Blackbird Leys Community Spirit’s Joe Kenehan discusses, from personal experience as a volunteer English teacher with asylum seekers, the negative impact that asylum and immigration policy has on migrants and society alike:
While Britain’s duty to give asylum to people fleeing war, oppressive regimes, torture and persecution shouldn’t be up for discussion, two important aspects of the problem should: one is Britain’s role in propping up or contributing to what causes people to flee their countries; the other is what happens when people get here as refugees. This article concentrates on the latter.
In my experience as a volunteer teacher of English to asylum seekers and refugees, I learned that my students came here looking for freedom, but their idea of freedom is defined in negative terms: not being persecuted, not being kidnapped to serve in the army indefinitely, not being tortured, etc. They were elated at the prospect of being able to hop on a coach and go to a different city without needing a permit from the police or the army. But if I asked them what the three powers of the state are and why they should be separate for a country to be democratic, they were stumped. If I asked them what a jury in a court case is, they didn’t have a clue. The idea that hearing voices might be a medical condition and not the result of having been “touched by the devil” was also new to most of them, and when I explained that the child that was thrown out of the village and abandoned in the wild had actually needed medical attention, they looked shocked and sorry for what had been done.
Asylum seekers and refugees, especially those from Muslim countries, have often been taught at an early age that a sin is a crime, and questioning their religious leaders (who often doubled as political leaders) is a sin and therefore also a crime. Critical thinking is actively suppressed, and knowledge of political ideas, civil rights or anything to do with being part of society is strictly limited to what their leaders say the Koran says. In other words, most of my students came here carrying a fascist ideology they have never even compared to any other ideology, let alone discussed or analysed.
To make things worse, after 30 years of multicultural policies that have managed to flip the meaning of “segregation” into “safe space”, coupled with cuts to services meant to facilitate integration, asylum seekers’ main source of help and information when they arrive in the UK are bedfellows of the conservative religious leaders that dominate the political landscape of the homelands they had escaped from. Refugees find themselves in a bubble in which the only contact with outsiders is with volunteers and English teachers.
And here’s the next problem: English teachers teach English language, not English culture. English culture, including citizenship and other important aspects of living among British people, would be considered oppressive indoctrination with a typically colonial aggression against students’ “identity”. Plus, a lot of English teachers are not equipped to discuss citizenship, politics and ideology.
But discussions of that kind are exactly what is needed (as opposed to frontal attacks that would cause defensive walls to rise instantly). And this is the next thing: none of the people I taught ever declined to engage in a discussion – quite the opposite. They were eager to engage. Any point is a good entry point: I was even able to discuss the separation of religious institutions and the State, which, for religious people coming from clerical-fascist states who take their knowledge from religious leaders, might be considered a taboo subject. I asked my students to tell me the story of Abraham, and then I asked them what they would do if one day, coming out of the mosque, they saw a man with a knife to a boy’s throat. Would they call the police if the man told them God was asking him to sacrifice his son to him? They said yes. And I said that this was because they didn’t hear God the way the man said he did. Which is why we need rules that allow us to live together, regardless of what some of us think God is telling us he wants, and that we must agree that if an action is a horrible sin against God according to an interpretation of the Scriptures, but not against other people, we should leave it to God to punish the perpetrator.
My students attended other classes aside from mine. They were impatient to learn English, and attended any class in town that any organisation offered. The thing that would probably surprise liberal identitarians and the far-right equally is that my students complained that none of the other teachers ever told them about “these secrets of Britain”, as they called them, that we had discussed. The students could never have enough discussion and I believe wholeheartedly that, as progressives, we need to encourage this as much as possible. We need to face the fact that many refugees’ and immigrants’ core beliefs are often at odds with Western democratic norms, and acknowledge and address the unconscious fascism that those raised on a diet of religious bigotry carry with them.
We cannot allow freedom from being offended to be touted as a human right, or respect for ‘diversity of culture and religion’ to be used as a smokescreen for those who wish to undermine our secular state. It is an unquestionable fact that this country is being pushed further and further to the right by self-interested old Etonians and their allies. An asylum policy that actively locks refugees into an echo chamber of unexamined religious dogma and swells the numbers of the socially ultra-conservative, only serves this rightwing agenda – whatever the liberal left might have to say on the matter.
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