Why This Image Isn't As Helpful As You Think

England’s charge in the Euro 2020 Championships was immense. They had never made it to a final, in fact this tournament was one of many records. It was the first in which they had not lost a knockout game*, one in which they have maintained a record number of clean sheets, and they have the second youngest team in the tournament with an average age of 25. This is also one of the most diverse England sides I have seen. There are players in the squad who represent all corners of England, with heritage spanning from Jamaica through Ireland to Nigeria. 

At the height of the tournament some graphics were published to demonstrate that without the children and grandchildren of immigrants the starting 11 against Germany would have been 8 men short. Sterling, Philips, and Walker all have at least one parent/grandparent who emigrated from Jamaica. Kane and Rice similarly would not have been eligible without immigration from Ireland. At the time something didn’t sit right with me but, swept up with the hype of the tournament and being unsure of what I was feeling, I made a private note to refer to later. In the light of the single biggest loss of life in the Channel last week, I know now what it is I wanted to say.

You likely don’t recognise the name Mamoudou Gassama, however I’m sure some of you will remember his story. Hailed the “Spider-Man of Paris”, footage emerged in the summer of 2018 on social media of Mamoudou climbing the side of a building in an attempt to save a child who was hanging off a fourth story balcony. Upon their arrival, the fire fighters realised their services were not required; Mamoudou had successfully rescued the 4-year-old boy. In an interview at the time the mayor of Paris expressed her praise for his act of bravery and thanked him warmly. 

The 22-year-old had arrived from Mali only months prior to the incident, travelling across the Mediterranean and through Italy (having obtained papers to stay legally). In an interview, the Paris mayor said she was sure the people of Paris would assist Mamoudou with his efforts to settle in France. President Macron invited him to the Elysée Palace, where he was given a certificate and a gold medal for his heroic act. The Paris fire brigade tweeted: "Mamoudou shares the values of the Paris fire brigade. We are ready to welcome him."

The immediate response was much of the above; jubilation from officials and members of the public alike, calls to award him with various honours, grant him citizenship, and so on. But something even then seemed a little off to me. It seemed like Mamoudou didn’t really matter, not until he had acted in some kind of exceptional manor anyway. What this entire event demonstrated was that Mamoudou’s value to France was based solely on what he was providing for them, almost literally like a transaction. 

Mamoudou’s story is virtually a carbon copy of one from a few years earlier. Lassana Bathily, a Muslim man also originally from Mali, helped to hide customers in the basement of the supermarket he worked at during a gunned attack. He was 24 at the time and arrived from Mali as an undocumented child migrant at 16. He was immediately granted citizenship and given a job by the Paris mayor’s office.

The vitriol following the 2016 EU membership referendum was palpable and has only really been substituted off for COVID - it will no doubt be back in the starting eleven soon (I promise that is the end of the football analogies). As continental Europeans living in the UK found their status at risk and indefinitely uncertain, I began to hear protestation. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve turned on the radio or opened twitter to an EU domiciled person currently living in the UK defending themselves by explaining that they had lived in the UK for several years, worked the entire time and had been paying taxes here too. In some of these cases the individuals would plea that they had started businesses here and currently employ several people, that they are specialist consultants treating people in Britain, or that they are inventors bringing innovation to this country, and the rest of us would use these individuals as examples of why immigration is a good thing. 

To defend continental Europeans, I would commonly cite the statistic that immigrants are net contributors to the UK economy, especially EU immigrants. This is because in most cases they travel here to work only, choosing to be educated and retire in their home country (commonly the two big burdens on the state). The statistic is incontrovertibly true, and at the time felt like a powerful argument, but all it does is perpetuate the idea of the exceptional immigrant model. It creates a great deal of anxiety for those that don’t fit this mould and generates animosity toward them from the indigenous population.

And so we are seeing a mirror image of this following the boat that sank in the Channel last week, killing 27 people. In the aftermath of this tragic incident, people are sharing stories of their colleagues and neighbours who arrived in this country as asylum seekers and refugees and now working as doctors, consultants, business owners, etc., in opposition to the governments callous stance on this issue. The government, conversely, believe that these migrants do not deserve to reside in this great land. So, what is the intrinsic value of a human life and how is it measured? Refugees scrambling on a boat to claim asylum for a better life are to be turned away, while we offer special rate fast track visas for those with exceptional talent and Nobel laureates. It is no surprise that nobody had applied via the prestigious pathway in the six months since May that the programme was active. This is an extremely difficult discussion to navigate. You want to support these people’s right to a safe and meaningful life, and it is easy to give examples of what these people could be and achieve if they were given a chance. But that is also the problem - why must this be a transaction?

A measure of one’s value cannot simply be their GDP contribution, as myself and many of my contemporaries who were born and brought up in the UK are net beneficiaries when you understand the cost of healthcare and education. Similarly, Gassama and Bathily were accepted into their countries after two heroic acts which had no immediate financial benefit to the state. Do people believe that those acts were a example of a uniquely French or European value, demonstrable of their assimilation?

What value have I provided to be granted stay here? What have you provided? If the punishment for not providing value is deportation, as it has been with so many of the Windrush generation who have been threatened with deportation to a country they never lived in, or just immigrants who the state believe will become a burden, why not deport the indigenous population who don’t conform to these requirements too? Meritocracy has no place in this conversation; we are lucky, if you want to call it that, to have been born here. That is it, nothing more and nothing less. We are lucky that we don’t have to prove our worth in the same way, because I’m not sure many of us could: I’m not a specialist, I’m not an innovator, I’m not a hero. Even though I was born and brought up in the UK I still feel like I must excel just to be accepted. As Musa Okwonga puts it in One of Them; “to enter this world I had to run a thousand miles, and my friend merely had to open his front door and stroll down the lawn”.

Ultimately, I appreciate the sentiment of the image in question; it was a protest against the current governments policy on immigration. It asks the top ministers and their supporters how they can cheer these players on the pitch while justifying committing abhorrent acts against people who, in so many ways, are just like the England players. In this regard I think it is powerful, but we should be very careful not to fall into the trap of promoting the exceptional immigrant model. It is very easy to approach politics like it’s a game when it is the lives of other people you are playing with.

*I wrote most of this before the final, the result of which is probably the reason why it took me so long to edit and publish it.