Chris Bertram

Quiet around here, isn’t it?

I’ve just finished watching Netflix’s new Turkish miniseries Ethos, set in Istanbul and directed by Berkun Oya. This has been very little reviewed in the Western press, as far as I can see. The Guardian’s what-to-watch for December doesn’t even mention it. And yet, I think it is one of the most compelling dramas I have seen for a while. The eight episodes link characters from diverse backgrounds linked through Meryem, a hijab-wearing house cleaner who is seeing a psychiatrist, Peri, because of recurring fainting episodes. She lives with her brother, the permanently angry Yasin, a nightclub bouncer and his depressive wife Ruhiye. Meryem cleans the flat of Sinan, a philandering playboy. We get to see a spectrum of Turkish life from devout village people to sophisticated urbanites and a world where women actually dominate the action (the men are passive, confused, at the mercy of events). The soundtrack is wonderful and the acting superb, as is the lingering cinematography. I’ve avoided posting spoilers, which disables me from saying too much about what happens, but it might help to know that Gülbin’s family is Kurdish, and to be primed to think about what is happening when the Hodja’s daughter, Hayrünnisa, leaves the house in the final episode. Some of the interest is Turkey-specific but there’s much that’s more universal, such as the clash between the educated urban set and the more religious “rednecks” from out of town. Give it a try!

I took part in a debate today with Martin Ruhs (Oxford) for Migration Mobilities Bristol on labour migration. I’ll put in a link to the full discussion when it is available, but meanwhile, here are my opening remarks:

We live in a world where extreme poverty coexists with great wealth and where the accident of birth with one nationality rather than another has more bearing on someone’s life prospects than anything else. We also know that migration from poor countries to wealthy ones is more effective in addressing global poverty than just about anything else. Migrants from poor countries to wealthy ones gain access to more productive economies, earn higher wages than they would have at home, and send back valuable remittances to a degree that vastly exceeds the value of foreign aid programmes.

Meanwhile, wealthy countries need migrant labour to do the jobs that too few of our own citizens will do: agriculture and food, social care, health, construction, hospitality. (Jobs, actually, that once were invisible but which COVID has brought home the value of.) But immigration is also a hot-button electoral issue and nativist parties have enjoyed great success in promoting restrictionist policies that pander to anti-immigrant sentiment among electorates.

In response to this conflict between what is economically desirable (for both sides) and what is politically palatable to electorates, many economists have argued for the idea of a trade-off between openness and rights, suggesting that we can make the labour migration that “we” need more palatable to electorates to the extent to which the inferior and temporary status of those migrants is made concrete by depriving them of some rights. Here, migration is conceived of in transactional terms: “We” get a flexible and exploitable labour force, perhaps plugging key skills gaps; “they” get more money and voters don’t feel threatened that these incomers will displace them in “their own” country.
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The UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission has just published a report into the Windrush scandal. The report shows that policy makers ignored warnings about the likely impacts of the “hostile environment” policy on groups such as the Windrush generation. As a result of the policy, many people who had difficulty in proving their right to reside in the UK, often because the Home Office imposed a ludicrous evidential burden on them, lost their jobs, their homes, were denied access to vital health care, were detained in prison-like immigration detention centres or were deported and excluded from a country they had lived in all their lives.

The report makes grim reading, but what emerges clearly from it is that ministers and their civil servants, seeking to display a “get tough” message on immigration, were not disposed to listen to the people telling them about how things would turn out. They were already set on the policy and were going to stick to it whatever. Critics were to be ignored and rebutted and the UK government were not interested in finding evidence that would get in the way. Legal duties to promote equality and non-discrimination were not seen as goals that ought to inform policy but, at best, as obstacles to circumvented.

After the Windrush scandal broke in 2018, thanks to the work of activists and journalists, including Amelia Gentleman who wrote an excellent book about this, the Home Office pledged to put things right. But the compensation scheme for victims that the Home Office was forced to put in place has paid out a pittance to a very few of the victims, and a senior civil servant has resigned suggesting that racism is an important part of the explanation. Almost weekly new absurdities come to light, such as the case of a man who the Home Office illegally excluded from the country who has now applied for British citizenship, which the Home Office is denying him on the basis that he spent too long out of the country.

The British press, with the exception of the Guardian, has given little prominence to this story. Another report from the EHCR into anti-semitism in the Labour Party was all over the front pages, but one into the impact of immigration policy on the lives of thousands of people is, well, not. Too late to affect this report but ominously for the future, the UK government has now appointed David Goodhart, a prominent advocate of the hostile environment (who now says he was always against “abuses”), as one of the commissioners for the EHRC. As US Republicans have learnt from the experience of the Supreme Court, the answer to the problem of referees giving decisions against you is to appoint new, more pliant, referees.