 Welcome, everyone, to the first seminar in the Development Studies seminar series. We're very pleased to have Maya Goodfellow joining us. She's going to be talking about debunking the myths about immigration. And Maya, this follows on from her book that's just come out with Vosso called The Hostile Environment. And she's a writer, an academic, a broadcast commentator. She's written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Statesman. And on a range of issues, including UK politics, gender, race and immigration, she has a PhD in the department. And she's, as I say, author of Hostile Environment, How Immigrants Became Scapegoats. And that's out with Vosso. It's just come out, actually. So she's going to speak for about 45 minutes. And then we'll hear from Paru with a few comments. And then there might be a little bit of a Q&A. And then we'll open it out to the floor. Thank you, Faizi, for that. Thank you also to everyone who's involved in putting on this series of events. I know they're really well attended. And I'm really pleased to be able to take part in one of them. Thank you, everyone, for coming as well. And it was a pretty grim Tuesday evening. So what I'm going to do is... So the books that Faizi mentioned, it kind of charts the history of immigration policy and rhetoric in the UK specifically. And looks at some of the main arguments that are made against immigration. And instead of going through that history, what I'm going to do is maybe spend the next half an hour to 40 minutes talking about how the debate has historically manifested and this kind of maps onto a lot of the contemporary discourses we see today. I'll try to mention some of those as well. So I want to challenge essentially the two main arguments that are made against immigration. One, which falls into the camp of economics. And the other, which falls into the camp of culture. But before I want to do that, I want to speak about a particular case which I think illuminates some of the things that I'm going to talk about. And this is the case of joy gardener. So I just want to get... This is not a test. I'm not trying to shame anyone. I just want to get a sense. I've done this a few times and it's always interesting to get a sense in the room of how many of you know who joy gardener is or the case of joy gardener. If you could raise your hand. Okay. So there's maybe a few people. Okay. Yeah, I'm not going to say... Comment on that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk a bit about joy gardener's case. For those of you who know this will be a recap and for those of you who don't, this will be an introduction into what happened to joy gardener. And I'll try to explain why I'm doing this as I go. So joy gardener was born in Jamaica and she grew up in Long Bay, Portland. She came to the UK in 1987 when she was 34 years old and she came to join her mother who had come to the UK from Jamaica just over 20 years earlier in 1961. So her mom came to the UK when Jamaica was still a colony of this country and Jamaica would get independence a year later. So as some of you may or may not know, maybe you've picked some of this up from the coverage of the so-called Windrush scandal over the past few years. Because of the way the UK Nationality Law worked at the time, joy gardener's mother could come to the UK because she lived in a British colony. So she, like anyone else who was living in a colony or former colony could come to the UK as a British citizen. This had long been the case but was essentially put into law through the 1948 Nationality Act. So anyone who lived in a colony or had become a former colony could come to the UK legally as a British citizen. But by the time joy came to join her mother over 20 years later, that British immigration and nationality law had drastically changed. So successive pieces of legislation had been introduced to essentially make it more difficult for people to migrate to the UK. So for people who weren't at the time immigrants, people who were citizens as I've said, a lot of these pieces of legislation essentially turned these people into immigrants. There's something that Gaminda Bamba calls policies of racialisation as opposed to immigration legislation. But a lot of that legislation, I think it's important to know, was introduced by both Conservative and Labour governments. So the Labour Party often talks about its proud anti-racist history and whilst it's true that there has been a lot of anti-racist organizing within the body of the Labour Party, it has also been complicit in implementing some of the most racist pieces of legislation that has ever been seen in past through the House of Commons. And the reason I'm saying that is a lot of that legislation around immigration and nationality was implicitly colour coded. So it wasn't stated in the pieces of legislation themselves, but what a lot of the immigration acts that were introduced from the 1960s onwards were intended to do was to make it more difficult for people of colour from colonies and former colonies to come to the UK. And this is why I widely agreed in much of the academic literature, but there are also politicians from the time who have talked about this and who have noted that if people living in those colonies and former colonies had been white, there would not have been this effort to try and limit immigration in this particular way. And the reason why I think this is important is not only because it impacted Jury Gardner, but because I think it may be less so, it applies less so to people in this room, but at least in our popular discourse, people are quite well-versed with the history of Enoch Powell, the Rivers of Blood speech, the National Front, but what a lot of people are far less well-versed in is the fact that a lot of the ideas that Enoch Powell espoused, a lot of the logics at the heart of some of the speeches made by Enoch Powell were essentially mainstream. They were part of the mainstream, and they exist in a lot of this legislation that was passed through Parliament. And so when politicians aren't denigrating immigration, they're often celebrating it, right? So we hear mainstream politicians talking about immigration as having had a positive impact on the UK if they're going to talk about it positively at all, but they are far less inclined to engage with these very, very insidious and very damaging forms of exclusion that often met people when they arrived or meant that people couldn't come here to begin with. And this telling where racism is knitted into immigration legislation by the party political left and right I think would undermine this notion that is often quite uncritically espoused that the UK is a progressive and welcoming country. We only need to look at a case of Meghan Markle, which I think we will maybe talk about in the Q&A to see actually how false that vision of the UK is now, but it's long been a false vision of the UK. And so thinking about this legislation, a particular piece of legislation that was introduced was the British Nationality Act of 1981. And so until this act was introduced, Joy Gardner would have had the right to British citizenship through her mother. So it's quite complicated how this worked, but essentially this act, which was implemented by a conservative government, it was Margaret Thatcher's government, but the ground for which was actually laid by the Labour government that had come just before it, meant that she couldn't get citizenship. So Joy Gardner came into this country as a tourist and she was only able to stay here for six months under the way that nationality and immigration legislation worked at the time. So though her mother had been able to come, she was not able to come and settle in the UK. So she did come for six months. She came on this tourist visa. But after those six months, she decided to stay in the country. And you know, there's a lot of... I would encourage you all to go and read about this particular case because I can't really do it justice in the amount of time I have. There was a lot of back and forth between the state and immigration officials. So Joy was attempting to stay in the UK. The government was trying to deport her. She was very briefly married. And there were a number of deportation attempts, a number of appeals, and she was essentially trying to find a way to stay in the UK. So to stay in a country where her mother and much of her extended family lived, but also a country where during this time she'd had a son. So this is really where we get to what happened to Joy. So she'd come to the UK, was attempting to stay here, but the government was trying to deport her. And what happened to Joy, this is according to her lawyer and reports from the time, is that on the 28th of July, a group of police officers came to her flat to deport her. And the home office had deliberately not told her that this was going to happen because they claimed that they thought she would abscond. So at this time, she believed that her attempt to stay in the country was still being considered. And what essentially happened is her solicitors received notification later that same day, so the same day on the 28th of July, that her attempt to stay in the UK had been rejected by the home office. But the letters that they received, informed them of this impending deportation, were dated the 26th and 27th of July 1993. So that was two days before this deportation attempt happened before essentially what was an immigration raid. And the immigration minister at the time admitted that those letters were intentionally sent at a later date so that Joy would not be forewarned about this planned deportation. And so her solicitors couldn't advise her about what was going to happen. So on this summer morning, a few months after Stephen Lawrence had been killed, these immigration officials and police turned up at home where she was with her five-year-old son. And I'm not going to go into all the exactly what happened. It's quite graphic what they did to her, but essentially they tried to restrain her. They claimed there was this kind of violent struggle, but it's contested exactly what happened at the time. And because of the way that they restrained her in an incredibly brutal and violent way, the oxygen to her brain was cut off. She suffered brain damage and she eventually died a few days later after this encounter with these immigration officials. Three police officers were tried on manslaughter charges in 1995 and they were all acquitted and there has never been an inquiry into her