[Introduction] On April 14, 2022, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson officially announced the establishment of an offshore refugee disposal center. Previously, Australia also set up offshore refugee detention centers, and has been criticized and criticized for this. The introduction of the Johnson government's offshore disposal policy has caused an uproar in the international community. The violence of the policy and the violation of human rights of refugees have pushed the cruelty of the British immigration and refugee policies to a new high. At the same time, this also reveals the cancer behind the relevant policy considerations in the UK in recent years - xenophobia and xenophobia that have been deeply integrated into the British background by the British government for a long time.
A radical pretended to be Johnson and held up the "Welcome Refugees" billboard torn in half
"When national policies are to isolate you, attack you, and force you to give up, you can only clean up the bedding and choose to leave." A few years ago, a refugee named Diana described the British immigration system in this way, and what she said was true. For a long time, the primary purpose of British immigration policy has been to force immigration away. For this reason, many people even spared no effort to escape from the British Isles. Those who barely stayed behind were also entangled in complex, profound, abusive bureaucratic nightmares, trapped in hopelessness and helplessness of nothing.
Make Conservatives government still seems reluctant to stop there, and they are even thinking about how to raise the cruelty of policies to a new level. Earlier, British Prime Minister Johnson, who was involved in another political scandal, announced that the UK plans to load specific asylum seekers (at first just single men) into ships and trucks and send them to Rwanda , 6,500 kilometers away to "dispose".
This is no different from violent oppression in the country. "dispose" and "detain" refugees are the offshore disposal centers that Australia has long used, where the violence and abuse methods used have long been notorious in the international community. Refugees seeking asylum in other states bet on their lives to cross national borders, and after arriving in the UK, offshore detention will further damage the already vulnerable refugees.
The "three feet of ice" of offshore disposal policy is not "a day's cold". , even if it was not for many years of planning, the British government has invested months of preparation to lay the foundation for the introduction of this cruel policy. With the help of some British media, British national leaders have vigorously aroused and intensified the hysteria of the people, created confrontation between the people and refugees who came to the UK across the strait, and introduced more cruel and strict border control policies and immigration policies on this ground, claiming that this is the only solution to the "invasion".
British Defense League marched in Newcastle, demanding the repatriation of refugees
However, the airtight borders and hostile immigration policies do not solve the problem. on the contrary, it is they that have created a series of problems that have staged on the British coastline and tragedy . Refugees' routes to the UK are mostly difficult and dangerous, and there are few safe routes to follow, so many asylums have no choice but to take the risk of taking small rowing boats and freight trucks. Worse, under the rules of the game of the British government, these only optional paths would exactly define their asylum seeking as illegal.
"Impossible, immoral, and the threshold is too high to be coercive." This is the description of the authorities' offshore disposal plan by the Labor Party (the main opposition party in the UK) of the authorities' government. Liberal Democratic Party also believe that the policy is "useless" and "ineffective". These reviews sound too modest and polite. The problem before us is neither a failure of the bureaucratic system nor an unfortunate mistake, nor a government incompetence, but a deliberate brutality of the government. Like many governments in the world, the British government has also carefully plotted and thoughtful about shaping its xenophobia.
The British government's clever packaging of xenophobia and xenophobia concepts is enough to prove that offshore disposal is just another policy to seize political capital with xenophobia.
At first, the British government only repatriated male asylums to Rwanda, and there are many reasons behind this decision. For many years, the Tories in the British Conservative Party have instilled a racist, usually Islam-phobic concept in the people - The black and brown-skinned male refugees who came to the UK were all "scammers" , and they are all "clear threats to the British people." When the government uses very dehumanized rhetorics such as "illegal immigration", they do not want the public to think of living people who need protection and sympathy, but only want to implant the image of threats and troublemakers into the people's minds.
Faced the problem directly
Johnson's government's plan to set up offshore refugee centers is not an exception, but is the latest manifestation of the British government's open xenophobia, cruel and inhumane immigration policies in recent years. Why did it come to this point?
For politicians, answering this question is not easy. For decades, different groups on political spectrum have consistently fueled the public's racial bias against refugees for their own political interests. Indeed, in the short period of the Labour Party's last rule, the British government has adopted strong anti-refugee rhetoric and promulgated inhumane laws that can only be described as "cruel".
I mentioned that the factors of political interests are not to cover up the huge responsibility that the Conservatives should bear on the UK’s immigration and refugee policy - today’s UK’s immigration and refugee policy is so cruel that the Conservatives, which play a leading role in policy making, cannot refuse to blame; it is not the intention to ignore the possible catastrophic consequences of the current policy. The reason I emphasize the role of Labor in building this xenophobic and cruel system is because it touches the root of the problem, and if we do not examine the root of the problem, real change will not happen.
With the efforts of the Labour Party and the Tory former governments, xenophobia and xenophobia have now become the tradition of Britain. It is in the context of anti-immigration politics that the fearless Johnson administration has put forward the refugee repatriation plan rightfully.
As Prime Minister Johnson himself admitted, the guiding ideology of this policy will be challenged by many courts and challenged by a "strong legion" composed of lawyers and activists. However, the court struggle was not enough to make Britain, who was deeply trapped in xenophobia, lose its way. To avoid the British government from repeating the same mistakes in the future, we also need to focus on changing the people's views on immigrants - no matter why they move away from their hometown, no matter what their status is.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-