 Welcome to the Scottish Parliament. My name is Ann Packard, and I'm closely involved with the charity called the RSA, and I would like to welcome you to the 2022 Festival of Politics. This year's event celebrates the festival's 18th year of provoking, inspiring and informing people of all ages and from every walk of life to engage in three days of spirited debate. We're delighted you can join us today to participate in the 21st century Migration and Asylum Policies Panel, and I will later invite you to ask questions and make comment. But please keep the questions short. If you're keen to throw your thoughts out into the ether, you can do so using the hashtag FOP 2022. I'm very pleased today to be joined by Dr Zazia Zaza, Dr Sarah Keamby, and Dr Dan Fischer. You can find out more about the panellists on the Scottish Parliament website and indeed that friendly thing called Google. Dr Zaza has been chief executive of the Scottish Refugee Council since 2017, and was previously chief executive of Coventry Refugee and Migrant Centre. Dr Sarah Keamby, who I had the pleasure of chairing on a Zoom event some months ago, is director of Migration Policy Scotland, which is a new independent think tank, promoting a constructive approach to migration, and that project was launched in October 2021. Dr Dan Fischer, on my right, your left, is a geographer with an interest in borders, asylum law and refugee integration. He's currently working on a project titled Scotland's New Scots Strategy towards an international exemplar of best practice in refugee integration. I'm going to start by asking our panellists some questions, and I hope that both those questions and their answers will give you food for thought for your own questions a bit later on. The first one is how well or smoothly is the migration process working in 2022, and that might relate both to the UK and Scotland, of course. And how important is it to challenge the often polarised rhetoric we hear when discussing migrants and asylum seekers? Now, who would like to start on that one? Thank you so much, Samir, and thank you so much for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here. I wanted to start on that question because it gets to the heart of why we set up Migration Policy Scotland. As Anne said, it's set up to promote a constructive approach to migration, and one of the reasons why we thought that was so deeply needed was because of the increasing polarisation of our politics, which meant that the ground to discuss more substantively the options to the dilemmas that migration poses was getting very close to non-existent. It was just questions of should it be more or less are you pro or against? This is an incredibly complicated global phenomenon with local impacts, with options of things that we need to be thinking through. And it's a process that, with the ending of free movement following the UK's departure from the EU, is going through an absolutely, it's a once in a generation change, the ending of free movement. It is the most significant change most of us are likely to see in terms of our labour migration system in the course of our lifetimes. Most of our labour migrants have come through the EU, particularly post-accession in 2004, and so we are now in the middle of a really big shift, and we're in the middle of a really big shift at a time where it's really difficult to know what's going on. To some degree, COVID has massively disrupted our data sources, so we're a little bit more in the dark than we used to be. We are also in the middle of a scheduled change to how migration data is gathered, so we have statistics that we're not quite sure how we compare them with what's going on before. So it's really difficult to answer how well is that system working in. What we know is that it's done a huge pivot. We haven't seen a change to net migration post Brexit. The number is still roughly around 230,000, but what we have seen is almost unprecedented switch in the numbers where those people are coming from, and where there used to be quite a lot coming from the EU, they're now almost exclusively coming from outside the EU. What that means in practice is something I think we still need to think through, because I think, for instance, in Scotland, the increase in migration that we've seen in Scotland over the last 20 years has mainly been through accession, and we've gotten quite good at that, we've gotten good at accession migrants, but now we probably need to get good at something else, and we're not quite sure what that is yet. So I think there are some real concerns there about how well it's working, how well it will meet labour shortages, what the options are for using any of that to address population concerns, but the answer is that we still don't know and we're still not getting to a point where we can have a sensible conversation about that, and that's something that we're really looking to change at NPS. Jan. Yeah, sure. Thanks Sarah. I think on the whole we'll agree a lot on this panel on things. I think I'll talk briefly on the matter of rhetoric, and I think this is someone who spends some time dipping in and out of Twitter. Rhetoric is a scary word and scary thing right now, but I think if there's one benefit of Brexit, which I don't know if there is, but one benefit might be that we are all becoming slightly more familiar with the complexity of borders and how hard it is to navigate both borders physically and also the bureaucracy, the amount of bureaucratic hurdles that people encounter when migrating, and this is something that in the era of free movement I think we've all managed to escape somewhat, and yet as someone who's, okay, brief aside, my wife just got sent some of her old belongings from Italy and basically our customs tried to charge her for this, and all of a sudden you're just like, oh she's from Italy, sorry, and all of a sudden we're just encountering all these small hurdles that we've never encountered before. And my hope, and maybe I'm quite naive, but my hope is that by encountering all these hurdles now, the general public will start to understand the complexities of borders more, and as a result hopefully our rhetoric around migration might become slightly less black and white. Although pattern and volume perhaps have changed since the period you were in England, would you like to come in on that with your experience both of Coventry and Scotland? Yeah, I think if you were asking for a very short answer whether the system is working swiftly, I think the answer is no. I think what we need to look at is that we haven't done over the last 20 to 25 years is two things. We've not tried to understand the scale of the issue, and secondly we've not tried to understand why people are moving in the first place. So the scale, friends, if we just pause for a moment now, there are 100 million people forced to flee their homes around the world. That is the scale. The majority of these are women and children and families. There are 100,000 people stuck in the UK's asylum system. Not that these people arrived yesterday altogether. Some of these people are waiting for years. You heard the broken asylum system. It's not broken by the people arriving. It's the ineffective, inefficient system that we have. So it's the incompetence that has led to 100,000 people who have hopes and aspirations, just like me and many others, to give to this country, to have a dignified life, a roof above their head and be part of our society, are kept out. There are 30,000 people kept in temporary detention type accommodation. There are 10,000 people who put their lives on the line to serve British interests, who were evacuated after spending nights on the tarmac in Kabul, who arrived here. They're still in hotels. 