Britain’s Final Solution?

It seems a strange and impractical thing to do, building a wall to stop or slow immigrants coming to the country. Not only does it miss the point entirely, it goes even further to confuse the issue between “immigration” and “illegal immigration” – two factors which seem to have been squashed together as one by a constant barrage of propaganda from our media.

Great effort has been put into making the word “immigrant” a dirty one. Ironically, even the slightest bit of education would alleviate such a problem given that this entire nation is built on immigration. From Romans to Saxons, the French, and even a royal family with European heritage, one might wonder just what is the problem with immigration?

In these modern times it is the complaints about the lack of space, housing, or services such as schools, NHS and jobs. However, surely it should be quite a hard push to drag our heels on letting a few hundred vulnerable children in – incidentally, as refugees, and not just selective immigrants. Surely it must be even harder to huff and puff and tut with stressed anticipation of a “swarm” of a few hundred children when the reason resources are stretched is hardly their fault. Successive governments have failed to improve the housing crisis, or the building of new schools. In the latter example, more time and money has been spent on making schools into Academies than building new schools to accommodate even a naturally growing population.

But is there a more concerning narrative bubbling away under the surface? Is there something darker not brewing under the cover of economic strain? After all, no-one complains about “all them immigrants taking our jobs” when all the foreign footballers come to play in the premiere league and draw in simply ridiculous sums of money from fingers of their allegedly jobless fans – who, incidentally can’t get work because of all the immigrants. However, those same anti-immigration chanters are happy to bestow their right to an opinion as they drink their German beers and scoff their Greek kebabs, Indian curries or Italian pizzas.

It seems that complaining about immigration is a matter of convenience, despite being potentially offensively ignorant in such a multi-cultural society. Moreover, the lack of differentiation between EU freedom of movement and non-EEA refugees is not only careless, but deliberately sinister in the narratives spun by our media. Let’s not try to hide the elephant in the room, and point at the clear link between terrorism, Islam, and a call for tighter border control. That is, after all, the way it is played by the media. Every time there is terrorist attack in France, for example, our media leaps from solidarity, to extremism in Islam, to tighter control of immigration. In that order, and with ferocity.

But if anyone really stopped to consider the problem with that order of thought they’d discover a few difficult truths. Firstly, the “illegal” immigration attempts are made by non-EEA (or non EU) people trying to gain access without a visa. Unless one has ever tried to apply for a visa to the UK it is hard to understand just how difficult and costly it is, not to mention how many are refused by the Home Office. No refund is given upon refusal, so hundreds, even thousands of pounds – that often equate to months of earnings – are swallowed up by failed applications. Any conspiracy theorist could easily bring themselves to conclude that it pays the UK good dividends to refuse visa applications on the slightest of whim.

The only real chance of submitting the best application is to get a qualified solicitor to handle the case. That’s more of an expense, indeed, but at least a potential applicant can rest assured that their solicitor is on their side and not just working at the behest of an increasingly xenophobic anti-immigration attitude which is spurned on by an ill-informed prejudice that has nothing to do with growth in population, lack of jobs or medical care. Why not? Because, for example, to get a child a visa from a non-EEA country to come to the UK to study requires them to only seek such education in a non-maintained school anyway. The parents also cannot draw money from the public purse, must pay for their own visa as well, and find a private school that they can afford.

Fair enough? We perhaps so, but what surely isn’t fair is that such people be lumbered with the same anti-immigration label, often held under a growing Islamophobia umbrella by the media. It is that far back in our history that immigrants were the source of huge terrorist acts: but they were perpetrated by Irish nationals and members of the IRA. In fact, when it comes to immigration and terrorism, far more atrocity and immigration has come from the West of the UK than the East, and yet it is some of those Western recent immigrants who now lay claim to this land as “their own” to protect from immigration. The irony is astonishing.

So what are we building a wall against? And how can we take the construction of a wall seriously, especially in the light of the fact that it simply sounds like we’re copying Donald Trump? Not to mention the fact that It seems like a satirical joke for an island nation to protect its borders with a wall, when most of the illegal immigration happens as a result of tunnel we helped to build!

Should we also expect all the UK expats to be fired over this wall and back into the UK by some kind of Trebuchet by way of the EU saying: “Fine – two can play at this game: have yours back, too.” After all, the UK does top the board in the EU when it comes to numbers of expats.

Perhaps my main concern is not the practicality of the wall, but what it symbolises. The end of movement; the end of negotiation; the segregation of society and community. When will it end? Are we going to see more “walled communities” when Muslims are asked to sort out the extremism problem? Are we going to see the poor pushed into ghettos?

It might seem extreme to be touching far too close to analogies of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s, but the net result of that was the political decline that led to the 1961 building of the Berlin Wall, which stood for over twenty-eight years and achieved nothing positive.

Realistically speaking the UKVI already has detention centres – prisons, if one stops sanitising the truth – and now there is talk of anti-immigration walls. We also have an unemployment market that threatens the unemployed with unpaid work if they don’t find a job. When you add the armed police we have at ports to this dangerous mixture of detainment, segregation, forced labour and xenophobia…

…how long will it be before the slip of tongue of a politician leads to a wall being referred to as the UK’s Final Solution?

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