Transcript

The Myth of Migration | Michelle Ezeuko | TEDxSOAS

well the myth of migration is the most powerful insidious and dangerous myths of our time today and this is because it's very normalized people don't question the messages that we are given about migration and the problem is when myths become normalized their power becomes tenfold and what I want to do here today is I want to use my experiences to debunk this myth and in doing so this isn't gonna be a political talk it will dub into politics because one of the problems is that migration has been politicized but this isn't about politics I'm here to debunk this myth because it's ruining lives and in doing so deemed debunking the myth of migration is an act of justice so just to begin I'm gonna talk about the facts so what are the facts migration is a very normal part of our humanity it's been happening for centuries borders actually a very new concept in the sense that when Britain for example colonized the world borders did not exist they didn't apply when slaves were taken from West Africa to the west borders did not apply then so how the world is ordered today in terms of how we relate the borders is very new borders are man-made so if you're hearing in the breath sick talks the issue of the Irish border it's because of how they're going to maintain that border because it's very much my maid it's a social construct and borders do not apply equally so if you have a red passport for example for a British passport you can go to 185 countries visa-free you have a lines your own passport like I do you can go to 46 countries visa-free and if you have an Afghanistan passport for example you can only go to five countries so borders do not apply equally they very much favor that elite the rich and people who live in the west and that brings me to what is the myth of migration so I split it off into two elements so first of all the politicization of migrants and migration and then the criminalization of migrants so how I would describe the myth of migration it's bringing the movement of people into the realm of security so governments have decided that migrants are a threat and they come under the realm of security where as poverty is not seen as a threat even though poverty kills and it's killing many people in the UK right now climate change it's not seen as a threat either even though there's been so many protests going on because it's urgent and climate change is going to kill us it's already killing people in the global south so the method migration is kind of this manipulation of what comes under security and bring in migrants under that realm it's weaponizing hate fear racism and xenophobia into a system legitimizing that and using it to marginalize and abuse the most vulnerable people in our society so DTaP go is an academic and he explains it much better than I can he talks about the different actors who instill you know this fear in everyone and it talks about experts from the military for example insist on the existence of rogue States failed States and the link between diasporas and their countries of origin intelligence services suspect the Terrorism from a board is supported by immigrants police explain the rising crime by the activities of immigrants and their children who were not well socialized in a host country and journalists evoke the feeling of insecurity among people economics kind of play off the burden on the welfare state of migrants and together all these actors legitimize this fear that migration is something bad it's something we should all be worried about and it's something that requires violence and force to mitigate and to control so what are the components or kind of the environment that has allowed this myth to be perpetuated and I think it's globalization and rising inequality so right now people are feeling very insecure people are feeling very economically insecure specifically and they want an explanation globalization I've put a broad definition on there but the definition that's relevant to migrants is economic globalization which is free trade and giving corporations the power to do anything really to maximize profits borders don't apply to businesses they don't apply to corporations Dyson can take you know their factories move it to India or Bangladesh and exploit cheap labor there there's no border issue their goods come and go borders don't apply according to trade agreements and all but goods are not kind of enforced the same way that people are and it's all to benefit corporations and this means that whilst globalization is making people rich it's only making very few people rich and an example of this is that Walmart in 2017 they made more they made more profit in that year than the whole GDP of Belgium rising and this also plays into rising inequality so 1% of England of people in England own 50% of its land the world's 2,200 billionaires got 12% wealthier love the bottom people 5 billion people grew 11% poorer so globalization is not benefiting many people it's the reason why a lot of people move as well because if you outsource your cost take advantage and exploit cheap labour what happens when those people you're exploiting want fair wages they want to be able to feed their families they're gonna come here because they want to be free they want to be able to provide they want to be able to succeed and then the other kind of environment has allowed this myth to Foster is criminalization as a form of governance so governments know that people are insecure they know that inequality is arising and instead of dealing with the deep systemic issues that have made this the way it is so things like globalization redistribution of resources the fact that corporations have unfettered power they don't do any any of that they won't even address climate change you know even address systemic changes that are needed to make the world work better for most of us instead they mobilize hate