10,000 people, they arrived with rights, they've got status, they can work. They worked for us in Helmand. They can work for us in Edinburgh. They can work for us in London. Those people have the language skills. They have all the clearances done that they kept in hotels. So I think if you look at the scale and understand the scale, then we will know what the system is, what the system could look like. But before we try to think about the system, I think we need to think about this fundamental question of why are people moving. People are moving because of inequalities. Inequalities in the right to be safe and be protected. Inequalities in the right to have access to health. Inequalities in the right to be able to wake up in the morning and take your children to school. Inequalities is at the heart of why people move. Unless we understand that, no system will work or help us to address the global migration and refugee crisis. Thank you very much. I'm going to move to the second question. But please don't forget to store in your mind anything which is said to ask your own questions in due course. According to the UNHCR, over 5 million refugees from Ukraine have entered Poland, Romania and Hungary with the United Kingdom taking in less per capita than most other European countries. Should more be done, and clearly you've made that point, to ensure that refugees are, and this is not my word, it's a word given to me, distributed evenly throughout Europe. I think, I would like it to have read, should more be done to ensure that refugees are welcomed evenly throughout Europe. Sarah, let's start. I think, we need to see what the UK did, and I think we did something that no other states around the world has done. We know the images on our TV screens reminded us from Ukraine, reminded us how life can change for people overnight. Those images also reminded us of the upswelling of public generosity, the goodwill of each and every one of you trying to reach out to help Ukrainians. What the UK did was introduced a visa scheme for refugees. Refugees don't need visas. Refugees need protection. Currently, if you look at the Ukraine scheme, there's homes for Ukraine scheme, there is a Ukraine family scheme, there was a super sponsor scheme, there was a Ukraine extension scheme, there was God knows whatever other scheme, and if you look at the Afghan protection, there is the Afghan refugee citizens protection ACRS, and then there's an Arab programme and then there's another one just introduced recently. Refugees don't need schemes, they need protection. The UK had that moment to show leadership like any other countries like Europe, which lifted its temporary legislation to protect people. Ireland didn't say we need a visa for people to arrive here. So again, what we've done in response to Ukraine in terms of the public response, the upswelling of public generosity, and the work that all our civil servants, the governments and others have done is remarkable. There's a lot of really good effort gone into it. The problem is the way we responded to Ukraine. We asked refugees to apply for a visa, fill in 90 pages long application forms when Putin's bombs were dropping. The problem is there. We could have done a lot more there. Not everyone from Ukraine will come here, not everyone from Afghanistan fled. When I became displaced with my family in the 1990s, not all of us wanted to go to another country. We counted days, months, weeks and years in a refugee camp to return back and rebuild our home. Many of the Ukrainians that I meet here on Tuesday I was on the ship in Leight and I spoke to some families. People want to go back to rebuild their lives. But we need to treat them with dignity and respect. We need to give them a chance if they want to rebuild their life here. We need to invest in that. If they want to go back, we need to give them a dignified return. Sadly, the response that the UK gave was out of the beyond refugee convention because Ukraine happened at a time when the UK was working on punitive nationality and borders bill which criminalises people like me who arrived in the back of a lorry here 23 years ago. So there was no way the UK government could have said all Ukrainian refugees are welcome because that would have then said we need to scrap the bill. Sarah, do you want to add something? It's important to recognise that we're answering this question in the context of Scotland having recently paused its process of accepting more Ukrainian refugees. Basically a large part of the reason for this is to be frank the mess that our reception has been of UK refugees and I don't exactly like to point fingers but the UK government has a lot to answer for and Sabir has eloquently spoken about the visa scheme and that caused an immense number of blockages pre-arrival of Ukrainian refugees. What we then had was that in Scotland the UK government decided to bypass local authorities who have been in charge of the Syrian resettlement scheme in the past and instead went straight to households asking if they could support and by no means attributing any blame to households I'm incredibly thankful for anyone that's supporting Ukrainian refugees but the issue is that local authorities had no say or control over how this process would happen and as a result this is now a scheme which is facing immense problems as they were trying to solve it in the short term without knowing whether or not this is going to be a medium or long term problem and as a result funds have been used in certain ways which might not have been and I'll say one more thing which is how do you make it for someone to arrive through visa schemes the less likely it is that they will then decide to try to go back to for example Ukraine if they are uncertain of what will happen next time or what will happen next so then as a result you are forcing people to live in a place where they might not want to be precisely because they fear not being able to come back if something happens I'll just feed in very briefly so in terms of migration as a field we tend to distinguish between protection migration and non-protection migration so protection migration are the refugee and asylum issues that Sabir focuses on our work at NPS is on non-protection migration so people who come to work to study to join their families and one of the reasons we distinguish and that distinction obviously isn't quite that clear cut people's reasons are often very mixed but one of the reasons we distinguish is because that puts you into a different logic one is allowing people to come somewhere because they need safety and that is the right thing to do the other is about while people move and states control access to their territory and states might have different things that they try to do in relation to that they might want to build up certain sectors of their industry they might have population concerns they are addressing they might recognise that people should be able to live with their spouses and their family but those are two slightly different sets of considerations and I think what Sabir highlighted is a bit how given the amount of pressure we have on this at the moment in political terms and in other terms we are seeing a running together of these two things in really unhelpful ways like requiring people who need protection migration to apply for visas which is really a labour migration thing but it's also going back to this point about the symbolic and I think Dan mentioned the issue with a lot of this remaining rhetorical is that while we have had some good responses in rhetoric what is happening in practice is really deficient and that's where and it's not on protection migration I want to do that but I really think there needs to be more done to turn that rhetoric into practical reality and to have those conversations rather than to have the political signalling conversations that we tend to have about these issues and those conversations are very complex actually how do you provide entry for hundreds of thousands of people how do you accommodate them how do you integrate them into your society how do you give them the right menu of options those are conversations we should be having but instead we're involved in a sort of either we're being tough or we're signalling that we're being really generous and I just think we really need to make more space for that practical work and that really constructive dialogue to happen on the practical options about how we turn what are sometimes good intentions into reality but returning back to your question also is to think about and I don't know because this is not my field it does seem that there is a huge amount of pressure on the refugee convention and on the systems for how states accommodate people who are fleeing and that those systems need to adapt but there seems very little prospect for coming to good solutions on that given our current geopolitics but I think that's something that both Sabir and