Leaving Home Hurts Likes Hell
Refugees pay a high price for fleeing their country of birth.
I think it was Warsan Shire, the British-Somali poet (and one-time muse of Beyoncé), who wrote that ‘No one leaves home/unless home is the mouth of a shark’. She implies with her metaphor that her meaning ought to be self-evident. Her tone is both dismissive and irritable, as well as haunting. It is perhaps unsurprising that those words have become a war cry of sorts, a slogan for those distressed by anti-immigration speech and feeling. This rising wave of sentiment, which began to roll across the West some years ago now, has threatened at times to carry all common decency far out to sea.
In the United Kingdom, debate on immigration rages. The question has been condensed into a euphemism, ‘small boats crisis’, coined for the vessels taken by refugees from the north of France to Dover. The term takes the focus off the men, women and children who make such a journey and onto those traffickers and smugglers who ferry them across, and thus warps the question into one mainly of crime and justice. Last month Rishi Sunak paid the French government €500 million to ‘stop the boats’ — part of what he called a ‘new entente’. And a few days later, you could almost hear the sound of collapsing scenery at the BBC as Gary Lineker, its highest-paid presenter, said government rhetoric on refugees was like the language of the Nazis. His colleagues walked out in protest at his suspension; Match of the Day’s ratings went through the roof. Soon after that, a new bill, designed to stop illegal entrants to the UK from claiming asylum, sailed through Parliament, despite Labour’s protestations.
You could almost hear the sound of collapsing scenery at the BBC as Gary Lineker, its highest paid presenter, connected government rhetoric on refugees to the language of Nazi Germany.
A common claim is that refugees are ‘economic migrants’ who come to the UK to enhance their job prospects. In 2021, Priti Patel, then the Home Secretary, told parliament that ’70 percent’ of those ‘individuals on small boats’ were ‘effectively economic migrants’. She was later forced to admit she had plucked the figure out of thin air. Another claim is that refugees go ‘asylum shopping’, and choose the UK because its welfare rules are (too) generous. But the notion that refugees are rational actors with perfect information, drawn to the country by so-called pull factors, has little grounding in research. Studies show that many refugees know nothing of their journey’s end when first fleeing home; that others, including smugglers and agents, choose for them. What matters are not the pull factors but the push factors. For leaving home hurts; and the pain of leaving home is there to see in the psychology of those forced to make that choice.
What we see are not people relaxing into the comfortable fabric of a social safety net, but depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Cases of these are incredibly high in those who have left their homes; and though we reasonably assume that these are hangovers, if you like, from the time spent by refugees in the country they have fled, that does not tell the whole story. It is unnecessary to say that the devastation witnessed and/or felt by a refugee from, say, Syria, or Afghanistan, makes itself plain in that person’s psychology, in the form of a general difficulty in daily functioning; but this is worsened greatly by the stress of resettlement itself — by the sheer strain of fitting in — or trying to — somewhere very different from the place where they grew up.
Some years ago I was struck when a friend of mine described Western beauty standards as more oppressive and insidious than those she left behind when she fled the country of her birth. She was simply not prepared for the assault on her emotions that Western advertising routinely carries out. I asked her about her experience of wearing the hijab, which she had shed after living in the UK for some time, and for her, the view among some Western commentators that the veil was oppressive was ironic. This was not because (in her view) it was not oppressive, but because the countries of the West were perfectly good at being oppressive themselves, through the mechanisms of the market, but clothing that behaviour in more attractive terms.
Study after study, going back 15 years or so, shows that the distress of resettlement felt by refugees affects their psychology just as much as the distress caused by war-related violence.
That is one small anecdote, and one person’s view of something specific. But it is not uncommon that refugees find their new home challenging in a multiplicity of ways. Study after study, going back 15 years or so, shows that the distress of resettlement felt by refugees affects their state of mind just as much as the distress caused by war-related violence, or loss. It may seem counter-intuitive; it may even confuse us; but the finding is robust and consistent, and less about the where than the fact that there is a ‘where’ to begin with. Some stressors relate to the phase between arrival and, for want of a better word, independence. Drawn-out detention, uncertain immigration status, limitations placed on work and education. A moment’s reflection affirms this: we have all suffered in conditions of restriction and insecurity to some degree or another. Some relate to the project of fitting in.
A number of commentators have argued lately that the only hope that Sunak has of winning the election next year is if he ‘stops the boats’. The so-called Red Wall will crumble, as the Blue Collar Conservatives group put it, if he fails in this undertaking. Clearly an enormous number of people in the United Kingdom are distressed by immigration, ‘illegal’ and otherwise; but it is perhaps worth, if only for a moment, stripping the matter of its euphemistic terminology, forgetting its political significance, and taking a common decency — and common sense? — approach. After all, no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.
