THE TABLET
THE INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC WEEKLY FOUNDED IN 1840
ASYLUM SEEKERS
THE UK’S SHAMEFUL IMMIGRATION POLICY
The key Conservative policy known as “Stop the Boats” has backfired horribly. Asylum seekers were moved into temporary accommodation in a barge moored off the south coast, and promptly moved out again when Legionella bacteria – the cause of Legionnaires’ disease – was discovered in the water supply. It may well backfire again and again, because the policy is based on a series of fallacies that will inevitably be exposed. And the government is already aware of the primary one because of its own research – which it refused to publish, but was leaked.
The fallacy is that refugees seeking to reach England across the English Channel will be deterred by measures such as deportation to central Africa, housing them in huge barges, or branding them as criminals and refusing to let them assimilate into the general population.
These policies will not work because asylum seekers entering Britain by that route are completely ignorant of them. So they can have no deterrent effect. In any event they are pin-pricks compared with the privations the asylum seekers have already endured, not least the perilous, and expensive, Channel crossing itself.
The government knows this, so why does it persist in pretending that the boats can be stopped by making life as unpleasant as possible for those migrants who succeed in making the crossing? The answer is that tough policies appeal to right-wing opinion in the Tory Party. Turn off the “pull factors”, as they are called, and the boats, it is supposed, will stop. But those arriving in the UK from Afghanistan, Syria, Iran or Eritrea, as the majority of these migrants are, are fleeing from cruel and corrupt security services in their home countries. Any rational government would recognise that being able to show that they had come from such a country was by itself sufficient proof of the validity of their
asylum claim, and they should be admitted into the UK and allowed to settle and find work, almost on arrival. And they should be allowed to apply for an entry visa at the nearest British embassy. The treatment of migrants from Afghanistan is doubly troubling, as many of them were left behind during the frantic evacuations from Kabul two years ago. Britain still has moral obligations to them. Yet now, if the government had its way, they face arrest on arrival in England in a small boat, and immediate deportation to Rwanda – as shameful as it is unworkable.
Another fallacy is the argument, growing in popularity among Tory MPs, that the UK’s withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) would give the government the freedom to “stop the boats” it currently lacks. The whole point of the ECHR, largely drafted after the end of the Second World War by British lawyers, was that it codified rights already implicit in English common law. Those rights would still be there.
In any event the relevant legislation in the English Channel is not the ECHR but the international “law of the sea”, by which every seafarer has a legal duty to rescue other seafarers in difficulty. That is the reason why the Royal Navy and the crews of the Border Force patrol boats refused to implement the policy of pushing the boats back into French territorial waters.
So the UK government has talked itself into a corner, fixated on a series of assumptions it almost certainly knows are false. Migration is one of the great issues of the age. History will not judge its response kindly. The great majority of British people are not hostile to human beings fleeing tyranny and oppression. Acting on the assumption that they are, and milking this for political advantage, is an extraordinary failure of political and moral imagination.
POPE’S VISIT TO MONGOLIA
LEARNING FROM BUDDHISM
Encouraged by Pope Francis, the Catholic Church is drawing closer to the other Abrahamic religions, but relations with Hinduism have proved more difficult and with Buddhism even more so. So his visit at the end of this month to mainly Buddhist Mongolia, where the total number of Catholics is about the same as in an average English parish, suggests he is interested in breaking through the usual interfaith frontiers into uncharted territory. What Catholicism can teach Buddhism is for Buddhists to say, but there are potential gains in the encounter for Catholic spirituality, particularly in the concept of “detachment”. Christian scholars such as Thomas Merton and Aelred Graham mainly concentrated on Zen Buddhism, and found in contemplative prayer points of contact between the two faiths. Mongolian Buddhism inclines more to Tibetan spirituality than to a Japanese Zen approach, but the connection is still valid.
Buddhism has many insights to share. Buddhists are more responsive to Jesus and his teachings, and find more overlaps
with their spiritual pathways in Christian spirituality than in Christian doctrine. Both traditions emphasise the need to care for the poor. There is common ground in the duty of compassion for other living things, the value of community life, the emptying of self, suppression of ambitious egotism, distance from material possessions, and what in Western terms has become known as “mindfulness”. And in the value of silence.
Catholicism must repossess its mystical tradition and rediscover the power of prayerful contemplation. Contact with Buddhist traditions – with a good dose of Thomas Merton, perhaps – can help. If anything, modern liturgy has become too “busy”. That sense of the numinous partly explains the continuing attraction for some of the pre-Vatican Council liturgies, shorn of their partisan associations. What Pope Francis says about Buddhist spirituality will be intriguing. His namesake, Francis of Assisi, would have embraced Buddhist monks and nuns as brothers and sisters, and instinctively understood the lives they lead. There are rich spiritual gifts to be exchanged when the Bishop of Rome reaches Ulaanbaatar.
2 | THE TABLET | 19/26 AUGUST 2023
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