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The cruelty of numbers

11 August 2003

By toughening up on asylum-seekers, the government is turning complicated human issues into a numbers game that it cannot win. Spare a thought for the innocent victims caught in the fall out.

The expulsion of Kurdish asylum-seeker Yurdigal Ay and her four children from this country and their return to Germany on the grounds that they asylum application had already been processed (and rejected) there, has given rise, as usual, to a fair amount of humane-thinking protest, not least in Scotland. The family settled there four years ago; a year ago Mr Ay returned to Germany, whence he was deported to Turkey and is said to have disappeared. Mrs Ay and her children have since been held in a detention centre in Lanarkshire, pending the unsuccessful outcome of their appeal against removal.

According to the letter of the law, the family's case has little merit. They arrived clandestinely in a lorry after having their applications for asylum in Germany repeatedly turned down. Asylum in the E.U. is the responsibility of the first country in which the applicants arrive, so, in the case of the Ay family, Germany was the correct jurisdiction. For the government, therefore, removal of this family was a rare success in applying the law in a political context increasingly intolerant of asylum-seekers and refugees. It must be galling for ministers to encounter such protest when all the political pressure on this subject goes the other way.

All of which goes to show how little the government understands the intricacies of this complicated situation. That people should fear unregulated immigration in general yet object to the particular removal of a settled family with four children is not inconsistent at all. Not inconsistent, that is, with human nature, which is what the government is dealing with. The oldest of the Ay children is fourteen, and that none of them speaks Turkish or has ever been in the country to which they now expect to be "returned" is a measure of the time for which the family has been on the move. To uproot them from the brief respite of a few settled years in Scotland, to incarcerate them for a year, and finally to fling them back into a life of peripatetic uncertainty, is a sequence of actions that any intelligent observer might legitimately criticise as adding to an already overflowing sink of human misery in the world.

It is not illogical, irrational or otherwise unacceptable for human beings to have general views that go in one direction on a subject, while considering an individual case in a different light. To do this is to distinguish, as, with intellectual honesty, one should (and as ministers should have the courage to do) between what ideally should happen and what should be done in the un-ideal circumstances that arise. Ideally the Ay family would not have come to Britain. Ideally they would not have felt forced to leave Turkey. But, circumstances being what they are, the family came to be settled in Scotland, doing, so far as one can tell, nobody any harm. Given this imperfect reality, the intelligent thing to do is to leave them there and allow the children to grow up in a normal, unfearful way.

What is bizarre, therefore, is how the government denies itself this intelligent, humane and flexible approach by playing into the hands of those who seek to make political capital out of the "problem" of asylum. In the vain pursuit of electoral advantage it has constructed for itself a narrative that goes something like this. "Yes," they say, "there is a problem, and we are going to make ourselves very popular by doing something about it. And just to make sure that everybody knows that we have solved the problem, we are going to start off by being tremendously honest about how enormously big the problem is."

It is a bizarre approach not only because it buys in to those who seek, for quite other political purpose, to exaggerate and distort the "problem" of asylum. Because what follows from it is a framework for "solving the problem" that (a) cannot be met and (b) if it were met nobody would really notice.

The framework is all about reducing numbers: number arriving and numbers staying when they shouldn't. Doing this is difficult and unpleasant. It requires immigration officers to make tacitly racist judgements about the motives of (for example) Roma people wishing to visit this country and it give rise to inhumane episodes such as the expulsion of the Ay family, which most people would prefer not to happen.

But, against the background of a rising number of asylum-seekers, even such measures can have only limited effect. For, along with the numbers seeking asylum, the number of successful applications has risen also, indeed the proportion of applications that are successful is on an upwards curve.

This relative increase in successful applications may reflect some success in discouraging undeserving cases from coming forward, but the absolute increase in numbers reflects is the increased need for asylum in a turbulent world. Administrative policies in Britain cannot reduce that need. The most the government can hope to do is to reduce the rate of increase as it affects Britain, and that means that its boast in the numbers game will probably be: "not as many more as their might otherwise have been." For its political enemies, peddling the idea that the number of asylum-seekers as a "big problem", that is going to look like failure indeed.

What is more, even if the government's numbers come out better than this, it will not affect a political debate that is driven largely by mis-information and perception. Taking the electorate as a whole, most do not come across an asylum-seeker from one year to the next, and when they do they are not generally inconvenienced by the occasion. What they are assailed by is a politico-journalistic construction that says that the country is over-run by a tidal wave of foreign spongers with designs on our social security benefits and an agenda to destroy our traditional way of life.

That construction can survive whether there are a thousand or thirty thousand individual cases. It only takes one case to make a headline. It cannot, therefore, be defeated even by winning the numbers game. Its central proposition, that asylum-seekers are a big problem, can only be defeated by challenging it in solid and sustainable terms.

Which brings us back to complicated humanity, and the thoroughly human instincts that ought sensibly to lie at the heart of such a policy as this. When a stranger knocks on your door and asks for help you naturally oscillate between reluctance to get involved (which translates as fear of the possible consequences) and human sympathy for the stranger's plight. Often the fear seems stronger that the sympathy; you say sorry and you close the door. But so long as you allow both emotions to live in you there remains the possibility that next time you will feel strong enough to act the other way.

And any help you give, you give freely. Even if you have second thoughts you don't suddenly try to snatch it away. Not, that is, unless you have politicised your decision, seeking to justify it on grounds of right. You convince yourself, for example, that the stranger was in the wrong even to have asked. They had no right to importune you, even to speak to you. In doing this you weaken your integrity since you resign your responsibility to make a judgement rooted in human terms.

Until recently the issue of asylum has not been over-politicised in Britain. It has been pragmatic, if somewhat chaotic, trying to say yes often enough but not too often, and accepting, when failed applicants disappear into the woodwork, that a degree of unauthorised migration is an acceptable and possibly healthy part of an open society.

Now, with the implausible commitment made by the prime minister in February to halve the number of applications for asylum within six months, that long-established consensus appears to be shifting. The prime minister's commitment is tantamount to telling people who want help that they shouldn't ask. In addition, the segregation of asylum-seekers from society while the merits of their cases are investigated suggests that the government is seeking actively to discourage the integration of would-be migrants like the Ays, so that their eventual removal will be less visible and therefore less contentious.

All this will be expensive, for a marginal and pointless advantage in a numbers game that has nothing to do with the real issues. The waste of money doesn't matter, but the suffering of the Ay family does. And so does the belittling that we all experience when the government carries out acts of administrative inhumanity in our collective name.

Copyright Martin Whitlock 2003