Dan have much more to add on than I do and I think we'll have questions where we can reflect on that Dan would you like to lead on this one what do you believe is the best practice when it comes to focusing on the integration of migrants and refugees versus ensuring that people are able to maintain their own identity and specifically is a multicultural or assimilationist approach more effective yeah so I'm just making notes so I'll just briefly explain the kind of two approaches that you've mentioned assimilationist is fairly simple it means people arrive and they will adopt our norms and values and assimilate multicultural has kind of had a bad rep which I think is slightly unfair but in principle kind of means that people are able to maintain their own cultural norms within a kind of host society and I would add a third to that which isn't on the question but there's intercultural where the idea is that basically instead of multicultural where to kind of sit alongside intercultural accepts that there is going to be change on both sides and in brief that's kind of where the answer lies which is where if we try to have a political system in which integration is understood as either you assimilate or you don't then we're just heading towards problems because it's unrealistic and frankly fairly incumain to assume that people will completely assimilate our norms and values it's also unrealistic to assume that people will live alongside each other and not change instead what part of my project that I'm working on is trying to help define how people and communities change when they move to a new place and how we can encourage this change to be a productive change so that's I hope a fairly short answer I think this always ends up becoming the battle of terminology you have these different bits of jargon trying to describe different approaches is it this, is it that and I think what Dan has said is very helpful is that of course what actually happens in practice is a little bit of both but having said that I think one of the things that troubles me with integration policy is that it seems to me that whenever we come up with a new phase of integration policy it's a policy that seems actually much better suited to the migration that we had about 10, 20 years ago so for instance multiculturalism was a policy where you had large that to me in its inception was linked to a time when migrants came in much larger blocks from certain countries so you kind of had blocks and this idea that there'd be different blocks and they'd have their things and you would recognise that in law or at least in policy somehow and right now for political reasons maybe we would say we're in a simulationist term so there's also a lot of signalling going on here even though I think that the EU kind of phrasing that integration is a two way process seems to me like really just yes of course it is people change and how they change and what they might change and what differs depending on some of what they bring with them but also the context they're in and where they're trying to go and what really troubles me with some of this at the moment is that the one thing that we do see in migration data now for the UK and I think this will probably hold fast from a lot of Europe is that migration to the UK is diversifying rapidly it's no longer from the empire or increasingly from the EU it's actually we're seeing more and more people coming from more and more countries and they're going to more and more different places and in Scotland I think that's really important as well because they're also going to places where migrants didn't go to before they're going to rural areas, they're going where the jobs are and I think we need to adapt how we think of integration and what we want from it in relation to what's actually going on and we consistently fail to do that because we have these arguments that are really about either about our conceptions of the past which are often nostalgically wrong with their sense of coherence or our conceptions of the future which are also maybe mistakenly optimistic where everybody lives in cosmopolitan harmony and actually you know we're not having the more honest practical conversations about okay so if all of these people are going to live together and it's going to work really well how do we do that what are the good things we could get out of that and what are the things, the challenges that we're going to have to try and find ways of tackling together and who talks about that with each other and who decides and that to me is completely missing at the moment Role for civil society rather than the politicians maybe, Dan and then I'll go to... Yeah I just wanted to really quickly jump in on you were talking about two way process of integration and what I found really interesting recently is that there's two definitions of two way integration there's always multiple definitions of everything but I'll just big up Scotland for a second so for the most part when you read two way process of integration in policy documents what it means is people will, migrants will arrive and then they will to a certain extent adopt norms and values and then the two way part often means that the host society will help them do this and that's not how I understand two way integration and that's also not how Scotland through its new Scott strategy understands two way integration Scotland currently understands two way integration being that the host society will also adapt to people arriving so I just wanted, in terms of kind of difficult conversations that need to happen and kind of adjusting our rhetoric I think that's, it's really important to kind of be aware of these multiple meanings that people have when they use certain words and yeah so I just wanted to add Yeah I think for me integration happens when both sides the arriving community and the state fully discharge their responsibilities sadly with recent examples the burden of integration is very much on the person arriving so the state in terms of rights a rights based approach doesn't happen so if we take the example of let's say the Avgans in hotels and the Ukrainians on the ship integration does not begin in the back of a hotel room it begins within our communities in our post offices in our bus stops in our neighbourhoods so if you put people away and then expect them to speak and sound like us and that doesn't work and even within the UK policy of asylum as well accommodation centres putting people away locking them away or keeping them away I know we've got a housing crisis, we've got other issues, we've got cost of living and so on if we expect people to sound and behave like us then we need to invest in them and give them a chance and opportunity as well and I look back on my own example because for me integration wasn't an easel course or somebody teaching me how to integrate it was the society accepting me and giving me a chance I arrived from Afghanistan from a monofate, monocultural society the Indian culture I knew was the Afghan culture the only religion I knew about was Islam in 2017 when I was leaving Coventry I was a member of Coventry Cathedral Council advising the Bishop of Coventry on interfaith matters so how do we make that kind of transition happen for everyone so I think integration becomes problematic when the burden is on the person but the state is trying to be regressive in its approach to welcoming people so again it goes to that question of inequalities and injustices so I don't know, I'll leave it to you whether I've integrated or not but in terms of my rights I don't think I've integrated so in 2019 when I was privileged to receive a honorary doctorate from University of Glasgow the only person I could think of was my dad to be at that ceremony with me and when I invited him over the him office refused him so I'm not fully counted because I'm not trusted in a way so has integration happened for me? well I think in terms of how I speak maybe it has has integration happened for me in terms of all my rights even my children rights as well no it hasn't because they are deprived of seeing their granddad on a special day so thanks but was there a photograph of you with him in he arrived two days before the that's right but there was that marvellous photograph in the newspaper yeah we managed to get him over yeah excuse me