Lord Alf Dubs was a former child refugee who escaped Nazi-occupied Prague on the Kindertransport in 1939 and was one of 669 Czech children saved by English stock dealer Nicholas Whinton. He went on to become an MP and a member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, as well as a passionate activist for refugee rights and a patron of a number of refugee-related organizations. Ayan Mohamed Ali spoke with him about his personal connection to the refugee plight and how his experiences with the Kindertransport initiative can assist influence UK government policy on refugees crossing the English Channel.

Q. Could you give a quick overview of your background in connection to the present refugee crisis for our readers who may be hearing about you for the first time?

I came to Britain as a child, an unaccompanied child refugee in 1939 on a Kindertransport. I’ve been active in politics for a long time. I was the director of the Refugee Council for some years, and I was in the House of Commons. I was active with refugees then, and in the House of Lords, I became more active with refugees. More recently, I got an amendment, so in 2016, which the government eventually had to accept, for getting unaccompanied child refugees to Britain.

That was passed, and several 100 got through under that amendment. I got to another amendment that family unions continue, where possible, under the European Union treaty, even after we left the EU, and that passed both houses 920 – 17, but the government deleted it in 2019. So, there are very few safe routes for child refugees, and certainly none from Europe at the present time.

Q. Do you believe that seeing the names and faces of the refugees who drowned trying to reach Britain will help to improve the existing unfavorable perception of refugees and the reluctance of some British people and the government to welcome more?

I certainly think that the shocking van in the tragedy of those people a couple of weeks ago was absolutely horrific. Whether that will make much difference to the government’s attitude, I don’t know. The government seemed to blame it on the traffickers but show little sympathy for the refugees who have no other way of coming here except to traffickers because the government have closed all the doors. What I believe is important is that people in this country should be made fully aware of the circumstances under which refugees have fled their country, fleeing from war, persecution, oppression, discrimination.

I think if there’s a better understanding of the awful lives, and the awful fear that they left behind, then there’d be more sympathy for those that come here, because these are not people who are just trying to improve their condition. Not that there’s anything wrong with time to improve your condition. But these are people who fled and have the full protection of the United Nations Geneva Convention.

Q. What’s your response to those who say accepting unaccompanied child refugees will create a pull factor, whereby migrants are incentivized to undertake dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean to places like Greece in the hope of being resettled elsewhere in Europe.

This is always the argument that people use the pull factors. I’m not convinced by that argument at all. I think that our push factors in terms of the terrible situation that refugees are left behind, I don’t think the pull factors really carry much weight in the argument.

Obviously, we want to make our country as welcoming as possible for refugees, although I don’t think we’re doing that

Obviously, we want to make our country as welcoming as possible for refugees, although I don’t think we’re doing that. Some of the terrible situations that child refugees have left, there was one same boy who told me that he’d seen his father blown up in front of him by a bomb in Aleppo, Damascus. It is the fear of that situation that drives people to leave much more than any pull factor.

Q. Many British residents have been turned off from engaging in the political process because of the lack of compassion in political arguments over immigration in parliament. What steps do you believe the government should take to address this?

Our problem is that the government has contributed to the hostility because they’ve announced they want to keep the numbers down. The signaling all the time that refugees are not welcome here. The new legislation that just passed the House of Commons and is going through the House of Lords will make the environment even more difficult for refugees.

I think what we need is a government that shows leadership, and that says where people are fleeing for safety. But under the International Geneva Convention, we as a country should be welcoming, rather than hostile. And the difficulty is that if senior politicians make hostile remarks against local communities, it’s not surprising. If there’s some hostility I think that is depressing and awful. I think what all would like is for political leaders to help public opinion to understand why people are fleeing. To say that as a country, we should be humanitarian, and welcome and we can’t take all refugees but those who we take, we should be welcoming.

Recently various footage started to circulate showing U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback using lariats, ropes used by horse riders, to chase down and push back Haitian migrants – women, men, and even children – stumbling through the Rio Grande in the hope of crossing over the Mexican border into Texas.

Images display the agents whipping the migrants, rounding them up, yanking their t-shirts, and insulting them. The brutality of the scenes caused widespread outrage both from civil society and institutions, including a condemnation from White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who described them as “horrific.”

The Texas Border Patrol’s mistreatment was so blatant and widely shared that everyone’s reaction couldn’t be anything other than criticism and shock. Yet each pushback entails the same violence, the same corporeity, the same fear for each and every person cornered and chased out, with or without such flagrant abuse at the hands of state forces – and yet so often included.

All around Europe pushbacks take place daily and generally do not meet the slightest outrage from national and European institutions.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has already signed off the tactics; however, such a controversial measure is unworkable without French cooperation, and Paris does not seem willing to cooperate any longer.