they stoke fear to make themselves look strong and powerful so this has been going on forever as I was doing my research I found out in the 60s Peter Griffin won a place in Parliament off the slogan if you want a n-word for a neighbor vote labor this tactic is its secure it's been working for years they've always been doing this Trump is the most recent example but he's not the only one politicians are doing this around the West because it's easy you know people are scared you know they're worried about their future so what do you do you just blame someone who can't defend themselves and everyone puts their trust in you so the process of being tough on migration is now seen as synonymous with good governance what are the effects of the myth so the first time we had to really talk about this myth properly in the UK or people didn't perceive it as a myth but when the windrow scandal happened we had to have the conversation on the immigration system it wasn't had properly which is why I'm here to carry on that conversation but we still talked about it we saw that the system is unfair the system punishes innocent people so windows generation have been there here since the 60s they've worked they've contributed to the economy they're they're what I call the model they're they're the perfect good migrant right and this is still what happened to them because the good migrant bad migrant dichotomy doesn't exist the system punishes us all and eleven people died as a result of Windrush before that cases could be resolved and that's of the people we know because so many people didn't come forward there's no trust in the system and Windrush brings me to talk about the hostile environment because that's essentially what it was and because it affected quote-unquote the wrong people doesn't mean the hostile environment isn't messed up it's predicated on making living in the UK so unbearable for migrants that they voluntary leave voluntarily leave and it's really hard because my question is why are you so sure that people are going to voluntarily why do you not understand that it takes desperation for people to come here no one's going anywhere this is the best they can get and there's a reason why people move and it's not because they just feel like it it's not because they just want to they just want to come here it's cuz they're desperate because they don't have a choice and what the hostile environment entailed was basically taken away legal aid increasing fees detaining people deporting people requiring the burden of proof to be on migrants to legitimize and prove that they have a right to be in this country and what happens when the home office they decide so if you they don't like the documents you've presented then you don't deserve to be here and that's essentially what happened in the window scandal but the hostile environment effects you know so many more people it's basically a system that creates conditions that make it impossible for people to have lawful status and then punishes them for that reason so I became undocumented when I was 19 despite living in the UK since I was nine and I've realized that it doesn't matter how long you've been here it doesn't matter how hard you work no one is safe so I didn't have access to good lawyers because there's no legal aid so what happens is that pushes people so you use whoever they can to do their applications and sometimes that process can go wrong and that happens to so many more people this is the the immigration system in terms of like the lawyers it's not so strongly regular alized so people get keep getting cool off and going to bad lawyers in order to save money and basically my application got rejected and I was undocumented for two years because first of all didn't have access to legal aid so I couldn't do my application and didn't have any money and it had to be a process of waiting till there was enough money to do it and it's really hard to punish people for being illegal and undocumented but then also creating the conditions that pushes them to that position a really good example of this is che cose it's an island and you can colonize there they stay falsely removed people from it and then use that as an as a u.s. airbase they gave them really small compensation pushing them into poverty and these people decided to migrate to the UK because if you're colonized you can migrate to the colonizers country I think back then the law allowed for that came to the UK because of the poverty that was induced on them only to be caught up in a hostile environment as well and this is my friend Ken so I was away at campaign boot camp and I met him there and we were both campaigning against the hostile environment he came to the UK in 2009 he had lawful status but then they increased the fees that you have to meet so you have to add a certain amount to be able to renew they increased that amount and he didn't meet her so he became undocumented he then was later detained and it took his friends raising noise about it going to the press for him to be released till now he still hasn't got a decision for his application and the problem is that the Home Office only focus on individual acts and then they act but when you only look at individual cases you don't see that the whole system is flawed and the problem in the UK is that we don't realise that immigration system is really flawed we always look to the US and we're like Trump's wall and all these things but really it looks more like this and an example of this is what's happening in Libya right now so the UK is complicit and the EU is funding the Libyan Coast Guard to curtail migrants from getting to Europe to claim asylum claiming asylum is a human right the Refugee Convention which was enacted after the Holocaust when people were trying to flee and they ended up being killed because people would not let them claim asylum that's a human right and the EU is part of funding to take the detainment