Where I grew up, in the mock-Tudor enclaves of suburban west London, I developed a rosy view of multicultural England. My street could’ve been a Potemkin village built to fool visiting delegations about the ease of ethnic integration. There was the Iranian handyman whose daughters babysat my sister and me. Japanese families who held eclectic garage sales that became the talk of the street. An Irish gardener cycling from house to house with a rake on his back. Our Kiwi opera singer and English pianist neighbours who we could hear from next door, and were generous with free tickets. The gruffly cheery Russian lab technician who worked at my school and had all the staffroom gossip. Cypriots. Indians. And, of course, us: Armenians. Only the Aussie backpackers would elicit a few grumbles with their parties and breezily parked vans.
I still go back home to that street, and it still seems just as mixed. A Syrian refugee there recently gave us a trike his son has outgrown; it’ll be my daughter’s Christmas present this year. Not everywhere is as melting-pot perfect: Tower Hamlets, the east London borough I live in now, has a clear “that’s the white school; that’s the Asian school” phenomenon, for example. But what I see on my old street in Acton jars with the politics I encounter in my role as the New Statesman’s Britain editor. Anger at immigration; growing fear of foreigners; deportation proposals for vast numbers of settled residents; politicians declaring multiculturalism a failed experiment. And, as has long been a feature of public attitudes in this space: lament for integration.
Labour has given up on the latter. Look at the government’s latest asylum plans, announced by the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood – who, incidentally, has as equally a sentimental view of her hometown street as I do of mine (a few years ago she bought the house next door to her parents in Birmingham Ladywood, telling me: “I don’t know if that’s an immigrant dream or an Asian dream, but it’s definitely living a dream!”).
Her latest policy is to only allow refugees to settle permanently after 20 years, rather than the current five. The plan is to review refugee cases every two and a half years and deport them once their home country is deemed safe. This is accompanied by other hostile proposals: diluting rights to keep families together, allowing people to fall destitute, and, reportedly, seizing valuable assets like jewellery from asylum seekers to pay for their stay.
The idea is to stop people seeking asylum in Britain. It worked in Denmark, where numbers have fallen fast over the past decade as parties of the centre-right and centre-left have refused to guarantee them permanent residency. But it has brought its own problems. A focus on returns comes at the expense of integrating newcomers. Refugees in Denmark have told Michelle Pace, author of Un-welcome to Denmark, how they often feel “integration is pointless if they might still be deported”.
This is hardly surprising. You’d struggle to plan your career, education, family life, and other long-term goals like learning a new language if every couple of years Border Force could be at your door. Burdened with decades of proving your place in British society risks alienating you from it – in limbo, living life at a different rhythm from your neighbours, colleagues and schoolmates. It is more likely to make you feel less British than embrace Britishness.
This matters. Making people poor and miserable doesn’t improve that prized bit of Whitehall jargon: “social cohesion” (translation: the public getting along). Plus, Brits care a great deal about integration: two-thirds think more should be done to encourage integration between people of different ethnic backgrounds, 73 per cent think it’s better if communities contain a broad range of ethnic groups, and 93 per cent think newcomers have a responsibility to integrate with the wider public, including through learning English, according to More in Common polling from October. The desire for immigrants to learn English and embrace British values comes up “so often in focus groups”, finds Luke Tryl, an expert in public sentiment as head of More in Common. “Integration is really, really important to people.”
Labour is letting these voters down. A contact familiar with official contracts for asylum accommodation notes that where the government would, in the past, demand the “bells and whistles” of integration encouragement – ensuring access to English classes, clubs and courses at the local library, etc – they now mainly demand the basic legal standard of safe and habitable dwelling.
All of this is short-sighted. It might sound like fluffy stuff, but initiatives where, say, asylum seekers cook meals for locals have an outsize impact. Eating food from different cultures has proven to foster more tolerant attitudes, according to new research by the University of Birmingham, which studied the eating habits and attitudes of 1,000 white Brits.
In all its fervour for deporting migrants, the government hinders what we all know they come for: to build a life. This makes it harder for them to do as the public would wish: to contribute, and mix. A short drive from my childhood home is a Victorian cemetery of cedars and moss-smudged headstones. Epitaphs whisper in English, Polish, Greek, Armenian. The grave of my dad, who escaped Lebanon as a refugee, reads: “An Armenian, An Englishman”. A tribute to a life built in the tolerant country he made home.
[Further reading: How serious is Labour’s asylum revolt?]
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