The Haves and the Have-Nots
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Version 0 of 1. BRIGHTON, England — To judge from the more strident news reports, it almost seems as if migrants gathered across the Channel from here are bent on a modern-day reversal of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, when an army from England overran the French. At best, though, it is an uneven contest. Today’s threadbare warriors — fugitives from newer war zones — have no visible lances, swords, ships, shields or longbows. They number only around 3,000, yet they stir alarm and fear in Britain, a nation of 60 million that once saw itself as a haven for the needy and oppressed, from the Jews of Germany and Russia to Muslims in flight from Idi Amin’s Uganda. This time, though, some inner switch has been thrown, blocking the circuitry of compassion and replacing it with hard-nosed calculations about who should be embraced by Europe’s few resurgent economies. Call it asymmetric warfare — a battle of haves versus have-nots, between the sense of entitlement of those who have and the expectations of those who crave inclusion. In recent months, migrants fleeing war, tyranny and penury in parts of Africa and the Arab world have assembled near the French port of Calais. From there, often in a televised frenzy, they attempt a final leap into lands of opportunity that the authorities in France and Britain are bent on denying them. “Many see Europe, and particularly Britain, as somewhere that offers the prospect of financial gain. This is not the case,” the interior ministers of France and Britain said in an article in The Telegraph, a British newspaper. “Our streets are not paved with gold.” This summer, a strike by French port workers offered migrants an unexpected chance to smuggle themselves aboard trucks snarled in lines on their way to the tunnel that runs under the Channel. British vacationers reported that migrants tried to break into the mobile homes towed behind their cars. News footage showed hooded figures advancing under cover of darkness. Compared with many of those who live in places like this prosperous southern English town, with its pebbly beaches and elegant stuccoed squares, those ghostly figures bear the scars of far more fragile, desperate lives. Just recently, reports citing DNA and other evidence pieced together the doomed voyage of two men from Syria, Mouaz al-Balkhi, 22, and Omar Kataf, 28, who bought wet suits and perished, probably while trying to swim the choppy, chilly, 22-mile passage from France to England. Biniam Habte, a 20-year-old Eritrean, who had crossed the Sahara in his quest to reach Europe, told a British newspaper reporter in Calais: “On the journey I have made, you carry your life like an egg in your hand.” The European response, by contrast, plays into a broader debate driven by populist, xenophobic parties tugging political discourse to the right. That, perhaps, is why the British government announced plans to abolish subsistence payments to failed asylum seekers and to make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to rent homes — a signal to those in Calais to look elsewhere, and an effort to convince their own citizens that, despite all appearances to the contrary, the authorities have the crisis under control. Since the failure of the Arab Spring to create anything close to a summer of content, the latest surge has written new chapters in a protracted chronicle of enforced migration in Europe provoked by successive waves of post-Cold War conflict since the 1990s. “Starting with helping the French on their side of the border, we're going to put in more fencing, more resources, more sniffer dog teams, more assistance in any way we can,” Prime Minister David Cameron said. But Britain’s response is seen by some critics as attacking the symptoms, not the cause, and Mr. Cameron’s remark conjured a far more recent historical parallel than Agincourt. “If the British carry on like this,” the columnist Nick Cohen wrote in The Observer, “the Channel will become our Berlin Wall.” |