death. And so in an interview for a collection of essays which I would recommend you having a look at, which is called Mother Country, The Real Stories of the Windrush Children, which is edited by Charlie Brinker's Cough, her mother urged us to not only remember this story, but also to remember Joy as she was, as someone who she says is a student, as a mother and as someone who was studying media because she wanted to be a journalist. This was all before her dreams were cut short. And as well as the fact that I think actually this case isn't particularly well known in the UK, which I think tells us a lot about who and what is remembered in what ways in terms of our national consciousness, it's also an instructive case in a lot of ways because the way that she was treated in her experiences of the immigration system I think really show us the human outcome of success as pieces of immigration legislation. So those pieces of immigration legislation that I mentioned that would devise to make it more difficult for people of colour to come to this country, but also the damaging impact that dehumanising language and policy has on people. So how is this even possible? How is it even possible to get to this stage where this happened? And I think it demonstrates one of the problems with this term illegal immigration. So if you recall when the so-called Windrush scandal was on the front pages of our newspapers immigration was being talked about perhaps for the first time in British history not because immigrants were being denigrated but because British policy was being held up to show what the human effects of it were. The government and actually the government talked about the hostile environment as necessary to deal with undocumented people. And even in the wake of the Windrush scandal there was kind of agreement across the political spectrum so even parts of the left of the Labour Party were still talking about illegal immigrants. They were kind of uncritically repeating this term. And I think not only is this term incredibly dehumanising what Joy Gardner's life and what her death shows us is that people who are undocumented are people. So their cases, their lives and the ins and outs of why they have become undocumented is far more complex than this label illegal will ever allow. And what I found during the research for the book was so many people who'd become undocumented because law had changed around them or they weren't able to pay the huge amounts it costs to have your visa or your application processed they were worried because they live in a country that proudly calls its immigration policies or at least did the hostile environment. And so there are so many reasons you can become undocumented or you may come into the country as someone who's undocumented and that isn't really considered much at all political discourse but I think what the case of Joy Gardner also shows is that although we might want to believe that it did the hostile environment for immigrants in the UK did not begin with Theresa May and the coalition government and it didn't begin with Brexit either. To recognise that I think does not it doesn't mean ignoring the very specific forms of suffering and damage that have been caused by the hostile environment that's still being caused by the hostile environment because although the so-called Windrush scandal happened the hostile environment is still in place and no minister, no member of government has ever actually been held accountable Amber Rudd who was forced to resign as Home Secretary only did so because she misled parliament about deportation targets but to recognise that it doesn't mean ignoring the specificity of current forms of marginalisation discrimination and racism but I think it's really difficult to argue that the facility in our immigration system only comes in the form of go home bands or the hostile environment if you look at this broader history and this is part of the reason why I decided to write the book. I'm not going to recount for you all the history of the UK's immigration legislation or the rhetoric all the outcome of this very politics because I've kind of documented that in the book and it would take me quite a long time to do that but I do want to think about the fact that this has been made possible by these two myths that I kind of mentioned at the start so the myths about immigration that make it possible for government to legislate in this way that mean the rhetoric is so poisonous and that mean that people are impacted in the way that Joy Gardner was by decisions made by politicians but then also immigration enforcement carried out by immigration officials and the police and these anti-immigration arguments that make this punitive policy these punitive policies possible in some kind of overlapping forms so I'm going to talk about both of these different forms that they manifest so the first is economics and the second is culture and I think everyone's probably quite well versed in the economics argument so this notion that immigration is bad for the British economy and a really good example of this was in September 2017 which now seems like quite a long time ago when Theresa May told the Commons that there is a reason for wanting immigration is because of the impact that net migration can have on people on access to services and on infrastructure but crucially it's also because it often hits those at the lower end of the income scale the hardest now putting aside the fact that politicians like Theresa May seem to only care for the welfare of the people at the lower end of the income scale when it's immigration that is the subject of discussion these arguments about the economy coming kind of two contradictory forms at least so it's this idea that immigrants are paradoxically taking jobs whilst at the same time coming to scrounge off the state I can't be doing both of those things at the same time so people coming to take nursing and doctors posts whilst also draining public services and this was very very clearly articulated in the general election that we've just had so the Conservatives talked a lot about a so called Australian style point space system which by the way they're not going to implement that was never what their plans looked like they were readily accepted in a lot of sections of the media so much so that right after the election I was talking to a producer about she asked me what I thought were the things to watch out for for the Conservative Government what we're going to do with this massive majority and I said well they said they're going to implement this Australian style point space system if you look at the details the very scant details of what they released in terms of what they will implement that's not what they're going to implement at all and she paused and she said no that is that is the plan and I thought for something to talk about so much immigration has been the subject of so much political discussion and the Conservatives have essentially managed to get through a general election campaign without having their plans scrutinised really much at all and the reason that this matters is because what they did is they used this as a signifier they used Australian style point space system as a signifier for something that means control but also for something that means for a lot of people whiteness people understanding Australia as a country that is white even though we know that the reality of that is very different and what the Conservatives actually want to do which they've talked about is do things like slightly relax visa rules slightly reduce costs for people who work in the health service but they want to make it more difficult for other people to come into the country so what they were saying is we want doctors and nurses to come and work in our hospitals but we also don't want too many immigrants to disrupt the NHS and be a drain on our public services so there was a contradiction right at the heart of what they were saying and this is the thing about this argument is that we know it is patently untrue we know that immigration doesn't drive down wages and we know that it isn't the cause of low pay and I often think a good way to try and combat this is asking people why they think that it was people who've just moved into the UK how they would have created the conditions where people are being exploited and we add up and we know that the reality I mean I'm probably telling people in this room probably already know this but it is often people who've migrated to the UK who are involved in not always but at times involved in fighting for better paying conditions across the country so whether it be an institution like SOAS or whether it be places like Sotheby's or the LSE what you see is you find the people struggling against these poor conditions, low pay and bad conditions but this is far less likely when those struggles are covered in the press that the immigration status of these people is far less likely to be discussed about than when it is people analysing low pay and Britain and so you kind of have this real difference in how these two things are covered immigration is relevant in one and not relevant in the other but I think there is actually one of the things that I argue in the book is that there is a problem with just framing people as economic contributors something that the Labour Party of the last election did to an extent, they talked about people who contribute to the economy the jobs that people do and I think we do need to reject this argument that immigration is bad for pay or that it reduces the number of jobs available for people in the UK but you I don't think you can argue against anti-immigration narratives by saying we are going to have an immigration system that is good for the economy because in doing so you prop up this idea that some people are not and a lot of people on the left don't want to talk about British people just as economic contributors in this quite dehumanising way so it's kind of puzzling as to why you would want to talk about immigration in this way and I think it's far more productive to be thinking about this as structural so thinking about the fact that we currently live in a world where capital can move with relative ease but the movement of people or the movement at least of some people is considered a problem so this is kind of where the Conservatives' plans come in and we can understand what is going to be implemented what already exists for a lot of non-EU migrants is unless movement is