I don’t see Calais migrants as a threat – perhaps I have my mother to thank

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/02/calais-migrants-uk

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It’s hard to think of my mum as anything other than the formidable woman she is today. But when she left Jamaica in 1965, she was just a timid 21-year-old. Like so many young people from the Commonwealth at the time, she had jumped at the chance of a new life in England.

“I saw an advert in the Jamaica Gleaner and decided the opportunity to come to England was too good to pass up,” she tells me.

“Throughout my life I’d been taught England was the Mother Country. I wasn’t naive enough to think the streets would be paved with gold, but I knew there would be more opportunities for me in wealthy London. So I signed up.”

Related: New immigration rules will cost the NHS millions, warns nursing union

She was offered a trainee nurse position in Cambridgeshire. A couple of her cousins had already made the journey to Britain and were living in London, but my mum had no idea whether this was anywhere near her new home in Doddington.

“I was really nervous,” she explained. “I didn’t know how I would be treated or whether I would be sophisticated enough for England. People were curious but friendly.

“I’d hang around with the two other Jamaican nurses who were training there. We’d tell people we were the Three Degrees. We were a novelty.”

Despite the nerves and the well-documented problems black people faced in 60s Britain, my mum had one massive thing in her favour: she was legal. This was fortunate because, even in her youth, I doubt she would have had the strength to hide in a plane’s landing gear or to cling on to the wheel axle of a truck.

Fifty years on, people who want to come to Britain from outside the EU face a much tougher passage. Non-EU migration to the UK is now managed strictly, and applicants have to navigate an assault course of “tiers” and “caps” to prove their worth. Migrant workers have to be earning £35,000 within five years of coming to the UK to be deemed worthy of staying. Nursing unions are warning the moves will cause chaos for the NHS, with its low salaries and large non-EU workforce.

For some, just reaching the UK is a deadly lottery. In the first three months of this year, almost 500 people drowned trying to get from northern Africa to southern Europe. Base camp for a final attempt on summit UK is often northern France. A port workers’ strike in Calais has meant that lorries have been backing up. Some people trying to get to Britain took the opportunity to clamber aboard the stationary trucks.

Migrants and strikers “Ran riot” according to today’s Daily Mail. Last week, the Daily Express warned of “armed refugees [continuing] their relentless bid to reach Britain”. It was as though the paper was reporting on Hardhome, the outpost overrun by a rampaging army of the undead in Game of Thrones, rather than the Channel port of Calais.

For the press, the chance to seed the idea of brown-skinned men on their murderous way to the home counties was too good

It wasn’t just the numbers that alarmed the British press, it was the perceived nature of those trying to enter the country. There were no reports of attacks on lorry drivers or travellers but the chance to seed the idea of desperate, knife-wielding, brown-skinned men making their murderous way to the home counties was evidently too good to pass up.

With a startling lack of thought for those people who had actually fled real conflict zones, a spokeswoman for the haulage industry added: “For those waiting … it’s like a warzone.”

Maybe it’s the thought of my mum all of those years ago, but when I see people desperately trying to get to the UK, I don’t see a threat, I see fellow humans fleeing persecution or poverty. Regardless of our invented borders, we have one world to share. People should be as free to move around as money is. My instinct when I see images of desperate people trying to make Britain their home is to greet them and try to make them feel welcome. Britain is only rich because of the wealth we smuggled out of various countries around the world. The least we can do is be welcoming when the rest of the world comes looking for its money.

It was with these thoughts in mind that I helped launch a new project to support new arrivals and counter the negative narrative on migrants. Lebara Community calls itself “an online destination for migrants to seek help and advice, share their experiences and meet like-minded people”. Connecting on a personal level is a good antidote to dehumanising press coverage.

If you can ignore someone’s humanity, you can ignore their plight. It’s easier to turn a blind eye if migrants, rather than humans, are drowning. Rough sleepers don’t seem to have it quite so rough if they don’t have the legal right to be here. A person falling from the landing gear of a plane is not quite as tragic because his papers weren’t in order.

I sometimes wonder at the people who complain loudly of how their travel plans have been disrupted as a result of “migrant chaos”. Our problems are generally small compared to those who have come from afar desperate to make a new life here. Maybe if they’d had a mum like mine, they wouldn’t be so quick to judge.