Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s controversial new immigration proposals not only limit people’s ability to settle and integrate, but also other people’s ability to accept them, writes Ros Wynne-Jones
The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is right about one thing. “Dark forces are stirring up anger in this country,” she said, launching her new immigration proposals, “and seeking to turn that anger into hate.”
Her diagnosis – that Labour has one chance to fix immigration before the fascists come and do it for us – is also right. But her solution is wrong.
Over the past few months, I’ve had the privilege of seeing refugee integration close up across the UK, working with my colleagues John Domokos and Claire Donnelly on the Island of Strangers video series.
Far from the stereotypes and loud hotel protests where protesters perform their anger for social media, we’ve seen how time and time again, people can flourish when they are given a chance to integrate into our diverse and tolerant country.
Our most recent film took us to a patch of disused land in Middlesbrough from which hope has begun to spring. The Flower Patch is a community gardening project where refugees volunteer alongside locals to grow flowers.
What’s extraordinary about the Flower Patch is not just the people, and the death-defying journeys they have made, but the resilience that knots them all together. The garden has been vandalised multiple times. Which might be devastating, if you weren’t a refugee who had already started life over, and over, and over, patiently replanting lives, seeds, and flowers.
As Shirley tells us in our latest#IslandOfStrangers film: “When something is gone, you can re-plant it.” I would defy anyone to watch our film, or any of the films we have made in the series, and think that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has got things right with her new proposals.
What the Flower Patch, and places like it strung across the British Isles, show us is that, with proper nurturing, refugees are able to put down deep roots in the communities they end up in, and to grow together with the people from that place.
Keeping their status in jeopardy for up to 20 years not only limits their ability to settle and integrate, but for others to accept them. It others people who have sought sanctuary in the UK, and lets the fascists win.
Labour’s proposals were celebrated at the weekend by Tommy Robinson. So maybe they already have.
It is perfectly possible to control our borders without performative cruelty towards traumatised people who are already here. British people want control, but they want compassion too – even for those so desperate they have arrived on our shores without an invitation.
Watching Labour flounder with policy after policy as it flails about in a trap pulled tight by Reform and the Far Right is painful to watch.
But what Riada, Abu Bakr and Shirley teach us in this film is that we cannot give up hope. Keep digging, keep planting, keep on going, keep the faith. And keep telling our politicians when they are wrong.
Watch our Island of Strangers films here: tinyurl.com/bddj6ftn
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