Photograph: The Trustees of the British Museum
We are repeatedly sold a painfully two-dimensional picture of the motivations of those seeking shelter in Britain. According to this picture, migrants are eager to experience the benefits of our society, but they are also out to undermine it, because they come from cultures whose values are dramatically different from our own. Think of the ongoing “grooming gangs” scandal: an undeniably appalling series of events, institutional failures and victim-blaming that has been transformed into a narrative that suggests any “alien” is likely to be a sexual predator, since their predatory behaviour is a direct consequence of their religious and cultural background.
So often, all we are allowed to know about asylum seekers is that they are asking – with irritating persistence – for a place in our social fabric, as if they have no world of their own, no cultural hinterland, no really recognisable human values aside from mysterious and dangerous belief systems. This explains why there is now a feverish pressure to instantly reveal the ethnicity of any suspect in a major crime of unprovoked violence – as with the Cambridgeshire train attack (where, confusingly, it transpired that the hero of the day was a man of north African background), or the tabloid habit of illustrating stories about migrants with images of young men, usually of Middle Eastern appearance.
