.

No wonder that tens of thousands of Indians continued to take to the roads to walk, cycle or attempt dangerous journeys in trucks back home.

Over the last week, scores of stories have emerged of how the Indian Railways has mismanaged the movement of these trains, leading to delays stretching on for days, with passengers going hungry and without water. As of Thursday, nine people had died on the Shramik trains in 48 hours, the Indian Express reported. On Wednesday, a heartbreaking video of a toddler trying to wake up his dead mother lying on the platform at a railway station went viral.

The Centre has tried to brush off these reports. It has claimed that those who died on the trains were old, sick people and chronic disease patients. It insists that the trains that were delayed by many hours taking unconventional routes, such as one from Mumbai to Gorakhpur that ended up in far-off Odisha, were just involved in route rationalisation.

It claimed that these diversions were necessary because of the congestion along the way. One Railway official told the Indian Express that these measures were effected so that trains are not held up at one place for hours without water and food.

Except, this is exactly what happened. Numerous accounts make it clear that passengers were not given even the basics.

We should have reached the previous night itself, one passenger told Scroll.in. The train was stopping at such places where there was no [access to] water. Nothing can replace waterwe can buy it also but the train never stopped at such places.

The Indian Railways, the organisation famed for being able to move millions of people every day, has been unable to organise a few hundred trains daily, without extremely long delays. It has failed to provide food and water to the passengers.

The Railways can offer all sorts of explanations delayed departures, congestion on the route, the lack of timetables but all these point to immense organisational failures. Nobody is claiming that these operations are easy. But the magnitude of the mess reveals just how little thought and planning has gone into movements that have been predictable for weeks, if not months.

Union Minister for Railways Piyush Goyal has spent the last few weeks squabbling with states about trains. The incidents and deaths over the last few days should remind him to focus first on the organisation that he is supposed to be overseeing before he starts to point fingers at others.

See the article here:
Railways monumental mess-ups are another sign of Centres tragic mishandling of the migrant crisis - Scroll.in

The sun has still not set on hungry and thirsty children with bags on heads, mothers hugging their infants, and workers with blisters on their feet, setting off on a journey into the unknown, hoping to reach places they connect as homes.

This humanitarian crisis has been brought upon by a failure of public policy and public action. To make things worse, States have carried out an unprecedented assault on the rights of the working people by withdrawing basic protections that had been hard won by a tiny sliver of the working class. Unfortunately, many employers appear to approve of these changes while being silent on the plight of those who help build their industries. But the heroes among them are those who have overcome the myopia of their peers and spoken of the countrys collective future.

In an exceptional article (Economic Times, May 16), Azim Premji, the former Chairperson of Wipro, writes of the unforgivable tragedy of the death of 16 migrant labourers on railway tracks, acknowledging that the blame lies on the society that we built. He notes the worsening precarity of workers and the lack of any social security cover for these labour migrants.

He writes that it was shocking to hear that various state governments, encouraged by businesses, are considering (or have already done so) suspending many of the labour laws that protect workers. He notes that measures such as these will only exacerbate the plight of the poor and that they are not only unjust but dysfunctional. He believes that the interests of businesses and workers are deeply aligned particularly in the times of the crisis.

He then goes on to underscore the need for a large fiscal stimulus to include a much expanded MGNREGA, and an urban employment guarantee scheme, a strengthened public health system, free and universal PDS and emergency cash relief to each poor household and migrant for a period of time, and finally autonomous and free movement of migrant labourers to their homes.

Similar measures were outlined in an appeal by the Indian Society of Labour Economics to the Prime Minister and the Chief Ministers and recommended by a vast section of economists and industry associations such as the CII. Had these measures been taken promptly and expeditiously, they would have stemmed the tide of reverse migration, lowering the huge costs to migrants and the economy.

Instead, a package of about twenty trillion rupees has been announced by the Central government, mainly comprising credit and policy-related measures but the total additional budgetary outlay for the much needed fiscal stimulus to demand and income support is less than one per cent of GDP during 2020-21.

Meanwhile, the crisis that has hit the migrants and informal workers looks set to intensify despite the easing of the lockdown. Workers in urban areas, who still continue to grapple with hunger and unemployment, have to deal with unpaid rents, bills and other liabilities built up over the last two months.

In the rural areas, the MGNREGA is only slowly ramping up but the subsistence and employment crisis will intensify in the lean monsoon period. The government should urgently announce a second round of stimulus measures with emergency income support to all households except the well-to-do along with an urban EGS and free universal PDS.

As the migrant crisis exploded, we saw the spectacle of an exceptionally strong government at the Centre deciding to sit on the sidelines, leaving States to coordinate and implement movement, even though both inter-State migration and inter-State quarantine are central subjects. The Prime Ministers addresses to the nation remained silent on the issue. The governments directives demonstrated a marked reluctance to facilitate inter-State movement of migrants.

Till as late as May 8, the Central Labour Ministry was of the view that migrant workers should be persuaded to stay back. The States where migrants worked, on their own part, were equally reluctant to send them back, with the Karnataka government initially deciding not to send trains purportedly under pressure from its builder lobby. The source States were themselves not keen on receiving large number of migrants because of the pressure on their fiscal and administrative resources.

Clearly, neither the Central government, nor the States or the employers have covered themselves in glory in the way this huge humanitarian crisis has been handled. There are extensive and continuing reports of unpaid wages and workers being coerced to stay back on sites, even without payments.

The recent changes in labour laws announced by several States are against the backdrop of the existential crisis faced by labour, and will encourage, as Naushad Forbes, former President, CII, has warned a race to the bottom with no laws.

