In response to Julian Brazer’s study: ‘An Over-Crowded Land’.

I was dismayed to read the report by Julian Brazer MP on Immigration in UK. http://conservativehome.blogs.com/files/anovercrowdedland.pdf

It is an interesting read, and persuasive in parts, but what alarms me most is that I get a feeling the current government is using the immigration issue as a scape-goat for their failings in economic policy, and the state of Britain as a whole. To me, this is the worst kind of cowardice because it encourages the British public, who are worried and frustrated about the countries stability, to have a target group to aim their insecurities at; a target group who have no vote and no way of responding.

My attention was flagged to the paper by the suggestion at the end that we should temporarily deport asylum seekers to Kenya while they are having their cases examined, and I will come back to this. However, before I do I want to pick apart a few of Brazer’s preceding arguments.

Up until the labour government, immigration was balanced in that the same number of people were emigrating as immigrating, and in some years, more were emigrating. Recently, the excess in immigration has been around 200,000 per year, recently dipping to 180,000. With this continuing the population is set to boom, but what Brazer does not even mention is that British fertility rate has been decreasing almost steadily since the 1960’s. Without immigration, the accepted fertility rate to sustain a population is 2.33, but in Britain it is only 1.94. It is impossible to say at what speed the British population would shrink without immigration, but it seems irresponsible of Brazer to not even mention dropping fertility rates when his article is called ‘An Over Crowded Land’.

Also, it is misleading to talk about Britain as ‘one of the most densely populated countries in the world’. This may well be true, but ‘national’ population density is rarely a parameter used to depict a country’s woes or blessings: only in cases such as Monaco, Macao, Singapore, and UAE states can we see entire states with only urban land mass; for other countries, population density is only a concern in urbanised areas. In Britain, no urban area has significant population densities, and indeed, only 6.9% of British land-mass is classed as ‘urban’. Therefore using national population density in the arguments surrounding immigration, illegal immigrants and asylum seekers is unfair and sensationalist. 

Now to the Kenya issue. Brazer writes:

“ Crucially we need to take a long, hard look at the asylum issue.

No decent country sends people back to their countries of origin

to face persecution. We have made some progress in speeding

up applications, but they remain slow and, if we tighten controls

in other areas, applications may soar again. All too often people

disappear in the process. We must consider making treaties with

democratic Third World countries with plenty of space (few are

as crowded as the UK) and establishing two or three processing

centres abroad. For example, if we could secure a deal with

Kenya, it would be worth our while to make a considerable

payment per capita to them to provide a haven for Somali

asylum seekers, sent from Britain to have their cases examined

(by a British tribunal, as now). Those who absconded would not

then be able to disappear in this country.”

If this is based on the assumption that the asylum seekers would be detained in Kenya, then I would have a problem with this on the level of human rights, but you would have to question why they wouldn’t just detain asylum seekers in UK while their case is being examined. Surely that would be cheaper than carting them off to Kenya and back? If they are not being detained in Kenya (as I suspect Brazer intends), then Brazer is overlooking some concerning aspects of life in Kenya, especially for a Somali refugee.

As you will see in my blog below, Somali refugees in Kenya do not have an easy time, and around Christmas time, many Somali refugees living in Nairobi were forced to either return to their country (from which they had fled for their lives) or go to Dadaab refugee camp where opportunities and dignity are severally threatened. This was because of a government who suddenly turned hostile to the Somali community (ostensibly to the whole refugee community, but really only Somalis bore the brunt of it), and a population, who, in a case worse than UK, feel threatened by outsiders such as Somalis. In Kenya, the government have done a much better job than Brazer and his colleagues in turning the local communities against immigrants and fostering a situation where xenophobia is permitted. Unfortunately for them, Kenya has some neighbours who have harboured revolving battlegrounds within their borders: Somalia, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan, DR Congo to name a selection, and refugees have seen Kenya as a haven nonetheless. Now there are nearly 1 million refugees in Kenya. Here we really do have some of the highest population densities in the world (Kibera 800,000/2.5 sqkm) and the highest unemployment rates. But as a nation Kenya could not compete with UK in terms of population density, because it is a vast country. But 10% of the population lives in Nairobi, and 90% of the population lives in the thin strip of fertility between Lake Victoria and the coast, combining the rift valley and the central highlands. Most of the land mass in Kenya is uninhabitable, and Dadaab refugee camp in the middle of this hostile land proves this, as the inhabitants survive on food aid from NGO’s. So if the asylum seekers did abscond, where would they go other than to the areas of Kenya that suffer from far greater challenges from lack of population control than Britain? They would be victimised by the local population, and by the government that Brazer calls ‘democratic’.

Too much talk on the issue of immigration during tough times is dangerous – the extremes can be seen in countries like Zimbabwe and Zaire under Mobutu, and Uganda under Idi Amin, where leaders turned on minority groups when their economies were threatened, and blamed them for the countries downfall. In Zaire this contributed to a continental war, and in Zimbabwe and Uganda the mass exodus that followed by the foreigners led to economic implosions with inflation rising over 1000% per year. This may seem far more severe than what is going on in Britain, but the banding together of asylum seekers, illegal immigrants and immigrants in political language and treating them all as the same problem, as Brazer seems to, gives people on the street the excuse to accuse anyone is who is not British of being behind the country’s challenges. The British government needs to stop looking for people to blame and take on the burden of responsibility, or the social upheavals they are desperate to avoid will only be exasperated.