sanctioned and controlled by government movement is considered incredibly dangerous if it's in the hands of the poor or people who are racialised as a threat and what that movement often means if it is sanctioned, if it is allowed is movement on very bad terms so I think what we can anticipate over the next few years is the Conservatives essentially bringing EU migrants into a system that is already incredibly unfair for non-EU migrants so for particular people, depending on the type of your visa, it means very poor terms it means you only have the right to stay in the country for a particular amount of time and you are subject to these huge costs that I mentioned before and what that's historically meant in this happened in particular in the new labour years is people coming into the country spending a huge amount of money to get here for many different reasons but in part at times to provide for people back home to send money back home and what happens is the way that their visa terms work at times is they are only allowed to stay for a specific amount of time and they barely recoup the costs they've spent moving by the time their visa is up and so this is part of the problem is the cost of it, then also the terms of those visas and something interesting that someone said to me when doing the research for the book, Assad Raymond from 1, pointed out that as well as advocating for a world in which movement is easier for everyone we should also be talking about a world in which people should have the right to stay if they want to, right? So whether it's the country city or town that they were born in I think we can probably agree that having to move because of economic degradation isn't necessarily something to celebrate so at the same time as trying to change the world so people can stay where they want to manage this idea that movement is a threat to us whoever that us is and showing that it's actually borders that are the problem and not people and a very good example of this is when 39 people were found dead in the back of a lorry in Essex people who'd come into the country trying to make it to the UK because it was very difficult for them to do so the response from certain politicians and certain public figures was if there were more border checks this wouldn't have happened and whilst it's true if you had more checks maybe those people would have been found in this lorry before they had suffocated what it ignores is the very checks and border controls that force people to climb into the backs of those lorries in the first place so when politicians talk about smugglers being the problem what is ignored is the fact that they are creating the very conditions in which these smuggling markets can thrive they provide the business that you need to understand where the need is coming from where the demand for smugglers is coming from in the first place but I think this leads us to the next broad argument against immigration, the one that's been made for a very long time alongside the economic argument and so I've said this idea of people the movement of some people is considered a threat and that that isn't only about economics it is about race as I mentioned a lot of the legislation has historically been incredibly racist but this has shifted how it functions in the debate more recently at least in the past 30-40 years or so and how it's often articulated is the idea that immigration is a threat to British culture and to British people's way of life so this thinking comes from a belief the anti-immigration feeling so when people in Britain say they dislike immigration that dislike has come from a natural reaction to too many immigrants of a certain kind coming into the country so people dislike immigration because there are too many immigrants here basically that's the argument that is made by people that would call anti-immigration professionals that I won't name them so a really good example of this is when David Cameron and his team were trying to negotiate with Brussels before the EU referendum they said they couldn't find any evidence that was satisfied the European Commission the immigration pressure on communities so they said we couldn't find any evidence at all and then this is a quote from someone who worked with David Cameron who said there was no hard evidence that is not to say that we didn't perceive immigration as a problem Cameron was convinced it was a real challenge if perhaps more of a cultural one than an economic one and so there is this acceptance right at the heart of government immigration is not about the economy they cannot prove that they cannot prove that as part of these EU negotiations they think it is a cultural problem and you hear that culture argument in a lot of different ways it's talked about in a lot of different ways so people talk about the pace of change being too fast people talk about their sense of British culture is under threat people talk about walking down their local high street and not recognising where they are and feeling like they are in a different country no longer in Britain but all of this is produced by notions of racial and cultural difference the adage that's been used a lot by politicians in the past 15-20 years is that it's not racist to be concerned about immigration but what that does is it eclipses and obscures how race can be at the heart of the debate and so much of our debate is so focused on saying it's not racist to be concerned about immigration that it becomes very difficult to take a moment to analyse how race is operating in the debate and where and one of the things that I found doing some of the research for the book is I watched quite a lot of documentaries about immigration in Britain trying to see how it was covered in the media it's a really hard thing to do to try and track how broadcast media covers issues like immigration there's only a partial picture but what I found in three different documentaries across three different channels is that when when the journalists who were doing these documentaries they chose particular areas to go to they chose particular areas as a country to go and look at and they decided to look at those particular areas the way they made that decision is that they looked at an area and looked at how many white people had lived in that area 20 years ago and how many white people live in that area now so whiteness was used as a marker of change and the proportion of white people living in X town was 95% of the 1980s and now it is only 70% and so what that tells us they're not where they're doing this I don't think it shows one of the ways in which the immigration debate is very much still about racism because not all groups of immigrants some immigrants are white and not all people of colour in Britain are immigrants so there is a problem there at the heart of this but it's interesting because not all groups this leads us to understand how not all groups of immigrants are seen as culturally incompatible with the UK so it's certain groups that are marked out as a threat and the what would you call him he's often called a public intellectual but I think he's a journalist I'm not sure so far as to call him a public intellectual he's one of his books and he says this isn't to do with race, it's to do with culture it's nothing to do with race it consistently rejects anything to do with race but drawing on the academic Robert Putnam he also makes the argument that 100,000 Australians coming into Britain is very different from 100,000 Afghans and so race is there but it just isn't being so explicitly talked about in the way that maybe it once previously was you find this shift in the 70s and 80s with a group called the New Right the Enoch Powell was loosely part of and what they say is they say we do not think we are racially superior to people who are not white we just think we are culturally different British people are culturally different from groups of brown and black people who come to the UK many of whom who have come to the UK as I mentioned before as British citizens and what they argue and what they argue now the reason why this is a problem the reason why people feel it's a problem people feel anxious about their culture and their sense of self being under threat isn't only because that's a problem in and of itself but because what it does is it weakens the bonds of solidarity between between people in in undermined support for institutions like the NHS so unless everyone feels like they have common culture and a common sense of identity they are less likely to want to contribute to an institution like the NHS so they kind of couch it in these terms that seem like vaguely progressive, a few like squint enough but it is obviously so clearly still tied to these racialized ideas of culture and the one question that I think should be asked to anyone who is making this argument because I've gone through a lot of this footage and a lot of these interviews you know I've seen Labour, Conservative Liberal Democrat politicians talking about culture in this way is synonymous with race I think they should be asked what do they mean by British culture how are they defining this sense of culture and what does it mean to talk about a British culture and I really enjoy quoting Stuart Hall on this because I think it forces people to think about exactly what it is they're talking about and I'm just going to read a quote from Stuart Hall that quite a lot of you probably are familiar with which is about T and he says people like me who came to England in the 1950s have been here for centuries symbolically we've been there for centuries I was coming home I am the sugar at the bottom of the English tea cup I am the sweet tooth the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children's teeth there are thousands of others beside me that are the cup of tea itself because they don't grow in Lancashire not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom this is the symbolization of English identity what does anyone in the world know about an English person except they can't get through the day without a cup of tea where does it come from Ceylon, Sri Lanka India that is the outside history that is inside the history of the English there is no English history without that other history so there's a very clear there's a very clear problem at the heart of how people are conceptualizing Britain and how people are imagining immigrants and people who are considered to be British is coming into the country and disrupting that sense of self