Gulwali Passarlay responds to the proposed ‘Illegal Migration Bill’.
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This piece is part of a collaboration between English PEN and Counterpoints Arts in response to the UK government’s proposed ‘Illegal Migration Bill’. For this PEN Transmissions series, writers have been given an open platform to respond to the Bill. Counterpoints Arts coordinate Refugee Week, a UK-wide festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. The theme for Refugee Week 2023, taking place 19–25 June, is Compassion.
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I won’t start by asking about your journey to the UK – partly because you’ve written and spoken about it at such length and so compellingly elsewhere, but also because that story can’t be shrunk into this little space; no story of refuge and displacement can. I want instead to ask: how far away, now, do you feel from that journey?
I appreciate you not wanting to start with my story, because people always want to start with my story – and it becomes frustrating, boring. Somehow, I’ve become a public speaker – a storyteller – and so I tell the story of my journey, particularly in schools, because I want the debate about migration to be humanised. But what I really like doing is having a conversation around my story, as we’re doing now.
Your question is a very good one. It’s been over fifteen years since I came to the UK. Sometimes, I’m very attached to that journey; sometimes, if feels very far away. When I hear tragedies in the news – of people drowned in the Channel, or the Mediterranean – they are very personal to me. They are very close. And so, reading about others’ journeys, mine cannot leave me.
I wrote a book about my story (it’s 120,000 words and, as you say, you can’t condense that into a minute or two) which was published eight years ago. I wish it weren’t relevant anymore. But things are getting worse. At the moment, one of the things I’m doing is working with Afghans staying in temporary accommodation in the UK who are waiting for their claims to be heard. I try to provide assurance and encouragement. But I am frustrated and I am angry.
I was scrolling through your Twitter feed, and what you say about the news cycle being so recurring and intimate to you is reflected there; it’s like scrolling around, rather than down.
It’s incredibly frustrating. What happened to me fifteen years ago is happening now, but it’s even worse. When I came, I was criminalised and penalised and treated as a suspect, because of a culture of disbelief and hostility. But now it’s not culture, it is law: it’s the law of the land to criminalise.
Yesterday, I saw a friend who lives in Leicester, who came to the UK with me in 2007. We travelled from Rome to Paris together. He made it to the UK, and as soon as he arrived, he was age-disputed and put in a detention centre, ready to be deported to Afghanistan. Lawyers and doctors intervened and proved that he was 15, and he was instead fostered. But when he turned 18, his leave to remain was refused. For eight years we fought his case. And then, in 2016, he was forcibly removed to Kabul. His life, all that opportunity – wasted. He couldn’t live in Afghanistan, and so he did it all again, ending up in Greece. There was still no life for him there; no opportunity to work, and his wife wasn’t permitted to join him. Then, in 2021, as Kabul was falling, he realised that the UK was evacuating people and he thought, You know, I have a chance here. Because the UK has done a lot wrong to me. And now is the time they make the wrongs right and provide some justice. He made it to the UK. But rather than getting justice, he was imprisoned for twelve months for “illegal entry”. He’s now on probation. The idea of probation is that you don’t commit a crime again – what crime would he commit? What crime has he committed?
There’s no such thing as an “illegal refugee”. The Refugee Convention and international humanitarian laws are very clear: you should not penalise people based on how they enter. And yes, though I’m talking to you now, if I had arrived this year, the way I did in 2007, I wouldn’t be: I would be “a criminal”.
The Nationality and Borders Act – and the proposed Illegal Migration Bill – create a two-tiered system: if you come via irregular means, you are a criminal; if you come via resettlement schemes, you are a good immigrant. I am so pleased that there are routes and schemes that mean Ukrainians and Hongkongers can be resettled in the UK. But that’s not available to others – to my friend, to those whose journeys are like mine. I met my MP on Refugee Day last year. I was outside Parliament, protesting the Act. I know that he has a copy of my book; he bought it, and I signed it for him. I asked him, ‘Why did you vote for this Bill?’ and he said ‘This is what the people in the constituency want. This will solve the problem’. I replied: ‘Look, in five years, Ukrainians will be in the exact same situation as other refugees. We’ll be having the same conversation, and the situation will be even worse. People will be in limbo. We will have detention centres full of asylum seekers, prisons full of asylum seekers, military bases full of asylum seekers. There will still be no solution, let alone a humane solution’.
We normally get around 30,000 asylum applications a year. France get 100,000, and Germany 170,000. I listened to the German Ambassador speaking recently, and he said ‘We process more asylum claims in a month than the UK does in a year’. The idea that people should stay in France is absurd; it’s not how the international protection system works. There’s nothing in the law that says refugees should stay in the “first safe country”, and yet the vast majority do – Afghans in Pakistan and Iran; Somalis in Kenya. The attitude the UK policy and its narrative have is one of exceptionalism – of excluding the UK from international duties. Last year, about 250,000 Hongkongers came as “guests” to the UK, and around the same number of Ukrainians. But those 30,000 asylum applications? Those are “the swarm”, “the invasion”.
I heard the Minister of State for Immigration say the reason we’re not processing asylum claims more quickly is because it would give the impression that more people should come. (People sometimes even tell me that I shouldn’t share my story, because it is a story of ‘success’, and it will encourage more people to come. In 2016 I went to Calais and met refugees and told them to keep hope, not to feel powerless, and the BBC reported that I was encouraging people to risk crossing the Channel and come to the UK.) So keeping people in limbo is the way to go, they think. That’s why 170,000 people are in backlog, why we have 100,000 people staying in hotels at a cost of £5m: because the government wants us to be angry that our taxpayer money is being spent like this; instead of being angry with the government and its incompetent systems, its austerity and its policies, to be angry with the refugees.
