Apparently, I am “a member of a group of freelance intellectuals who gather round The Philosophers’ Magazine and live by their pens.” Sounds very glamorous, in a bohemian kind of way. If you said three people who sit alone in front of computers all day in their underwear, it wouldn’t have quite the same ring.
The three said people are myself, my fellow TPM editor, Jeremy, and Butterflies and Wheels editor and TPM deputy, Ophelia Benson. We are all, says Nick Cohen. “suspicious of intellectual orthodoxy” which is probably why we don’t even agree among ourselves.
This is all very flattering and makes me feel self-important for about five seconds, but the question of the power of orthodoxy is a serious one. The extent to which some very cogent criticisms, albeit rather aggressively put, made by Jeremy on this blog has attracted nothing but indignation from people on the “side” of humanism is but one example of how unwilling people are to accept challenge.
But this is insignificant compared to the difficulty of changing people’s minds about asylum seekers. I’ve been involved with a commission of enquiry into the plight of refused asylum seekers in the UK. No one knows how many of them there are: there could be up to 450,000, and there are certainly around a quarter of a million at least. Because of the way the system works, when asylum claims are refused, most asylum seekers simply vanish off the radar, for fear of being forcibly deported. They have no income or means of support and rely on friends, charity or the shadow economy.
You might argue, so what? They’re refused asylum seekers aren’t they, which means their claims are bogus. The solution to this is just to lock them up as soon as their claims are turned down.
It’s not that simple. Many decisions are just wrong. Many other refused asylum seekers are being asked to return to countries like Eritrea, Iraq or Sudan, where they are clearly not safe. Other cannot return because their own governments won’t provide the paperwork. Hence they are left in limbo.
But even if you do think that the number of bogus claimants is high and that the processing of claims needs to be tougher, it still remains the case that there are hundreds of thousands of “legacy” cases already here, invisible. What do you do about them?
Our key recommendation, which echoes that of countless other experts, is to get them back into the system by granting a revocable right to work. Evidence suggests that this, combined with non-coercive voluntary returns programmes, will actually result in more people going “back to where they came from” than an apparently tougher system. Plus it is more humane, if you care about that.
Our report was actually very careful not to be a sort of wishy-washy, liberal, hug-an-asylum-seeker effort. It’s actually pretty robust in places. But still, it has been dismissed pretty brusquely by the government. Indeed, I suspect some sharp practice made sure the report was effectively buried. The Home Office (the government department responsible for all this) made two different announcements on issues related to migration and borders on the day our report was published, which pushed it off editors’ agenda. For instance, I was due to talk about it on the BBC’s flagship morning radio news programme, Today. I was phoned at 6am to be told, however, that overnight breaking news meant they were dropping the item. At the time I was due to go on, there was another report about visas for nannies which had its source in, yes, the Home Office.
Meanwhile, a piece I wrote about it on the comment is free blog got over a hundred replies, almost all of which were extremely critical. You would not have thought the Guardian was a left-liberal newspaper.
It seems to me that in the UK the very phrase “asylum seeker” elicits such strong reactions that getting anyone to reconsider their views on the subject is almost impossible. I found the reaction to Jeremy’s blog depressing, but I found this even more so, because here we are talking about people’s lives.
For instance, I heard the other day about a refused asylum seeker who was sent back to Burma. On arrival, he was sentenced to seven years hard labour, simply for applying for asylum. Yet still people think refused asylum seeker = bogus economic migrant, and that all we need do is make border controls tougher.
It may be fun to be “a member of a group of freelance intellectuals” but we should not flatter ourselves that we make much difference, or that our battles against orthodoxy matter compared to the battle some people face just for survival and legitimacy.
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Unfashionable Sense about Asylum
By Julian Baggini ⋅ March 30, 2007 ⋅
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12 comments for “Unfashionable Sense about Asylum”
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© 2007 Talking Philosophy. 
Let’s hear it for the power of literature and movies to increase compassion. I am reading What is the What, by Dave Eggers, a fact based novel about Sudanese refugees. I don’t think anybody could read it and continue full-tilt against asylum-seekers. It is a great, great book. One of its themes is the ignorance and indifference of people in the west, who have no idea what horrors refugees have suffered through. Ahem. So true.
Indeed. When it comes to the hard edge of social change, philosophy is very weak compared to narrative arts.
A famous example in the UK is a 1966 TV film by Ken Loach called Cathy Come Home, which exposed the plight of the homeless. It really forced the issue up the politival agenda and was a temendous boost to the launch, a few weeks later, of the homelessness charity Shelter.
Another reason to be humble about our “intellectual” role.
Having said that, philosophy can of course inform debate about important issues: Jean’s piece on working mothers and the good life in the forthcoming issue of TPM being an excellent example.
Another good one on the theme of asylum is Children of Men. It brings out the horror of keeping everyone out, but also the painful question of how many can be let in. There isn’t room for every single person to stand in the UK (or even the US) so difficult decisions have to be made, but not from a standpoint of ignorance and xenophobia. Oh yeah, my piece on working mothers! I look forward to that!
I don’t sit alone in front of a computer all day in my underwear! I sit alone in front of a computer all day in overalls and a dinner jacket.
Less frivolously - my entry for the power of narrative theme would be Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. Not exactly about asylum - except it is, in a way, because various characters give each other asylum. One of the great novels of the 20th century, in my view.
I’ve been thinking about reading A Fine Balance for ages, so now I have an extra reason to take the plunge. By the way, as one who attempts to live by the pen, and spends many heart-rending hours alone at the computer everyday, I must say that I do wear clothes, at least after 11 am.
Ah good - don’t miss it. (I’ve made myself want to read it again - this will be the fourth time. Apart from anything else, it’s very gripping.)
Underwear is so chilly…
I have no source for it, but someone once told me that Margaret Mead said it takes 10 years for paradigm shifts in the academy, and a further 40 for them to filter into society.
I am the researcher commissioned by Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust to do research in Leeds on destitution among asylum seekers to inform the Inquiry Julian refers to.
I am an anthropologist by training, and for what it is worth, took on this work because I thought this project had more hope of changing at least a few people’s minds than some other things I’ve been involved with. This is largely thanks to the Inquiry format that brought in Julian alongside four other Commissioners from outside of the refugee voluntary sector world.
(Some) anthropologists have taken a particular interest in whether what they write about changes people’s minds and lives. This is a perpetual discussion in the journal Anthropology Today, for example.
Anthropologist Judith Okely discusses, based on work with Traveller-Gypsies, the influence of ideas and intellectuals on change in policy and the challenging of prejudices and racisms*.
She suggests change happens only at moments of serendipity: ‘the conditions have to be ripe for the intellectual to be consulted and for that knowledge to be heeded.’
Whether in underpants or dinner jacket, perhaps the project of changing minds can only be multi-pronged? Yet even if the broader conditions that make change more likely are met, do actual shifts still only happen by accident?
*Some political consequences of Gypsy ethnicity: the place of the intellectual. in James, A. Hockey, J. and Dawson, A. (eds.) After writing culture: epistemology and praxis in contemporary anthropology, London: Routledge
Oops, the year of publication of above chapter is 1997.
Like so many things, luck surely does play a part. I’ve been thinking of Sartre’s comment recently about how, when you are part of a movement for social change, you have to act “without hope”. It’s not quite as gloomy as it sounds. He means that you can’t kid yourself that there is any inevitability that you will end in success, or that others will carry on your work after you. But still, Sartre was very politically engaged. He just thought people who sing “We will overcome” and the like at rallies need to be less sure of themselves.
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