it's very hard to see how Britain and British culture isn't tied up with these global connections that it's long had but the other problem and this is I guess to some extent this is the bigger problem that I have with this argument and the more insidious argument it's very much been mainstreamed in a lot of media and political debates is that this as I mentioned before this cultural anxiety is treated and inevitable so it's like there's no way around it what a lot of politicians argue is that there is no way around anti-immigration sentiment apart from curbing immigration because people are always going to feel this kind of discomfort about too many people coming into the country and historically what this has meant is that politicians have argued that immigration control is necessary for good race relations so you find this very much in the debates of the 60s and 70s and essentially what politicians are saying is to reduce racism you have to reduce immigration because racism is a product of too much immigration and it's something that the Labour MP Stephen Kinnock argued not in those exact words right after the EU referendum saying that it's the prejudice that you find right after the Brexit vote so the spike in hate crimes and the racism that we saw across the UK is related to this natural reaction to too much immigration and what this ignores is what we all know that racism and anti-immigration views are produced they're produced when immigration is problematised and certain groups of immigrants are demonised and where race and racial differences are treated as if they are real instead of constructed and the a core way that this has kind of taken root in a lot of the political debate and actually analysis of the new Labour years is there's bits and pieces of academic work on new Labour but there's only really one comprehensive book-length study of new Labour and immigration that doesn't really engage with this subject of race and that is because the myth is that in the new Labour years immigration became such a hot political topic so what you find is you do find a rise in anti-immigration sentiment and a rise in support for parties that profess to be anti-immigrant this happened, people say and I was told this today as part of a debate that this happened because new Labour let too many people in so they let too many people come into the country from Eastern Europe in particular and it's true that they miscalculated how many people were going to come into the country but what it ignores, this let too many people in narrative is it ignores the anti-immigration rhetoric and policy that was produced during that time by the new Labour Government itself it's quite complicated, I cover it in the book so there is not one cohesive way that they talk about immigration and asylum but almost from the get-go almost from day one the new Labour Government were talking about asylum in this incredibly problematic way they were demonising people who were trying to seek asylum they were making asylum law stricter and they were essentially reproducing the narratives that the far right thrive off of at the same time as they were saying something slightly different about immigration because they were but what is ignored actually is that that anti-asylum rhetoric for a lot of people they don't separate out in these distinct ways asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants they do at particular times but not in a way that allows people to separate out oh they're just talking about asylum seekers so we think immigration is okay in the mind of a lot of people it's the other it's being produced there and so they were feeding that narrative and that curiously so rarely talked about in the analysis of the new Labour years at least in popular debate but actually in some of this academic debate as well of understanding what happened during Blair and then Brown and so what we can see from this is that it is actually anti-immigration politics and not immigration itself that is the thing that is disrupting how people understand the country is dangerous, is the damaging force I think in the UK is the thing that produces this dislike of immigration not immigration itself but these ideas really persist and maybe we're going to talk about this a tiny bit in the Q&A thinking about how it's manifesting right now including in parts of the left these ideas are so widely accepted and the economic ones are I think at times fought against more consistently by certain sections of society but the so-called culture argument is almost not engaged with it all it's very accepted by a lot of political actors I think or avoided I think is one or the other if I'm being unfair then please do tell me because I am kind of intrigued just how people are trying to combat this and I think at least at the level of national politics that isn't happening in any major way so I'm just going to end actually by just reading just a few paragraphs from the end of the book and I think sum up sum up some of the things that I've tried to argue but also I think just some of the things that we should be reflecting on when we're thinking about who is affected and in what way it was ordinary people who suffered in the early hours of the 14th of June 2017 in Kensington and Chelsea one of the richest boroughs in the country the blaze that tore through the 24 story West London blocks snatched away people's homes their neighbours, their friends and for some their family members 72 people died that summer morning in the days following the fire that would simply become known as Grenfell the name of the tower that had been reduced to a black hollowed out structure residents would speak with fury and inconsolable grief about the fact that they had tried repeatedly to prevent something like this from happening complaints and concerns sent to the organisation responsible for running the block and thousands of others were ignored in a prescient blog tenants warned that they would only be heard when an incident happened in which people died the charred remains of Grenfell tower stand on the city skyline as a reminder of failed housing policy driven by profit, austerity and corporate greed in the days following this atrocity who this impacted and exactly whose voices had been ignored became clear the faces of the dead and the missing were taped to lampposts all over west London and appeared on front pages of national newspapers people like Legaia Moore and Khadija Say and her mother Mary Mendy many of them belong to the groups which society likes to malign as a burden while ignoring the ways that they're grossly mistreated Grenfell tower was the home of migrants from all over the world refugees and working class Britons of all races Grenfell residents included the politicians the people our politicians and media pit against one another when they blame migrants for undercutting wages putting strain on our public services taking up scarce housing or destroying culture but they were all overlooked all ignored ordinary people are concerned about immigration we're told but it was ordinary people who died at Grenfell thank you thank you so much Maya okay so we'll now hear from Paru Aman Paru has taught in the anthropology department for about 20 years she's no longer teaching but she writes on immigration and she's been hugely inspirational for students all throughout her time it's so us so Paru I can think of a few other things to call David Goodheart but maybe we shouldn't go there at the moment I want to start off just by congratulating Maya it was a very brief period her second supervisor so I think it's fantastic but not only she got through her PhD which has now produced this book which is really timely and important and to me I think the most resonant message in it is how many decades this has all been in the making you know we see each crisis each racial crisis of racialization unfolding and it's presented to us as some new scenario and it never ceases to amaze me how the British public have this capacity to be not only continually surprised but have such little understanding of the history of the country that they live in and I think it really has very dangerous consequences for us all I mean thinking about what you related just there it strikes me how early this started there's a very young sort of well known and those of us who are older in the audience will now remember the Pathé newsreels and we used to go to the cinema and there'd be a little short news clip that would come on before the main film started and it was a jolly British voice telling you something topical and there's one that came out in 1958 called Our Jamaican Problem and it was about immigration from Jamaica and basically what it was saying was set in Brixton but talking about why migrants game or impoverished Jamaica was although it didn't go into the reasons about why it was impoverished it talked about people coming here and the jobs they did but then immediately went on to the Mayor of Lamberth at that time who then went on to say what a pressure it was putting on the schools in the area how housing couldn't cope with these new migrants from Jamaica and actually someone who was in the British Air Force a Jamaican man coming and trying to act the role of the good migrant saying we're coming here we're not coming here to take your jobs we come here to contribute to the country etc so all those tropes have been really present since very early on after the 1948 British Commonwealth Act and also of course they all relate back as you refer to with the Stuart Hall quote in particular about the whole colonial history of this country but I have maybe if we sort of gently ease into the Q&A I have a sort of continual question in my head because if you look at this country it always has had an image of itself as being a sort of fair liberal tolerance country you know and as I said before shock after shock so after the 1958 Nothing Hill riots the complete shock of what happened in the midst when Kelso Cochrane was murdered complete shock then of what had happened Cherry Gross Joy Gardner as you mentioned you know case after case where the British public is constantly sort of surprised and we have this discussion about whether this is a racist country or not yeah but still we live in the midst of a situation as has demonstrated so deftly about where the doors have been continually closed since 1950s where immigration policy has rendered more and more people illegal where borders are harder and harder to cross where the consequences