before we go on any further is this a lecture we're getting are we supposed to be having a debate I would like to support that statement the pattern of events in the Festival of Politics is determined by the Parliament and has been this format for many years and it involves I would not ask about this this should be a debate, not a lecture I want to name my opinions known about the sound of immigration I didn't come here just to hear the same old story that we hear you may frame a question when it reaches the question point meantime I will continue in the Parliament's format with thanks to those of you who are keeping your questions as opposed to your opinions and you can make those elsewhere that anybody sorry staff could you escort these people could you escort these people out if they're going to disrupt please Ann please do not disrupt the event I am following the format requested of panel chairs by the Scottish Parliament as determined by the Parliament's corporate body please bear with that on to the climate crisis and I will perhaps roll the three questions together so that you do have your chance to frame succinct questions not give opinions the climate crisis is set to increase global displacement and how in Europe and elsewhere should we prepare for this and measures that might be implemented then discussion around the impact that migration has on the host countries economy and is migration a solution for countries with an ageing workforce and Germany and Spain have been cited and more importantly looking to the future and I'm mindful here also that this Parliament has an effective futures forum what policies would you like to see Europe implement Sarah to try on the three questions I will try and remember them so I think on climate crisis you will remember an issue of water was something that Parag cannot mention I will leave that that's more of a protection question so I think in terms of economic impacts what we know from the evidence is that migration has been on balance beneficial economically and fiscally migrants have paid in more in tax and they've taken out in services we don't have evidence for that migrants have been displacing British workers from jobs we do have some limited evidence that there may have been some wage level pressure on wages in some lower paid sectors but so on balance we see that this has been generally positive for the UK economy and I think we're going into now with the end of free movement obviously that will be more restrictive and we have more exclusion from that lower end of migration into those kind of sectors where there may have been wage pressure is no longer possible but I suppose we are moving from an age of free movement that's been sort of cheap movement because in a way employers through the new system it's a lot clunkier it's a lot more burdensome and it's a lot more costly so I think it is going to be interesting to see how business responds to that and I think there will be labour shortages there are options for what to do about some of that but we will see the impact of that in economic terms and I expect it to be negative in terms of population it's a really really complicated question to Germany and Spain but I think what we need to remember is that Scotland is actually the forerun in terms of population ageing across Western Europe we have the fastest ageing population and we have had a population strategy since the early 2000s of which migration should play a role and it can play the role in offsetting ageing because obviously migrants also age so what it can do is it can buy you time you can't really bring in migration at a scale to combat population decline population ageing because the numbers just get too big so replacement migration isn't really an option most experts agree on that the demographers agree on that but there is a role for migration to maintain the viability of areas that are experiencing really rapid population ageing and population decline and I think we are seeing that in parts of rural Scotland but it is a really complicated picture because you need to address the issues that are making population leave areas those factors lack of availability of jobs pressures on housing those will affect migrants just as much as it affects the people who are leaving those areas so unless you kind of come up with a more holistic solution not how that works but there is a role for that and it will be an increasingly important role particularly in sectors like care like health we know in the workforce planning that there is a lot of ageing out of that workforce particularly at senior levels expected over the next 5 to 10 years and that will have serious impacts on all of us and it will have impacts that we can't hope to mitigate through training people up into those jobs will take longer than at the time it's going to take to age them out so we need to have a solution somewhere and that's what I mean migrants can buy you time in that by bringing that in but it is a complicated solution and it's one I really think we need to start investing the capacity to think through in much more detail so that we can make it happen so that we can take that and that's what I'm going to say that's what I'm going to say because I think that's a great question and I'm going to take any of those because then I'm going to move towards the public question I will talk briefly about questions of employment and I'll talk from the context of asylum and refugees because that's what I know I'll just throw out some statistics for you for a second there are two percent of people seeking asylum in the UK left school at the age of 20 or higher compared to 23% of the UK national average this means that we have a surprising look it means that we have a very talented group of people who are currently either unable to work or also under employed as in they are accepting jobs far below their education and there are lots of structural barriers in their way one of which is current under provision of ESOL as in learning English another is that in the UK we are really bad at recognising non-UK qualifications and certificates and we have very few means of people to convert non-UK based accreditation that they have so when we talk about the role of migrants filling jobs often people are hoping that they will fill low skill jobs which they shouldn't have to we have plenty of higher skill jobs that need to be filled and also people are skilled to fill these but they are unable to at the moment in the UK and I think this is a really important thing to mention in the context of Labour I think we are on a shared journey no matter where people come from what skills they bring or not bring people contribute in one way or another I used my own example I arrived with only seven years of formal education and when I arrived in the UK if you would ask me to be chief executive of the Scottish Refugee Council I might have run back to Afghanistan but again it is believing in what people bring to them is their dreams and hopes and I think we need to invest in those after the second world war people from all backgrounds came and helped in rebuilding Europe and the UK and today the second generation is our lawyers, accountants politicians home secretary and the same will happen with others as well that will arrive today people want to be safe people want to have a roof above their head people want to have a dignified income they are just like us people want to go about their life and make a positive contribution so I think we need to have a future policy that is based on it has got a rights based approach it is one that is built has got any whatever that system is it needs to have compassion at the heart of it and we also want to make sure that we continue with that approach of solidarity rather than whether these people will address our population crisis or other crisis and so on I think let's see what they will give not instead of I think there needs to be that global solidarity and Covid was one of the best reminders how much we rely on one another and how much our wellbeing is dependent on one another you never know we might need protection and I think we need to treat people the way we would want to be treated Sarah just before I go to the audience you mentioned earlier the conventions how realistic is it to hope and with what degree of speed and these