The most comprehensive changes have been proposed in States such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat will lead to a virtual demolition of the edifice of labour laws. The changes violate major ILO conventions and are on a common template provided by the Central government with the ostensible and unrealistic goal of attracting fresh investments, at a time when the primary objective has to be to keep industries afloat, restore demand, and revive the confidence of labour who feel let down by employers.

This is the time that all stakeholders must come forward to rebuild jobs, incomes and the economy. The Central government should take urgent measures to boost income and demand. It must deploy its resources, including the army and paramilitary, who have performed so well in national disasters, and assist the State governments in moving the migrants safely to their homes. Industry should collectively reject the rationale and need of rebuilding its future on the blood and sweat of workers and uphold the dignity of work.

A large number of industrialists, and people of substantial means have already been deeply involved with humanitarian efforts along with millions of other Indians. The actor Sonu Sood arranged a large number of buses for migrants to reach home. An urgent coordinated effort by industry to provide wages and help send migrants home at the earliest will go a long way in restoring the confidence of the workers in their employers.

Along with the pandemic, the crisis afflicting the vast sections of the working poor will still require very large proactive measures, which should also seek to build, and not destroy, partnerships among different sections of people, including workers and their employers.

The writer, a former Professor of Economics at JNU, is honorary Director of the Centre for Employment Studies, Institute for Human Development, Delhi

Dear Readers,

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See the original post here:
Time for collective action to overcome migrant crisis - BusinessLine

Vultures are becoming extinct and experts have been urging us to take urgent steps to conserve them. None in our right senses would ever dispute the necessity. Though not a pretty sight, the giant birds help the world stay clean by feasting on dead carcasses. That they play a crucial role as scavengers is text-book knowledge that we have grown up with. Yet, at no point have I empathised more with the vulture as much as I have in recent days since the bird found mention during a significant hearing in the Supreme Court, no less.

As the countrys second-most senior law officer, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, was making an argument involving the current migrant crisis when he launched a broadside against all those who have criticised the governments handling of a crisis that many have described as an unmitigated humanitarian tragedy. In coming down heavily against "armchair intellectuals" and all those behind the uncharitable headlines the crisis has been generating, he referred to an iconic photograph of a famine-stricken child taken decades ago in Sudan during a bad bout of famine. The photograph that won the South African photographer a Pultizer had a vulture menacingly sitting some distance away from the child.

The image was powerful and what the solicitor general narrated had the court listening to him in rapt attention. According to Mehta, the photographer was later asked how many vultures were there. When he said there was one, he was corrected immediately. There were two, the photographer was told, implying he was the other vulture.

Also Read |Cruel Homecoming! Of A Dying Son And Race Against Time For A Migrant Worker

Fact checks revealed that the tale the solicitor general narrated was apocryphal and suffered from inaccuracies. Though focused on getting the perfect frame, the photographer did not leave the hapless child at the mercy of the waiting vulture, which he happened to shoo away.

The child also lived through the scary encounter, though he unfortunately died like many others in his continent more than a decade later because of a fever. Yet, the underlying parallel that Mehta sought to draw carried weight. Many who read what happened in the court that day would have been prompted to ponder whether journalists highlighting the ongoing migrant crisis too were as heartless as the photographer was made out to be.

For the record, Mehta did not elaborate on what he expected the photographer to do. But perhaps what he left unsaid has encouraged those not happy with the overwhelmingly negative coverage of the migrant crisis to question the role of journalists. Suddenly, the idea of journalists as no better than vultures has gained currency, at least among sections who wish to undermine the reporting on the migrant crisis. Besides being portrayed as amoral, arguments are being forwarded that helping the migrants should take precedence for humanitys sake over reporting on their misery.

True, sensitivity and helpfulness are qualities that we should all cherish and actively practice. And it is only to be appreciated when a journalist, beyond the call of his or her duty, takes time off to help a person in misery. I can vouch for several such instances in the recent past when a reporter or a photographer, moved by the plight of the subject, has taken out money from their pocket to help a migrant in distress. It could have been to buy some packets of biscuits, or for buying a seat in a bus to ferry the migrants to their distant homes. But our individual capacity to help remains limited.

What we can instead do more effectively is to highlight their plight, speak truth to power and bring pressure on the powers-that-be to provide succour.

Also Read |Caught Between Hope And Despair, Bundelkhand Migrants Slip Into Dark Mode

Making the world a better place to live in is the basic tenet of journalism and fortunately, it remains so, despite the many shortcomings that have seeped in. Like every other profession, journalism too has good professionals and the bad. There are of course some who feast on tragedies to sell their stories and advance their interests. I can recount some, if it helps, including an instance when a reporter manufactured a story about the distress sale of children by enticing their uncle to hand them over against a few thousand rupees. The uncle had some 16,000 rupees already in his bank account. It turned out that the purported sale of his two nephews was more out of greed than distress.

But nothing justifies the attempt to portray our entire tribe as self-centred. It is okay to help those in need as and when the situation permits. But our primary job remains highlighting the unfairness and injustices so that they are not allowed to linger or recur. We fail most of the time. But that only means we dont give up but try harder. Sudan, for example, is hardly any better since the devastating famine that the photographer catalogued. But it did shake the worlds conscience and we need to be grateful to him for that.

None of the arguments made in our support will possibly make Mehta change his mind. People, after all, will subscribe to what suits them the best. It is also equally in societys interest that journalists keep doing what they are meant to do hold the mirror with warts and all. Being denigrated as vultures should actually be considered a badge of honour, just as a young Outlook colleague of mine did soon after Mehta made his controversial point. He tweeted out a picture of himself reporting on the migrant crisis with a caption: Vulture-ing. I remain very proud of his reporting and have no hesitation in proclaiming myself as the organisations Vulture-in-Chief.

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If Journalists Are Vultures, I'm Happy To Be A Vulture-in-Chief - Outlook India