of that we live on an island which is surrounded by death you know we're surprised when people are discovered in the back of the lorry but you have to say especially if you internationalise this this is something which is now common in the world that we live in and we choose to turn a blind eye to this it's common because we have chosen to support governments and increasingly put into place more and more restrictive border controls in a world which actually needs and should allow more and more migration and the two don't go hand in hand at all so that's one thing border controls are tightening all the time the detention regime in this country is absolutely appalling if you look at it in connection with other countries across Europe the record of this country about how many people we lock up who have done absolutely nothing wrong and how long they are kept in detention is completely shocking if you look at the children who try to come here for family reunions so seeking asylum the way they are treated is absolutely appalling if you look at the history of racist murders in this country police deaths at the hands of the police and the way they are responded to it's not a good picture and yet and everything that Myra has outlined as well and yet and this is maybe a trivial example we have the situation at the moment where we're having discussion of Harry and Meghan and there's a continual discussion about whether this is a racist country and I have to say that over the last three or four days I've seen more elderly white men appear on TV saying repeatedly I don't believe this country is racist and you have to really wonder how those two pictures live side by side with the reality of what's been happening decade upon decade and as Myra quite rightly says with Tory and Labour governments to the point that we've reached now and how at the same time the British have a difficulty we're coming to grips with who they are the sort of country they live in and their history because it seems to me this is absolutely tied up with understanding the history of what happened is not something in the past but is absolutely situated in the current moment so maybe Myra you could say a few words about I don't want to trivialise it because it's really serious but the Harry and Meghan thing because what really strikes me about that is precisely what you said about whose voices get heard because as well as all these elderly white men they've been many women of colour appearing in the media saying well actually listen to our experience we know what it's like to live in this country listen to what we're saying and they'll end up being completely ignored so maybe just stop the thing about it is as well and there are hopeful things to talk about too which we'll also cover hopefully when you look at that you do think you can be the most privileged of the most privileged and you're saying they've talked about there was a statement issued a while ago by Harry saying that there was racial undertones basically saying the press coverage of Meghan Markle was racist so you can get to that point and you're still not believed in this beloved institution of the monarchy people still will not believe it and I've been taking part in some of these debates and you say you give the evidence you give all the evidence you say these are the instances in which the coverage of Meghan Markle has been racist and you're still met with I don't see it and you do think for some of these people when you have these instances of overt racism and one of the articles about her talked about her is bringing some exotic DNA to the royal family it's racist this is racism so clearly and still people will not accept it it does make you think and reflect on how poorly equipped actually large sections of our media are to understand racism in Britain and what that means for how it's being perpetuated by much of our media and thinking about if they can't they can't engage with these overt forms of racism called out by people who have the biggest platforms some of the highest status in the country then it makes you feel quite depressed about the chances of talking about structural racism in a slightly more serious way and this isn't all of the media isn't every single debate that happens but it does tell you a lot about the level of denialism I think that goes on and this level of ignorance claiming innocence not knowing what that means for how whiteness operates in Britain as well I think it's part of this that we never really get to in those debates we're only ever talking about the racism that people are experiencing never the whiteness that is at play that is also there in the production of this racism yeah I think that it's not great but I do think that there is the fact that there are people who are resisting these narratives and there are people who have these platforms in this way they shouldn't have to do that people shouldn't have to talk about their experiences in this way but the fact that that does exist is at least something I think it means that there are people resisting some of those narratives and some of this what you find when you talk to some of these people is that they're feeling threatened they feel that their power is being threatened and so it's a reaction to that and so that tells us that there is important forms of resistance that are going on and they're in some ways being successful like even if you look at the equal pay case of the BBC there are these moments of hope where actually people are succeeding and contesting and challenging what is the status quo and some of this is a kind of backlash to that as well I think yeah and I thought it was great that she mentioned the Grunwick strikers actually and her speech afterwards that was sort of a nice moment okay well maybe we could pick up on that these sort of forms of resistance because I wanted to move on to really discuss the state of the left at the moment if we dare go there especially after the election it's a little bit depressing but because what also strikes me is that in the last 40 years or so the history of the left in this country in anti-racist struggles has been very checkered and highly problematic and a sort of a directional sort of centralized idea of telling people what to do and decided going into communities of colour and telling them how to organize rather than listening to them and you know so it's been highly problematic patronizing there's been a lot of instances of left parties have been very racist and in all the discourses around Brexit we've actually seen some really I think problematic rhetoric coming out about supporting immigration controls you know there's nothing which is not racist about that and of course a lot of energy has gone into the Labour Party because of Corbyn and we can discuss that so-called progressive politics and all the rest of it so we just wanted to get your idea about what you think organizing against structural racism and the oppressive structures of this country where it's going to actually come from now and what's the position of Parliament and parliamentary democracy and what's the position of organizing from without that as well I think so soon after the election I think right now I do think there is still a role for parliamentary politics, it's a necessary vehicle if you want to in some way make some changes at the level of the state you can improve things in a significant way and one of the things I thought a lot about when trying to write the conclusion was the fact that if you totally ignore that, if you totally say there's no point in engaging with parliamentary politics at all and I think it's fine for some people to say that I'm not saying everyone needs to ignore the ways that, for instance, the immigration system it's always going to be exclusionary it's what an immigration system is but it can be vastly improved in the sense that it could make a huge difference to a lot of people's lives if you did things things that seem quite simple like reducing fees making as a report out today the immigration system is overly complicated and I found that with everyone I talked to who tried to navigate the system but also people who worked as immigration lawyers or advisors saying even as someone said to me, even as someone who English is my first language I cannot make sense of all of this legislation it's so confusing it's so unnecessarily confusing doing things like that things like refugees he talked about unaccompanied child refugees safe passage, there are things that you could do a level of government that I think would make a massive difference to people's lives and so it's necessary to think about that and I don't think that we should I don't think we should ignore the impact that that can have but there is a but there really inevitably is with these kind of things I think in terms of the next five years which I guess is at least in the UK if we're thinking within this country there is a limit I think to the Labour Party or any other political party as a vehicle for trying to organise around this particular issue and the reason why I say that is because I don't think that means you don't do it for the people who want to but I think there has to be forces outside of that and that's always been the case that push that but also that try to demand things that those governments are maybe never going to deliver on or politicians are never going to deliver on or at least not anytime soon and the reason why I say that is because is because if you look at the nature of the debate there is like an acceptance and significant number of by a significant number of politicians about this narrative for instance the white working class they talk about the white working class and all the constituencies being lost and to me what that kind of reads on as well as being an inaccurate analysis of exactly what has happened and who the working class is and unnecessarily talking about why is whiteness relevant to understanding the working class I don't know but as well as that it kind of tells me that a political party is always going to be interested with trying to gain political power through the system that we currently have which is not a great system in terms of electing representatives but is the one we have at the moment and so they're always going to be making concessions on these very issues and as you mentioned the history of this the Labour movement broadly doesn't come out of this well there are people organising against racism and against immigration controls