of African migrants where they are abused raped tortured they're not allowed food water and it came to the media's attention when they were being sold as slaves so history is literally repeating itself because of this myth I'm gonna talk a bit about myself a bit more so I joined let us learn a campaign group when I was 18 and find out that I couldn't access Student Finance because of the hostile environment which is why I say there's no good migrant bad Micra and the system just it doesn't want migrants and it doesn't discriminate join let us learn advocate for access to education and I've ended up taking my story everywhere because I've realized that the only way this myth is gonna be debunked is if people who've experienced it talked about it so I'm now on a 10-year route to citizenship which means that every 30 months I have status now but every 30 months I have to renew and I have to pay 2033 pounds each time and if I can't afford to then I'm undocumented and then you can get detained deported all of it so you know there's been no freedom it's consistent and this is gonna stay with me for the rest of my life so I realized that all I can do is to just talk about it and to just try and debunk this myth so that people can stop suffering because of it and resistance people have been resisting the myth this is a group of doctors who got medals for their services during the Ebola outbreak and they returned at the number-10 because they were disgusted at the fact that the NHS has been conscripted to now act as border enforcement so they were sharing data with with the Home Office they were told to refuse patients who need care if they don't have the right documents and this kind of conflicts with doctor-patient confidentiality people who need help so some doctors are resisting Stanford 15 I don't know if you guys heard about it but it was a big case they did a peaceful protest on a tarmac to stop a deportation flight and ended up being charged with terrorism it was so bad that amnesty got involved and they said that charging them with terrorism inflicts on the right to protest which is you know democracy that's a human right so what we're seeing our government use this myth to perpetuate a system of abuse that allows them to take advantage of the vulnerable and to do whatever they can to keep that system in place even if that means charging peaceful protesters for terrorists with terrorism and then so their excuse is that it is willfully misleading to conflate the situation experience on people from the windows generation with measures in force to tackle illegal immigration and protect the youth in taxpayer but my problem is who is the UK UK taxpayer because my mom has been paying taxes for the 16 years since she came here yet she still has to live under the system that punishes you just for existing I've I've been I'm a taxpayer when I've worked I've paid taxes migrants are taxpayers so this dichotomy of them and us or the other is very much fabricated and then using taxpayers money to maintain a system of abuse so there was the right to rent appeal which just happened so in 2010 to 2015 there was a new law that meant that landlords had to then check status before allowing people to rent this meant that many migrants and people who could not prove that even when the burden of proof is so high if you couldn't meet it you were destitute you were homeless and the court found this against human rights I think it was just this month 78,000 will spend on challenging you know a discriminatory law other parts of the hostile environment have been challenged in court so the NHS sharing school sharing that's been successfully challenged in court so how much money are they spending to maintain the system of abuse detaining people 1.6 4.16 4.4 million it's been on indefinite detention per year and the UK's or any country in Europe that detains people indefinitely and finally 55 percent of people who get detained get sent back into the community so you're traumatizing really vulnerable people people in detention are you know if they've been trafficked they've been abused their LGBTQ people looking for sanctuary because their home countries are homophobic they're the most wanted people in our society fleeing war fee and conflict and you detain them traumatize them just to release them back into the community and spend 1.6 point four million per year it just makes no sense and Gary yawns summarizes perfectly when he stated that this isn't a system of law it's not a lawful system rather it is the sister it no this is not a glitch in a system sorry it is the system they have violated no law it is the law that is violating them but there is hope I don't know if you guys heard about the youth strike for climber but when I was younger I was never protesting or demonstrating so it makes me filled with so much pride that young people are fighting for the future we deserve and I just want to say that the less the more we debunk this myth and realize that it's not true the more we can focus on the systemic issues that are actually ruining our lives things like climate change things like poverty inequality austerity people are really suffering and it's not because of migrants so the more we debunk this myth the more we can actually solve the real problems that are plaguing our society today and finally I just want to say the best way we can fight against this myth it's so just choose love that's all you can do we're using hate to build our future hate crime has literally over doubled in the last five years our future is now being built by the worst parts of our humanity they hate the fear the racism the xenophobia so choose love we need to switch that up we need to build our future based on the best parts of ourselves we need to build our future based on freedom based on love based on basic human rights why are we letting people die at sea it doesn't make any sense so choose love thank you [Applause]