things are slow do you think a revisions to existing or totally new conventions could and should be introduced so I I'm not able to answer that question I don't work on climate migration or on protection conventions so I don't know I think these things are very difficult to do you need agreement geopolitical agreement I think my general sense of global geopolitics and who's feeling like they might want to step up to the plate on that makes me feel rather not optimistic is how I would put that so I I think what's really interesting with climate the potential for climate migration that people might have to leave places because weather makes it difficult for them to leave there is that it might make us all think about what if that climate crisis was here what if we had to leave here and go somewhere else what might we want in terms of our reception elsewhere I think it does provide an opportunity to to imagine what that might be like in a way that it feels often when we talk particularly about asylum and refugees that we are talking about people coming from areas of the world that are less stable less wealthy and that we don't see that as something that might apply to ourselves and I think it's actually quite useful I think what was very interesting about the refugee convention is that it came out of the turmoil of post-war Europe where people were much more used to the idea of this could happen to me and it could happen to the people I love and what does that mean for how we should work together I agree with Sabir on that I think there is a role for compassion there but I think it's in relation to protection for myself I do think there is legitimacy in states thinking this is what we are trying to plan and how does migration sit into that and how does that mean that we select the migrants in those other parts of our migration system that's not about protection and not all of that can be about equality and global solidarity some of that is about while we want to grow our tech sector so that's who we are prioritising people who can help us do that and I think that's fine and I think it's actually necessary and I think it's good to be organised and constructive in that way I'll very quickly add that the very first climate refugee was recognised last year by the UNHCR so this is something that has now got precedent but that's not being recognised by a national agency such as the Home Office but there is international precedent the thing I would add to this about forward planning and I agree with you that my worry in this context of climate migration is that the people that are doing this planning right now are usually thinking in a kind of securitised manner and they're thinking what does this mean for security instead of asking questions like you were saying about what does this mean for employment my migration in general integration etc and my one message in this context would be to desecuritise a kind of thinking around climate migration Thanks I'm going to turn now to questions but before I do that I would like to say that I think that reading and I'm probably as old as some other members of the audience and older than some younger members like Amarth like that the broad sheets in the United Kingdom have in my lifetime provided astonishing reading and some of the most astonishing reading has been the contributions of those people who have come to this country to the United Kingdom in the most difficult of circumstances and I think we need to allow those of us who come to our shores now to make their singular contribution so now could I look for questions if you would raise your hand please for one of the staff to bring your microphone please make it a short question so that other people have a turn to ask a question if that's possible Thank you I'm interested in the question of how we do help people to integrate quickly by achieving their own personal aims I've worked with a number of refugees over the years and found that stuck in the system the people they encounter are very invested in their own system but often they put up barriers because they don't actually ask the person what they want to achieve and what's the quickest route and if I may give one quick example Syrian friend who has years of experience of driving has been told he has to pass the theory test before he can do that his job coach gave him a commitment two years ago to learn English at no point did anybody check A how he was to achieve that how he was getting on give him any target as to when he'd achieved sufficient English and when asked if they could help him to get through the driving test he was told no sorry we can't do that an interpreter who'd worked with other Syrians got ten Syrians through the test in nine months by producing his own course and offering to help them through it funding and he's self-employed so he can't do that why can't we just set up simple systems and why can't we allow people waiting in a system that often takes years to work while they wait other countries can do that thank you Joseph Kikoff I'm happy to respond to that thank you I think there is opportunities currently based on learning from Ukraine where a lot of employers are coming forward to engage with refugees into their work so it's not a kind of like asking after employers employers coming forward themselves so it could be driving instructors others and so on I think there is some hope that based on what we are learning from Ukraine to make life better for others as well to engage with employment sooner but there are barriers within the system there are barriers, policy barriers for example people seeking asylum are not allowed to work so we are campaigning on that with others across the UK so in that period however long that might be well the Home Office's target was six months but there are some people who are in the system for six years or more and we miss out on their skills we miss out on what they've got to contribute but also life is difficult for them with 40 pounds a week as well so we do hope that Ukraine will help in improving that system and I think maybe through our integration policies as well so in Scotland we've got the new Scots refugee integration strategy there is a strong focus on employability, on upscaling and a lot of people from refugee backgrounds particularly but others too come from an entrepreneurial background I think there is a lot of people who would want to set up their own businesses no one wants to be a burden on anyone everyone wants to have a dignified income and want to be part of the society and I was at Glasgow airport welcoming Ukrainian families and the first word that I remembered from my time of going to school in Afghanistan we were taught Russian so I didn't learn much but I remember the word robot which is work so the first thing I heard was work and I asked them are they thinking about yes the first question was can we find job or can we work here in Scotland so people come with that potential there might be leaving behind everything but ultimately they want to like all of us want to be able to have a dignified income I'll add to that especially because your question is about language and that is really important and the new Scots integration strategy recognises the importance of language in the context of integration and yet language at the moment is learning language is something that is both misunderstood and underfunded in Scotland right now one of the ways in which it's misunderstood is that there's this belief right now that people will go to language classes learn enough English to then access a job or pass a test and anyone that's learned a second language will know you learn by doing and so by having this mentality that people will first access language classes and then access a job it's just a very back to front way of thinking and we are also undervaluing the role of interpreters in this integration context and some of the refugee run businesses in Edinburgh have been able to be set up because they've had interpreters and people who decided to give their assistance because they understood the number of hoops that need to be jumped through before you can open a business I was speaking to someone from COSLA COSLA is the association of local authorities and he was saying that the DWP can see how many people access their business gateway online service to set