within the Labour movement and within the Labour party that is true but in decades and decades and decades significant proportions of the trade union for instance have seen the legitimate worker as the white worker that has shifted in some ways but immigration status is still relevant to some of those trade unionists some of those trade unionists who have an incredible amount of power and I think spending so much energy trying to challenge them within these structures is maybe not so it's not always productive it's productive at times but I actually think organising outside is really the way to do some of this and it also depends on what happens with organisations like the Labour party but I do feel like only being focused on trying to get state power only being focused on trying to win an election and being government means that your analysis is going to be watered down in ways that I think is probably unhelpful to challenging anti-immigration sentiment and challenging racism in Britain more broadly I think the two have to come there has to be two things running alongside one another I'm glad you mentioned the trade union movement because absolutely the history of the trade union movement in this country is ridiculously racist and if you look at the history further back I mean it was actually English workers who took out very racist traditions to South Africa and Australia for example and the cultural arguments you use were exactly what we used under apartheid in South Africa so these similarities just do spread internationally in quite important ways I mean maybe we could discuss parliament I mean I think partly what we're seeing at the moment is a much wider crisis of social democracy as well so it brings in other questions but shall we open it up to you? Yes, just to indicate and I'll call you so over here Can I thank you for the introduction and it is appalling that this is a population that doesn't have any history of what has happened to itself for the last probably 30 years I mean I'm not saying it did before then but I think one's also got to be aware that there have been things in the past where there's been an attempt to look at issues like immigration and racism within an education system the thing that is appalling today and ever since all these different types of schools have developed like academies and everything else when you actually have a centralized education system through local authorities there were policies that could be enacted through all schools in an area an example is for example London 1981 there were riots the ILA which was the in the London Educational Authority which controlled all the schools other than the private schools right the way through in the London decided something had to happen quite clearly the politicians which was a left Labour politicians grouping decided there had to be some way that schools were going to start tackling what was happening on the streets but also in the schools and every school in London in 1981 was instructed to produce not a multi education policy an anti racist policy and they employed a group of us there were about 10 of us maybe more than 12 of us a group in Lambos and a group in Tahamlets and Hackney who were going to just help schools do that and it was a four year process and it was trying to get staff in schools students in schools at all ages from primary and secondary also parents and community people to start looking at what evidence there was of racism and how you try and control it and that's one of the things it was a very short period but it meant that for a lot of people in schools a lot of students came out of schools at that time having had education about migration about colonialism about imperialism it was a very very political sort of period and of course what happens you're absolutely right it gradually disappears and of course then new labour brings in a completely different form of ways of looking at education and we have today people who can go through schools knowing nothing at all and let's remember that the very first migration act in a sense was the Aliens Act in 1905 which is directed for what wasn't about black population it was against Jews it was to try and control the Jewish population coming into Britain from the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe and you just think you know that was then and the seeds of what in fact we know as now everything is deemed to be anti-Semitic and I'm not going to hold back on this the appalling statements that are currently being made about what is anti-Semitic and if you for example criticize Israel they are deemed to therefore be anti-Semitic but that is something that's built in the last well it's over a hundred years now it's after 1904 and clearly it was ceded beforehand but it's there running the way through and I just think one of the things we've got to be aware of all of us have a responsibility in this we should be saying to people who are running our schools that they should be doing something completely different from what they are doing at the moment they've got to be a far more political education right the way through schools thank you and do we have a hand over here another one do we have other hands okay over here and then you hello I'm Maria I'm from Brazil the interesting thing that we have in Brazil regarding immigration is that during the period before Bolsonaro we changed our immigration laws to be exactly reciprocal everything that the other countries do with Brazilians we started to do with them so if they ask us for a visa, for a process of doing something to get into the country we did the same thing so we had exactly reciprocal relations and it kind of amazed the Americans how terrible it was the process to get into Brazil so it's a different perspective when you are in a colonized country because normally colonized countries just open their arms to immigrations they just do that but and I would like to understand that big difference that there is in England because as I could understand England had almost no legislation regarding restrictions to immigration until the 19th century it was open to immigration I mean Karl Marx that was persecuted all over Europe he could just come into England and be here and those are things that I would like to understand how could this change, how could this happen how the British became that very conscious about the whiteness because this is something that I cannot understand from a colonized point of view because there we were brown and then there was a bunch of white people that invaded our country and dismayed us so our idea of immigration is quite different normally the immigration people come to destroy us okay thanks and over here yeah, thank you for your talk and I think one of the really interesting things you guys have brought up is the kind of asylum system in the UK which having been privileged enough to kind of volunteer at work with some people in the kind of going through the process is kind of really horrific, you know, you have things like you said of indefinite detentions people can be at any point and particular so and I think it's really interesting that like you were saying with the idea of culture one of the things is the idea of trying to preserve this kind of liberal idea of the UK when actually things being done almost in the name of preserving are so kind of brutal and kind of authoritarian even kind of holding people indefinitely who have been committed a crime and I guess it kind of relates to your point but almost kind of this weaponising of this idea of liberal culture and this cognitive dissonance of how people in such vulnerable situations even treatment of like queer asylum seekers definitely is kind of how that can be justified in the more of like an extent supposedly liberal country thank you my name is Bert and Joseph I'm from South Africa we of course have a different set of immigration challenges altogether the point I appreciate is which you've made the need for that thrust from civil society in changing attitudes and the need for civil civic education which has also been made by the speaker over there there's been quite a number of changes to immigration legislation and policies ever since 1994 I myself work in the immigration regime for a period of 14 years but no matter the extent and kind of changes that you bring about you still need to change in the consciousness of people because essentially migrants live in communities where they interact with citizens you know it's at that level of interaction that you actually gauge where the country is going so that's just the point I felt that I appreciate a lot and which I will be taking away from the seminar this evening civic engagement, civic education just in terms of changing attitudes it has to be a consistent ongoing process thank you do you want to take this one very quickly I guess your point in the first point also kind of relates to one another so I think there's a shorter term thing of thinking about how you try to change people's minds and I guess combat some of these myths and I think you're right that I talk a lot about like national level politics but actually a lot of these changes do need to happen more of a community level and that's one of the things that I also took away from the election is people have this to be consistent all year round and people around you making some of these arguments I think that's very difficult to achieve because you then need political education in like a big way but I think it's necessary, I think that's where some of these changes are going to happen in the shorter term in terms of combating some of these ideas I know that when I've spoken to people members of the public about some of these things it's not about one of the things that I often just call everyone racist because you talk about racism in the debate you just want to say everyone's racist and that's it but actually what you need to do as I said before is you locate where race is and then you try to I guess grapple with that so talk to someone about exactly what is it that you dislike about ex-group of immigrants coming into the country and then really have that discussion and it doesn't mean if you're doing I don't know party political campaigning or any other it's kind of community engagement it doesn't mean shouting at someone and telling they're wrong but it does mean really questioning them and what a lot of the debate has done on immigration is about just really accepting accepting it and thinking you can't change