Despite a previous bilateral agreement to double the number of French police patrolling the coastline and increase border security at ports with digital barriers like radars and optronic binoculars, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin rejected the latest policy on the grounds that “safeguarding human lives at sea takes priority over considerations of nationality, status and migratory policy.”

Paris warned that the Channel could become a “theatre of human tragedies.” At the same time, the U.K. Home Office’s own impact assessment in the Nationality and Borders Bill doesn’t say otherwise, as it states there is a serious risk that these measures could encourage people to attempt new and even riskier routes.

More and more people attempt the perilous sea route every year, a solid indication of how difficult or near impossible it is to gain entry to the UK by other means. While half of all migrants came by sea in 2020, in 2019, it was only 11%. In the last years, the Eurotunnel started to be subjected to much tighter control and the opportunity to board lorries through the fortifications around terminals or conceal oneself in vehicles was eventually cut off.

If people are desperate, they will do desperate things – and the U.K. is intentionally pushing asylum seekers trying to reach its territory to become ever more desperate.

Opposition is also coming from the trade union that represents the Border Force. Lucy Moreton of the Immigration Service Union (ISU), which represents frontline border staff, stated that this measure, announced without any warning, could put both migrants and Border Force officers at risk, prompting people to jump from boats.

According to the former director general of the U.K. Border Force, Tony Smith, the Australian tactic is an entirely different model, as “these are dangerous waterways [the English Channel] and very vulnerable vessels,” not designed to bring people ashore or to process people. “I think it is highly dangerous. … I fear for the worst. We have already had drownings. They are not as well reported as they should be, but we have had them. We do not know how many, of course, because bodies have not always been retrieved,” Smith said at the parliament’s debate on the new Nationality and Borders Bill.

Apart from the much higher life-threatening risks, such a pushback policy would provoke wider negative outcomes. On the one hand, it will likely encourage smugglers to develop and try new strategies to get around controls, like moving departure points further up the French coast to find longer and riskier routes. On the other hand, it would ultimately be up to individual on-scene Border Force agents to decide whether a boat is at risk of capsizing if forced back or it can be “safely” pushed back.

The arbitrariness of such decisions, the little oversight and accountability, and the violence every pushback entails by its very nature, as U.S. Border Patrol agents have recently shown, will make room for further abuses.

Harsha Walia’s Border and Rule, published by Haymarket Books in 2021, bulldozes through political partisanship to present a critical perspective of both sides, reminding us that the Left and the Right may seem different on the surface, but that paying close attention to the vernacular used by adherents would reveal how they are one and the same, and how embroiled both factions are in looking upon the world and its resources as worthy of exploitation.

Thus the immigrant/asylum seeker in the United States (US) through a right-wing lens is seen as ‘stealing jobs’ while through a left-wing perspective, he/she is ‘building the economy’. (19) In both cases, the immigrant/asylum seeker has been commoditized. (14)

Walia directs us to the concerted efforts of not just the US but the rest of the world in their move towards perfecting immigration policy in the optic of ‘displacing, immobilizing, criminalizing, exploiting, and expelling migrants and refugees’. (2) She goes on to point out that the US attracts only 1 percent of the global population of migrants—a fact that may surprise many, given the extensive publicity of how it promotes itself as migrant and refugee-friendly. (160) She believes that border politics should be rephrased in terms of ‘border imperialism’, and encourages moves towards ‘restitution, reparations, and responsibility’, rather than ‘charity and humanitarianism’. (3)

She views ‘anti-migrant xenophobia, immigration enforcement, detention centers, migration controls, and border securitization’ as symptoms of a more fundamental policy at play: ‘the rule of racist, nationalist borders.’ Along these lines, it makes sense that she finally advocates a ‘leftist politics of no borders’ (213) which implies an abolition of the concept of citizenship in order to allow a free movement of people across countries.

Walia’s book focuses on the plight of refugees and asylum seekers as they are forced to abandon conflict-ridden countries and homes affected by natural disasters and climate change.

Walia’s book focuses on the plight of refugees and asylum seekers as they are forced to abandon conflict-ridden countries and homes affected by natural disasters and climate change. She retraces the hardships endured in the course of these travels, commenting especially on the process-burdened entry they face, and eventual acceptance into host countries. But entering the host country is only the beginning of the ordeal of migration, she avers. Delay in issuing work permits or in processing applications for permanent residency or citizenship subjects them in the interim to harsh working and living conditions, as they are turned into an unregulated pool of exploitable manpower.