up a business it's all in English with zero support for anyone working in another language as soon as people encounter this website the number of people that just leave it straight away is incredible and so this is where we've all mentioned how complex integration and migration is but it's about understanding what you can do about this complexity and one of these things is, as I said, to recognise or help people have their accreditation recognised and the other is to not think that language comes before work it's both together I'm going to be very brief and just echo both the panel and yourself in recognising that we have these problematic aspects particularly in relation to asylum and refugee where we keep people outside work in a way that effectively de-skills them and isolates them but also that when we do the training we don't do it in ways that are particularly helpful and that's something that we could do with changes so that we can unlock all of that potential as well as make it easier on people you know right, I have two people here two men, one older, if I may say that and one younger, we'll take the older one first right I'm particularly interested in the asylum system so what are the legal criteria for granting asylum because I notice politicians are very vague about this so we'll start so currently as you arrive you would claim asylum on arrival and the UK does not give an asylum visa so there's no way of you applying to the UK and then arriving apart from the Afghan scheme and the Ukrainian schemes that were introduced in response to this crisis there's no other route for people to arrive in the UK the UK's current system is that you need to arrive on our shores to then claim asylum and that process could take quite a long time and that's what I mentioned there's about 100,000 people in that system all waiting to be processed some there are some cases where people might get refused or other people might be asked for additional evidence to present but the new nationality and borders act that has been introduced will make that even problematic because what happens is that currently the system is that you need to convince the UK that you are fleeing persecution or human rights violations or a war and then based on that then you either are given refugee status or some form of status or you're refused and then you're appealed the nationality and borders act that was ratified at the green speech more or less stipulates that the focus will move from why you are fleeing to how you are fleeing so there is a provision for inadmissibility in this new act so if you arrive through so the system will be focusing on which route you took to come to the UK if you arrive through various states then you are inadmissible you could be a woman from Afghanistan fleeing from Helmand where you lost your husband fighting with British Armed Forces no other route for you to flee you arrive here in the UK you could be deemed inadmissible and some of you might have heard about the Rwanda plans as well that you could be sent to Rwanda not for your case to be resolved there but just simply being dumped there to claim asylum in Rwanda the just because you asked about definitions I mean the I can't remember the exact definition off my head but basically you have to be able to prove that you have a well-founded fear of persecution for being a member of a certain group or of such a nationality it gets slightly complicated because you have a grant of refugee status or you have humanitarian protection which is usually if you can prove that it's unsafe for you to return so a lot of people from let's say Afghanistan or Syria right now they will receive some form of humanitarian protection because they can't necessarily prove that they themselves will be persecuted but they can prove that their country is an unsafe place to be in so it is slightly complicated but it's less complicated than we pretend Do you agree that politicians tend to help to escape what is happening? Yeah I think a lot of what's happening right now is that the waters are getting muddied with our Home Secretary mentioning the idea of economic refugees that is not under the definition that exists but as a result it complicates matters immensely they are people seeking asylum and they should be granted refugee status the second row So this is a bit more regarding like government rhetoric because obviously it can influence public opinion even if what the actual provisions that they put in place are still inadequate so for example when the Ukraine war is happening the government point of view seems to be all Ukrainian welcome we support Ukrainian terror when the migrants seem to be coming from Syria and countries like this the talk was about a migration crisis as if our borders were under siege so even like while the response to Ukraine is said is inadequate with the visa systems that rhetoric can still influence public opinion about how society looks upon migrants so I was wondering what you thought your reasons were for that was it just politically convenient or is it possibly something that's more deep-seated in racism or along those lines with Syria being for example with some majority country whereas Ukraine as a country is majority white I think again this we want to jump to conclusions on this but what it is is that when a crisis happens like Ukraine and Afghanistan and Syria people tend to move within the region they become displaced in the region and it's a pressure on that region initially so when the Afghan crisis happened it was the neighbouring countries and same with Syria as well but because Ukraine is so close it's within that region where then the region thinks that we need to do some things I think to be fair to European states UK and others is Ukraine is closed it's here there needs to be that response to what we all can do but again there is also that potential of differential treatment of people fleeing almost similar situation and I think that creates a sort of like there's no homes for Afghans or homes for Syria and the scheme and others and so on so the problem is these various schemes so if we were if we have an asylum system that is working based on the foundations of the refugee convention then that gives us a system that will have a flow so our call from within the refugee support sector was that Ukraine and Afghanistan clearly reminded us how these people who are within our asylum system have fled so that in a sense if there is Afghans within that system if there are Syrians they're fleeing crisis, they're fleeing war and if there was some form of an amnesty and a swifter processing of people within their asylum system which is 100,000 people in the waiting list that would have given the UK 100,000 supported accommodation units through their asylum system and then there wouldn't have been need for the government to say I want all of you to open up your spare rooms to welcome we could have added that as well but that would have helped the government so is that backlog that has created those issues and again I think the other point in this is narrative as well I think narrative does make a difference sadly over the last few years the narrative is very much problematising the refugee issues seeing it as a crisis, as a problem rather than as some form of solidarity for us to help and support these people because they're fleeing dreadful situation I think that's been a really good answer to your specific question but I wanted to take the opportunity to pan out slightly from it and just talk about the issue of government rhetoric on migration more generally and I think migration is a really curious policy area because it has this weird double faced edge it's got the in liberal democratic states it's got the expansionary inclusionary bit which is about solidarity human rights, universalist principles and liberal norms and it's got an exclusionary element which is more us and them and this is our territory and we're allowed to keep certain people out and of course publics in terms of their opinions right across that spectrum there are some people who are against immigration and there are some people who are pro-immigration and those two elements can be quite fixed but there is also the vast majority of people are kind of in the middle and some people call those the anxious middle they don't quite know what to