You mentioned earlier your friend being age-disputed, and you’ve spoken elsewhere about your experience of this – of the dehumanising immediate effect of it, and the pernicious resultant effect: you were 13, but flatly told instead you were 16; at the time, refugees were not afforded the legal rights of children, including the rights to education and to care, if they were 16 or older. The proposed Illegal Migration Bill strips the rights of unaccompanied minors even further. Could you talk about your response to that?
This is fundamentally about the presumption that asylum seekers are lying. And it’s, as you say, politically influenced, by the rights that minors currently have to be afforded. But the intentions of the Illegal Migration Bill go further: the government don’t want to give the impression that they’re soft, because giving rights to unaccompanied minors would, supposedly, encourage more to come. It’s about giving no room for speculation about who might get “better treatment”. It’s heart-breaking. They want to make it harder for families, for children, for women. We talk about opposing the Taliban for not respecting women’s rights or children’s rights, and yet we do this?
I’ll tell you a short story. I helped a friend – a young man from Afghanistan – with his age dispute. He was living in Newham. He was happy: he was playing cricket, he was registered with a doctor, he was living with a nice foster family. Then the Home Office sent him a letter saying that he looked over 25, and so the social services needed to carry out an age assessment. I read the text of that assessment; it was terrible, inadequate. It said he was over 18, and so he was stripped of his rights, sent to Whitfield and then to Middlesborough. This was right at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and I was stranded in Denmark. I managed to stay in contact with him, and he told me he had lost all hope – that he wanted to run away, or commit suicide. I said ‘No, don’t do anything stupid. Wait for me to come’. I finally managed to see him in person six months later. He had lost so much weight that I could hug him with one arm. I called Newham and said this was a safeguarding issue. They said, ‘Oh, we don’t know him. He’s not in our area’. I said ‘Well you must know him. You kicked him out. You didn’t want him to be your problem’. They said that he’d have only had a right to appeal the age assessment within three months. This was during the lockdowns: he had no idea what he had to do, and had been cut off from advice. We fought it, and fought it, and he had a proper assessment which found that he was, even after all this time, only 15. Only then was he finally given a new foster placement, and put into school. And he’s doing so well, now. But there are so many people in his situation, who don’t know what to do, or how to challenge the injustice. With the new Bill, things will only get worse.
As you talk about that injustice, and that process, I think of a phrase from a piece you wrote in the Guardian years ago. There, you say that you felt the immigration officials you encountered were ‘worse than the smugglers’, who ‘had been heartless, but […] hadn’t tried to change [your] identity’. It’s such an arresting sentence. Current policies are ostensibly about targeting smugglers, giving greater powers to immigration officials in an effort to achieve this. But data shows us that these policies fail to reduce trafficking. What are your thoughts on that?
That’s a really good point. If I was a smuggler right now, I’d be very happy with the way the UK government is doing things. For the last few years, we’ve been getting 30,000 asylum applications. When the government started discussing the Rwanda plan and the Nationality and Borders Bill, that went up to 45,000. Now, as they discuss even more inhumane policies, it has risen to 65,000. These policies don’t – won’t – stop smuggling; they just make it more dangerous. Before too long, we’ll start seeing boats travelling even greater distances – they’ll be launched from Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium. Because, however much the government tries to override international law and convention, if you arrive on a boat, and no one finds out, the authorities will have no evidence of you not arriving through “safe and legal routes”. All these policies do is put people in greater danger in the busiest shipping lanes in the world. The only way we can get smugglers out of businesses is to provide safer routes, humanitarian corridors; to make it easier for people to come here and claim asylum and, then, with a proper system, to deal with those claims accordingly.
As long as there aren’t safe, humane routes for migration, smugglers will thrive, because people will still need to migrate, and will do so through whatever channels they can. And traffickers will thrive, too. Smuggling and trafficking are two different things. The smugglers didn’t come to me, you know. I went to them.
My final question is about stories and writing. You write stories, you tell them. How important are they – writing them, reading them, telling them, hearing them, sharing them – in working for justice and change?
There are countries where books and stories are banned, where people are not able to read or write what they want to read and write. In Afghanistan, right now, I would not be able to express my views; in the UK, I’m able to. And that is invaluable. Because stories change people’s minds.
My book has given me the chance to visit twenty countries. It has given me the chance to speak to you. I always encourage asylum seekers to read and write – not least because it’s the best way to learn English. But also because stories humanise. You are only hostile to refugees if you haven’t met one, spoken to one, heard their stories, read their stories. And I can guarantee you that, however on the right you are, if you read stories like mine, or those of my fellow refugees, they will, to some degree, change your views. You might not say so openly, but they will change you. Stories challenge you in a non-threatening way; they challenge your bias, they make you open-minded.
This proposed legislation is dangerous. And it flies against our moral duty. We need a system based on human rights, based on compassion, based on the rule of law, based on humanitarian values. The government is scapegoating refugees for its failures, and there are things we can do individually and collectively to challenge that. We have the facts and figures, but they are not sufficient; the challenge needs to be about emotion, and stories, and lives. Otherwise, my friend, who is living with his tag and waiting for the government to make its decision, will, wrongly, be called a criminal. Perhaps he will be the first person on the plane to Rwanda.
Gulwali Passarlay is an author, advocate, humanitarian and spokesperson for refugees and asylum seekers across the UK and Europe. He arrived in the UK in 2007, after being forced to leave Afghanistan at the age of 12. He is a member of the Afghan Refugee Expert Network in Europe (ARENE), and author of the bestselling memoir The Lightless Sky.
Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.
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