But there is some respite too, as Walia discusses the success of grassroot level strategies that now allow migrants to be welcomed into countries together with their families, or have even led to the abolition of the live-in requirement for caregivers in countries like Canada. Previously the live-in policy subjected workers to a variety of abuses so that the Filipino Women’s Organisation in Quebec reported how caregivers ‘could not use fans or the internet, lock their rooms, entertain visitors, or leave the home when not working.’ (165-66)

In India, the rise of Hindutva ideology, embraced by Modi and his government, has stoked resentment against Muslim migrants so that among other policies of exclusion, compulsory registration in Assam in the National Register of Citizens (NCR) has turned Muslim Indians of Bengali origin into noncitizens, although they were born and lived there for generations. (159-160)

Walia also explores the effects of the COVID19 pandemic explaining how it provided excuses to tighten border control and impose further injustices on refugees and asylum seekers. Thus the government of Malta abandoned passengers on a boat in its seas so that some of them perished from dehydration and drowning, and later arranged for the remainder to return forcibly to Libya. (11)

Walia also explores the effects of the COVID19 pandemic explaining how it provided excuses to tighten border control and impose further injustices on refugees and asylum seekers.

Moreover in Australia, detained refugees in onshore and offshore centers were among the most vulnerable as they were forced to live in close proximity and many already suffered from health issues. (99) The pandemic also allowed authorities in Lebanon and China to impose stricter regulations on refugees from Syria and Africa respectively, and indulge in discriminatory practices where local citizens were made to adhere to a different set of precautionary rules. (11) In such times, refugees, asylum seekers and/or new migrants were also easily shunned and marked out as ‘vectors of diseases’. (196)

While Walia proposes a solution to remedy the global migration crisis—that is, ‘a leftist politics of no borders’—her war appears to be more ambitious than that. Arguably it may be looked upon as utopian, as she advocates a complete revamp of the capitalist system in place.

‘Empires crumble,’ she says, ‘capitalism is not inevitable, gender is not biology, whiteness is not immutable, prisons are not escapable, and borders are not natural law.’ (215) Her insistence and resilience are both contagious, and it is easy to be drawn by the bigger parentheses of this book that appeal to us to look upon a refugee not as a stranger, an outsider, or chattel, but a human being.

The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor issued a statement on Wednesday, November 4, 2020, stating that Greek refugee camps lack the minimum standards for human life, and that refugees and asylum seekers are forced to endure unbearable conditions which in turn “poses serious risks to their physical and mental safety and well-being.”

The Geneva-based organization noted that Greek refugee camps are “dangerously unsustainable” and that refugees and asylum seekers face an imminent threat to their lives.

A fire broke out recently at Vathy refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos. The camp is home to 4,500 refugees and migrants who are overcrowded in a building that only fits 650 people. Greece’s Ministry of Migration and Asylum claimed that the fire that caused the burning of 15 tents at the camp caused no injuries, adding that at least 150 people were rendered homeless. The cause of the fire is still to be determined.

Euro-Med Monitor noted in the statement that in September alone, two other fires broke out in the same camp, as the island was hit by a 6.7-magnitude earthquake causing a mini-tsunami, which also hit the Turkish city of Izmir.

Not only this, Doctors Without Borders have noted that more than 100 residents of the camp have tested positive for COVID-19. Despite this, refugees still lack proper access to healthcare and live in a continuing lockdown without access to the outside world.

“The fire has once again revealed how desperate and unsafe the situation in Greek refugee camps is,” said Michela Pugliese, legal researcher at the Euro-Med Monitor. “The restriction of movement, the overcrowding, the lack of proper infrastructure, the rise in COVID-19 cases, and the unhygienic and inhumane conditions of Vathy camp make such an outcome predictable.”

Pugliese added that the dire conditions at Vathy camp, which only got worse with the outbreak of the fire, violate international human rights law, including the right to adequate housing and health, which is also stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of (…) lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

Euro-Med Monitor concluded by calling on Greece “to immediately close Vathy camp and other similar overcrowded, unsafe and unsanitary camps in the Aegean islands and transfer the asylum seekers to adequate accommodation centres in Greece or in other EU states.”

Euro-Med Monitor called on the European Union “to respect, protect and fulfill international and regional law concerning asylum seekers and migrants’ rights.” The Geneva-based organization concluded by reminding the EU that Article 17.2 of the Directive 2013/33/EU lays down standards for the reception of refugees who lack protection and calls on EU member states to “ensure that material reception conditions provide an adequate standard of living for applicants, which guarantees their subsistence and protects their physical and mental health.”

In late September, an UNDP representative hailed Turkey’s decision to grant Syrian refugees access to healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic. Claudio Tomasi, representative of the United Nations Development Programme told Anadolu News Agency, “As we highlight in our joint report, Turkey stands out compared to other countries, as early on it adopted a comprehensive policy framework to grant Syrians under temporary protection not only access to services but also to the labor market.”