think and what they think depends on which type of immigration you're talking about and what types of issues there are some people who worry about jobs there's other people who worry about cultural issues there's people who worry about security and I think government rhetoric is trying to play to different audiences and it's also mixing in these different groups in ways that are often unhelpful so they'll talk about migration when they mean asylum they'll talk about X when they mean Y so you have this sort of muddle and you also have this very polarised politics in which in my view immigration functions as kind of a touchstone or a proxy issue it's a way of talking about discontents about change the world is changing and it's actually very disconcerting and it's seeing the reason for this change is immigration that's what's making it all change in ways I don't like it's a kind of a way of grabbing on to an explanation for that or we use it as a proxy for talking about race when to be honest most migrants actually aren't from a BME background so we could talk that some of them have been racialised but it's sort of so it becomes a proxy issue for things that are difficult for all kinds of discontents and again there is even particularly in the Scottish context also discontents about our constitutional settlement so that what we would do would be very different if we had powers over immigration is another way of using immigration as a proxy issue so it's a way of signalling and it's a way of trying to to say yes as a government we are addressing your issues I think one of the things that I found most interesting is that in the launch of the new UK immigration system in the proposals for that was the first time that I'd ever seen in 20 years in working in immigration policy is that I'd seen a labour migration strategy that no longer used the economy as a rationale for what they were doing so it wasn't we're doing this because it's going to generate work it's going to generate more productivity it was like we're doing this because this is what people voted for with Brexit and that was in my analysis of that was well we're doing this we already know that there will be economic damage we know that I mean at least in the short term where that ends up in the long term I don't know maybe there is a policy and that once firms adjust and so on we will have changed our economic model in ways that we'll look back upon and say okay that was that was necessary, painful but necessary but currently we're saying well we're doing this because this is what the British people wanted and it's going to hurt and it's currently hurting in economic terms it really is and I think I don't know as that works its way through maybe we'll start realising that actually there are there is a need for migration in a way that we didn't need to recognise previously or maybe that pain will be absorbed in other ways I don't know but I think I think there is this thing about the symbolic function of how this works and the need to both understand that but also to try to move the conversation on so that we can do more constructive and productive things in this space Thank you very much Could I just also since I don't see a hand I'm waiting to see another hand ask how you feel the media deals adequately inadequately well or badly with issues around migration and asylum I think media has got a clear role but I think again we shouldn't get into this territory of giving oxygen to the negatives that have been said but I think there is lots of positive media as well and there will be lots of positive from the Ukraine experience people welcoming other people fleeing war into their houses and their rooms and sharing with them whatever little they have I do hope there will be lots of really positive stories coming out of that or friendship or people sharing and I think we also all have a role to highlight and celebrate because the problem is that the minute there is a negative article about refugees or about migration even those of us that might not like that article jump on to it and then use our own platform to share it and give it oxygen and I think the media has got a role but I think we also have a role in telling a powerful story of things working well so before in June there was the refugee festival a lot of really positive stories of people living side by side or welcoming one another or supporting one we need to be telling those stories to counter that negative narrative I don't think we can change the media and say well you shouldn't produce these articles they will continue to do that that's their business model I think the role for all of us is to see where we can tell a positive story to counter that negative story and I think there's lots of positive stories and I think in that work again from our perspective at Scottish Refugee Council during the festival this year we had a story telling project we also had media awards for journalists who had done positive and challenging reporting on refugee issues and I think we also need to allow people with lived experiences to tell the story so instead of an academic or someone else who's read about migration then let somebody who's had that journey to write an article it might not be perfect but it could tell a more profound and powerful story to counter the negative stories There's questions over there Did you have a hand up? Hi First of all just to thank the panel and I really find your contribution very reflective and insightful so I just want to make that point that's appreciated from my perspective firstly secondly if the panel could cover something on othering and silencing and in relation to this topic around migration what I feel is very nuanced just hearing different perspective from the panel there's so many complex and sometimes contextualized conversations and people can perhaps be detached if they don't know much about it so my question is like how can we simplify that and also how can we call it out of the narrative and the conversation on racism for example on how the connection between migration and othering I think it's important to start naming it as well and that's the thing and also the silencing aspect what I mean by that is is that sometimes there's words around lefty lawyers or lefty do-gooders groups that come in that space who are perhaps misinformed around these issues how can we make sure that we simplify and bring them on board around understanding the complexities on this topic I believe you had your hand up as well are you going to take these two together? I had a very specific question for Sarah if I may because she said that there would be economic consequences of the current migration policies but you said earlier that the figures of 230,000 migrants were about the same so I didn't quite understand why there should be any economic issues if the figures are more or less the same so that's another part of this othering which I would welcome the panel's comments on maybe another untold piece of this is that the Home Office spend on Ukrainian refugees is going to be taken out of the overseas development assistance budget and it's now at 25% of that and that means that this all goes into that other foreign piece instead of being seen as something different so that people are now going to suffer because of that as well thank you I need to apologise the person who I gathered with somebody who's had a hand up who I didn't see so my apology for that these two questions and then the last one so if you'd like to answer Mohammed's question and this one can I answer the very specific one about the numbers? so what the difference is why I think there's going to be economic consequences and I think in terms of the data what we're seeing is we're seeing a shift from EU to non EU and I think within that also we are seeing a change in the composition of that migration so there's more of it so previously non EU migration tended to be for people coming for family reasons and students so there'll be less labour migrants and we know that the new system doesn't let you recruit labour migrants below a particular salary and skill threshold so that's something that free movement used to provide labour for and it's particularly industries like hospitality care farming and food processing where there are now shortages because that's the labour supply that they