it and that's why I mentioned this kind of the inevitability argument I just think it's been so effective because people think it's just not possible to change people's minds on this I think it's really hard it's been built up over years and decades and decades and decades hundreds of years of this kind of racial logic but I think it is possible it's not inevitable I don't know I'll live to see it but I think it's possible to change it in a big way and I think this connects to the education point is you're right there have been like lots of great initiatives that have happened throughout history that I think we should draw on and not ignore because there's a risk I know I have a tendency of making everything seem like it's doomed and nothing good has ever happened but of course I tried in the book to pinpoint some of these moments not the exact example you're talking about but to recognize that and to see what worked right even though it maybe was washed away what did work right because this is the longer-term battle if you can get into schools I often say like do a reverse Michael Gove like do the opposite of what Michael Gove has been trying to do to the history curriculum I've talked to so many teachers some of them say we try to teach this it's not part of the national curriculum even though the curriculum says we should learn about Britain and its relationship with other parts of the world Empire is not there which is ludicrous but the teachers that are trying to do it they try to do it or there are people who are trying to do it but they're not sure how and there's an anxiety I don't want to be essentialist about it but our teaching force is also pretty white because of colonialism in a way that isn't going to be right and isn't going to be too contentious and I think because it's seen as political to teach about empire we should say as if it's political to not be silent about it like this should be the response this is inherently political to say nothing about it so I think actually working towards there's a body that helps teachers teach about the holocaust that exists in the UK there should be an equivalent thing for empire talking about that and actually there are efforts by some teachers to be doing this kind of work and linking those people up I think it would be a good way a good way forward because I know loads of people have emailed me saying can you come in and tell us how to teach about this that's how desperate they are, they're asking me and I don't have all the answers on that so I think those two things are both really necessary, this longer term thing about changing the education system so that actually young people in all of us in society have the have the tools to question these things and challenge these things but know about these histories and then the shorter term thing as well about getting into those communities sooner and beginning to have those debates and then just very quickly the asylum thing I think it's a really good question I think two ways that it happens is politicians justify stricter asylum legislation by talking about poll factors so they say there are certain things that encourage people to come and seek asylum in the UK like a generous welfare system so that's why they've done things like reduce the amount of money available to people who are waiting on their claim to be processed so if you're an asylum seeker now in the UK and you're eligible, you only get £37.75 a week to live off of which is absurd and what we know is that actually successive studies have shown that poll factors are not really on a thing they're not an issue people try to get to countries like the UK for all kinds of reasons so that myth about poll factors I think needs to be busted because one of the things when search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean were pulled politicians in the UK and across Europe said the search and rescue missions are poll factors people make that dangerous crossing because they think that there will be boats there to rescue them and what has happened is that people have continued to die people last year the figures are very hard they're not reliable in a lot of ways because it's hard to know but they think around 2000 people died trying to make that crossing but I would also if you're interested there's a book by an academic called Lucy Mablin it's called Asylum After Empire and she talks about how the tightening legislation for asylum actually came when the countries of origin changed like before the 90s she argues that the figure of the asylum seeker in places like the UK was a white person fleeing communism and increasingly it was people from former colonies black and brown people from former colonies that were coming to the UK to claim asylum and that's when you get the tightening of legislation so you have this relationship between what she calls the colonial logics so this is colonialism still at play and I think that that's how Britain became what she mentioned about whiteness in Britain Bridget Anderson who is what she does is she documents actually how a lot of the ideas about immigration now and the narratives and these notions of control were also applied domestically within England to poor people so what she says is a lot of the ideas about the movement of poor people in Britain so you have things like vagrancy acts like hundreds of years ago they tried to curb the movement of poorer people within England and the logics are applied to globally to immigration and so you always have some of these ideas about who can move and who's who's considered okay to move who's considered the threat and how this links to capital but really a lot of the work suggests there is to do with Britain's Britain's empire beginning to fall apart and it literally was just people were moving the fact that more people could move meant that Britain's were saying we want to keep this racial purity but you see it when when empire wind rush comes immediately a group of Labour MPs organise and write to the Prime Minister and say we don't want these people coming here they're a threat to our economy so the whiteness always existed with empire it was there but this belief in superiority and this kind of idea that Britain was the superior country I think was upheld by a strong empire and as that begins to falter I think you begin to see that change just a very obvious and quick point though it's just basically in response to you because you were saying how did this happen you know it's not till the 19th century that we see Britain introducing these things well it's an international thing you could say the same I mean Myers Wright and Bridget Anderson's work she does illustrate how restrictions on the movement of the poor have been extended in various ways of course you mentioned capital it's all to do with the control of Labour but when we start to see increasingly is that this drive for profit and especially since the 1970s when we had a complete structural realignment of the capitalist system where that is extended and immigration controls just proliferate but what's interesting I think is that there's a myth there's a huge myth going on here because basically you know the whole discussion about open borders our borders are open the only difference is that a lot of people the elite they live in a borderless world and there's a large number of people who only cross borders they carry on crossing them but it's hugely expensive and hugely dangerous and that's the anomaly we have at the moment and what that's led to I mean Myers mentioned the whole sort of rise how the conditions have been now made right for smugglers but our border regime which exists internationally is hugely profitable governments have outsourced it most of it to private firms the complexities of immigration law well that has led to a whole industry of people who have now become experts in these things and the visa fees etc etc so the whole border regime is a profitable capitalist enterprise and it's also the case that people who are supposedly illegal are easier to exploit so therefore it's very beneficial to governments across the world to actually have this sort of hidden economy and hidden labour and stuff like that coexisting with what they seem to be legal workers and the legal working class so those things always coexist and our job is to make that not only apparent but emphasise the structural change that needs to take place alongside changing people's minds and busting the myths because this is a problem of political economy first and foremost to add on to that what's telling is under David Cameron the Conservatives had a net migration target to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands and what a lot of research shows is that they knew that was never going to be achievable they had that target but they always knew they needed people from outside of the EU to come in and do particular jobs so what they do is it's not even that people can't move but they are willing to give out some of these visas that are just on terrible terms and so what it means is they are saying on the one hand we're going to reduce immigration, we're going to control it but at the same time they're saying we're going to give out some visas to some people like it's limited but knowing full well that they're not going to meet the very targets that they've set themselves because they want an exploitable workforce and migrant labour is part of that and so it's so clear in what they're doing and who's coming into the country people are not, you can't it's so difficult if you're not an EU migrant and will soon be very difficult probably if you're an EU migrant to come into the UK without some kind of visa they know they're doing that but it just works for them the rhetorical side works with this kind of colder, harder side of exploitation is there a hand over there before okay hi I just have a question remark because we're going to face in the next few decades unprecedented waves unprecedented numbers of migrants and of course I'm not saying this in a negative way but because countries are going to face this and if the narrative doesn't change if there's not a new social contract that's created between populations like a global social contract that's based on solidarity and on exchanges of whatever can be exchanged for the better on the global scale I don't see how we can actually accommodate these waves how countries will there's no possibility if the whole narrative doesn't change if it's not a popular incentive to follow