were relying on and particularly I think in things like that are seasonal in a way data takes a while to kind of get its way through the system but what I'm hearing from certain places is for instance that a lot of farms this year have last year they couldn't get the crops out the ground they couldn't get the labour in those months so this year they haven't put the crops in the ground they've shifted bits of food processing like Scottish salmon off to Spain they're telling me they don't think they'll ever bring it back because they just can't get the workers to work in that anymore so we've lost that part of the food processing industry I'm hearing anecdotally I think somebody told me that in the independent care sector particularly in northern Scotland 12 care homes closed because they had staff shortages so I mean obviously there's a huge what is it, is it just the migration is it the economy, is it COVID it's very hard to disentangle that empirically in some way but what we do know is that we used to be able to get people in to work in those types of sectors and in those types of jobs really very easily because they could just come over and as long as they had a passport they could work in those jobs whereas now you need to apply to be a sponsor you need to pay for that they need to go through get a visa you need to keep monitoring you have to have systems in place it's really much more complicated so that's why I think we now have a much clonkier system and while we've got the same number of people like in terms of net migration I don't think they're doing the same things anymore and I think that there are economic consequences for that Could you answer my question? Yes I think it's important to move away from other people I think again as I said earlier COVID reminded us we're all one when we are in crisis we're all one and these people are fleeing crisis and I think we also need to remind the public and everyone that what we're doing now with Ukraine or with Afghanistan or other crisis is not something new we have a history of offering people protection and if we dig deep into our own history each one of us will have links will have connections so it's just giving that message that migration is and will continue to be an important part of our history and offering people protection and sanctuary will be one of the most important values Thank you Now I do apologise I haven't seen your hand up What's the panel's view on the hordes of people crossing the English Channel in Robert Dinges Now some days we're getting 700 people across if the weather was perfect all year round it would bring us into the region of a hell of a lot of people pouring into the UK a small country densely populated So what is your opinion and how should we put a stop to this because it's completely out of control and everybody knows that First of all, thanks for the question I would disagree a horde of people I arrived in that channel and I'm proud of my history of arriving in the back of a lorry in this country that was the only choice given to me I was fleeing the Taliban there was no way of going to the Taliban and saying Mr Taliban I'm fleeing your regime give me a passport and then walk to the British Embassy to stamp it with a visa that didn't exist that was the only choice given to me to cross the channel let me finish my answer and then you can enter so for majority of those people who are crossing the channel that is the only choice and option given to them if we had an effective efficient asylum system if we had a humanitarian visa system where somebody's life was at risk could apply to the UK and if we had an efficient fare system here if we had a family reunion scheme where people could be reunited with their families easily then people will not take those perilous journeys there was no way for me to come to the UK and even today because of what I say here on this stage or anywhere else if there's a risk to my dad there's no way for him to come and join me here he will have to take that journey that is the only option the UK provides there's no asylum visa to the UK there's no family reunion scheme the family reunion if I wanted my dad to come over through family reunion the home office will be asking how many radiators do you have in your house how warm it is they will find a number of reasons to refuse they refuse from a visitor's visa so they would do anything to refuse him on a permanent stay so people have the UK's approach to asylum is very much like don't come here that's what it is simply and the new act is basically saying that if you come here you will be deemed inadmissible and you'll be dumped somewhere else we've got two minutes to wrap up so Sarah and Dan your response to that question please each of you so basically since 1951 the convention states if you've got a well founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, political opinion membership of a particular social group you're entitled to seek asylum in another country so that's the right people have the right to seek asylum sorry could you let me finish so I think and because it doesn't suit states to meet the international obligations one of the ways around that is to make it increasingly difficult for people to arrive on the territory so that they can make claims for asylum and we've now gotten to the stage where we've closed all the other roots in to such a degree that more and more people are turning to Robert Dinghies in a way that is incredibly perilous to them, to the people who end up rescuing them and I think what I would do is have more roots by which people can seek asylum safely in the UK Dan I will very quickly counter your suggestion that something like 48% of people arriving in the UK are Albanian I will also read out some of the UK Home Office's statistics on the percentage of final asylum grants and other humanitarian protection so in 2016 47%, 2018, 45%, 2019, 52% and after that 53% so people who are arriving in the UK and claiming asylum on average half of them are entitled according to our rules and law to refugee protection okay this is a really important fact to bear in mind so in terms of what we do if we squeeze really hard and we do our best to keep people out then we force people into taking very perilous journeys that does not stop people from making perilous journeys because as Sabir said people have a need to make perilous journeys another thing that we need to do is we need to face up to why people as both of my other panellists have said why people are moving and why they choose to move to particular countries sometimes people rely on people smugglers because we have hard borders in which case they don't have a choice as to which country they arrive in sometimes people move because they already speak a language sometimes people move because they already have family or friends in a particular country the reasons why people choose to move to a particular country are really complex and saying oh you've passed through a safe country like France or like Turkey doesn't help in the situation because there are so many reasons why people don't just want to move but they have to move to a particular place I think your statistics emphasise the fragility and volatility of the world and the need for all of us to consider that people should be able to move by safe means in safety to a degree of security and an optimistic future thank you all for your contributions before we close I think I've given you your minute I'm going to get my into trouble with the administration if I run over so we miss end but I would like to thank you all very much for coming today and for contributing in all different ways but most especially Dr Sarah Cianvy and Dr Dan Fisher for your insights and to remind you that there are other festival events taking place today and tomorrow including other strong men of politics killing democracy caused of living crisis elect her on a female political representation at all levels of society and of course the in conversation with the writer and poet Len Cisse on Saturday to name but a few so if you haven't already got tickets for those events do consider getting them now and I hope you have enjoyed this festival politics I think it's one of the most marvellous things the parliament does and I would encourage you to be back here next year if you're not back here tomorrow