up on this solidarity because what's my question yeah it's really about the practical my question is about practically deracing immigration because otherwise I can't even imagine what places will look like because if people don't accept then the policies won't be implemented and then we'll be in this disastrous situation thank you both for your speeches I would like to link a little bit to that because I think part of the problem is to change the narrative in this sense in seeing migration as something to manage in a certain sense and this is obviously because the political world is still structured around nation states and obviously they have their policies and they see immigrants as foreigners and so they want to regulate that I think part of the solution to that would be to focus on the reasons why migration is happening because for example as I'm not sure who's spoken but one of the reasons why it's said that migration will will see, will experience an increase in migration in the next years is due to climate change because part of the world are not going to be liveable in 20 or less years so I think that the whole focus should shift in that sense not in managing migration because people will move because they don't have a choice but to look at the causes of poverty is one climate change is another one war is another one so I think the whole narrative is completely messed up because we're just looking at the problem in a sense which is not because most people are just moving because they have to not because they want to so we should whatever we're moving in our lives but the focus should be more on the causes of migration I guess and yeah so I think that we should focus more on that and obviously taking care of issues of racism within specific context but yeah okay thanks yeah so just at the back yeah I just wanted to talk to build on an irony within the climate point almost is that if the kind of white populations of the world the first time that an existential threat has actually been perceived as climate if that would be the moment of the deracialization of migration I think there would be a definite irony there in that the extinction of populations has always been a threat for what you've been talking about it's been a threat for communities of colour but as soon as perhaps that existential threat has extended through climate breakdown if that's the moment that nation-state starts to dissipate and racialization starts to go out of the migration debate I think there'll be a quite a sad irony there for for everything we've been talking about today I just wondered whether there were any links potentially to be drawn between sort of the racist crackdowns and like the rhetoric around sort of anti-gypsy rhetoric in the elections that we've seen with conservatives pledging about sort of Roma populations and how that's characterised in the media and by political parties and how it's used as a sort of vote winner in the same way that you were talking about how immigration policies can be used hmm thanks are there any last questions yes I guess my question has to do with whether class or race is more important because I think that if you have a black person who is multi-millionaire the borders are open for him to travel around the world the same for a Muslim or you know so when you are thinking about this in a globalised world where is the real border is it in race or is it in class and money and what it comes with in this society do you want to say a few words I love the Golan oldies I'll leave that to Maya I just wanted to make my short concluding thoughts actually on a positive note because we said we'd do that and it does strike me there's another historical continuity here I mentioned earlier on that Sarah when she came out of court mentioned the Grunwick strikers so of course there is a long history in this country of migrant workers, workers of colour multi-racial working class coming together to fight injustice and it really strikes me at the current moment that we see the most progressive things that are going on precisely how Grunwick, that tradition of Grunwick has been carried on to the migrant workers who are in unions, forming unions at the moment precisely because the labour movement in this country is so wanting and fighting their own struggles Uber drivers, Deliveroo cleaners, porters all of that are just doing amazingly well at the moment and how they are trying to be beaten back I don't know if you saw but James Sparrow who is involved with Uber drivers is just in court at the moment because the police arrested him because he was shouting too loudly on his megaphone and they complained that they had damaged one of the policemen's ears despite the fact that she recovered three minutes later but you know, that's very interesting so I think that's something really that we should appreciate and value including our own cleaners at Sarah of course it's a very positive thing so let's finish with that Yeah, yeah I mean I really agree with that and I think that's also before actually so I don't forget to say one of the things as well you asked before about where to organise I think that if you want to spend time organising in political parties that's great as well but if you have time, if you have the energy, if you have money then I would say a lot of immigration support and advice services I went to quite a few around the country are always under resourced understaffed, there is huge levels of burnout and so this is going to be positive so there's problems but they do amazing work some of these spaces are spaces where they say this is not about charity this is about solidarity this doesn't matter what your immigration status is we're going to support you and so if you have time, if you have money give that to those places because over the next five years things are not going to get amazingly better for a lot of people who things are really quite bad for there's a possibility to make a change and to use your energies to do that those spaces can be spaces for major transformation as well so I think that's something to be hot and buy and to remember and so I'll just really quickly the questions, these questions about climate and I guess reasons why people move here, I agree with you I think it's a major challenge but I think it's very necessary to begin to tackle these racial logics that are the heart of a lot of the debate but one thing that is practically being done by certain activists and I said Raymond who I mentioned before who's the director of war on want I believe is involved in because he's the person that mentioned it to me when I was doing the research for the book is there are people who are organizing around the implementation of a term that is climate refugees so because people who are fleeing climate climate change, climate breakdown or have been forced to move because of it are not covered by the 1951 refugee convention it is organizing around that and although the 1951 convention is problematic in a lot of ways, another piece of legislation like that would be probably problematic in certain ways would if implemented or at least taken up by some countries provide very concrete protections to people that I think are important and so maybe check out the kind of work that's being done around that as well because I think as well as this longer term thing of trying to change the debate that does have to be measures to try and offer protections to people and the thing that I guess you're talking about is push factors so I mentioned pull factors before that politicians are obsessed with it's push factors that are the things that actually matter and so I think we can try to flip the narrative on its head whenever it's mentioned yeah and I always think of Paul Gilroy when I think about this question about race and he says if your anti-racist organizing should be trying to imagine a world in which race makes no sense and I think that is a very helpful way of understanding what that organizing might look like and okay the question of Roma yeah I think it is, I think the forms of racialization that are going on can be slightly different but what you find in the new labors in 1998 they do this exact thing so there are Roma refugees arriving in the UK and there is like a really just absolute bile on the fronts of so many of the British newspapers and the new Labour government just don't really fight it they reproduce a lot of the narratives so a lot of those narratives about immigration you do find are just so similar about the Roma and so I think connecting up those struggles as well in a very clear way is maybe a helpful way of trying to tackle that and I guess I'll end on class or race both you know these things are not separate they're in operation together and yeah it's true there's a global elite that is multi-racial as well as there's a working class that's multi-racial but immigration controls are classed down their race and so even if you are, have a ton of money you may still be subject to racial profiling when you go through airports and you may still be subjected to immigration rules in a particular way and I actually think although it's true that like the super elite can move around with relative ease and we should talk about that we should talk about the open borders that exist for those people for loads of people and not everyone it depends on what your passport is for loads of people actually immigration controls the cost in the UK and how difficult they are they aren't really good for many people at all one of my friends who now has them definitely to remain was tied to her employer like they were sponsoring her and that was not good for her in lots of ways in some ways she was relatively privileged but in another way she was it's very difficult to move employer and find someone else who's going to sponsor you so I don't think we should be talking about it it's like in either or class on race exist in the same for a lot of people they're relevant for both they're both relevant and so I think that debate's been had for so long especially on the left and I just think it's time to recognise as has been said the working class in Britain globally is multiracial and that's what I'm done okay join me in thanking Maya so everyone is warmly welcome to join the reception upstairs in the SCR in this building it's on the first floor and also to join us next week same time same place 21st of January for a panel with Gilbert Archkar Janan Al-Jabiri and Reema Majed on the second Arab Spring Seasons of Revolution