Dr Hyab Yohannes
Academic Coordinator (School of Education), University of Glasgow
A shortened version of this piece was published in The Scotsman on 29 November 2022.
People seeking refuge do not do so merely as physical bodies needing protection. Often sealed within wounded bodies and behind strange faces, they respectfully appeal to the government and people of the UK to uphold their ethical responsibility to treat fellow human beings with dignity and respect. Refugees make these appeals as humans with their own languages, cultures, skills, and knowledge, and they want to use their languages, cultures, skills, and knowledge to build a world in which everybody can give and receive as equals.Yet, in the giving-receiving paradox of so-called integration, it is only citizens who have the right to give. Citizens accept no gifts from refugees, yet expect refugees to accept their own way of life as if it were a gift. People seeking refuge are required to learn the English language and culture, and to remember the names of the past and present royalties. They are required to pass English language and life in the UK tests as part of their naturalisation as British citizens. These tests are intended to examine whether individuals have sufficient language skills and are “suited” to life in the UK before they can be considered for British nationality. In this regard, the notion of integration as a benign relationship between incoming people and citizens tends to hide the fact that the latter forces its values and way of life on the people seeking refuge without receiving anything in return. The racialised refugees are expected to embrace the citizens’ language, culture, and ways of being without any form of reciprocation.
In this assimilative process defined as “integration”, people seeking refuge are expected to eventually leave their own “worlds” and enter a new “world” as if they had never previously existed as subjects with language, culture, values, and knowledge. They experience a perpetual reduction of their subjectivities. They want to work, study, speak their languages, and share their cultures, but, sadly, they are denied any opportunity to give back their languages, cultures, and ways of life. This impossibility of giving anything back forces refugees to become permanent receivers – to always be at the receiving end. Assimilated into a system in which they no longer recognise themselves, those who seek refuge unbecome what they once were to become like “us”.
If we consider place as a shared ecology, the category of refugee and the people seeking asylum are the sole hosts (of language, culture, and ways of knowing and being). One could say: ‘Well, they are being hosted in our country.’ Yet, the bounded spaces called “countries” are nothing more than places where the human condition, with all its complexities, unfolds. There is no need to politicise place, for we cannot afford to replace humanity with politics and hospitality with hostility. The truth, however, is that, for these racialised people, place has become a site of violence; it is turned into a site of bordering, of deportation, of detention, of denial of the right to seek asylum, and of forced assimilation.
The category of “citizen” appears to be assigned the role of “giver”, which denotes colonial relations. While, for citizens, the act of receiving is rendered impossible, for refugees, it is inevitable. Racialised refugees cannot force us to accept their gifts, and, at the same time, we can never force them to renounce their rights to give. One can only refuse to receive a gift – to share a world with those who seek refuge. In fact, those seeking refuge resist the idea that it is impossible for us to share the world; they know better how to coexist with new faces in new places. It therefore behoves the citizen to recognise the refugees’ dignity, and their rights to give and receive. Such an endeavour requires radical openness and hospitality.
Ironically, however, the government and the media create an environment – a “hostile environment” – in which citizens are taught to blame refugees for not giving back. Once citizens are persuaded that those seeking refuge are to blame, the government then uses to deny the refugees’ very existence and their basic rights to seek asylum. To deny people the right to asylum is the most radical dismissal of their very existence. To dismiss a wounded body, traumatised mind, and exiled human being seeking refuge is a radical abdication of any ethical and legal responsibility to protect the human condition. This radical dismissal is epitomised in the so-called Nationality and Borders Bill and its mutant Rwanda Deal. These legislations kill the right to seek asylum and legitimise deportability, violability, and detainability. The legislations sow existential violence.
To conclude, giving and receiving are essential elements in the processes of seeking asylum and integration. They allow us to leave ourselves and our own worlds in order to find ourselves in a new world that we have built together with others. If we deny people the right to give and force them to assimilate our ways of being, we are refusing to share a world with them. To listen and understand is to receive the refugees; it is the essence of hospitality. To refuse to listen to and understand is to abdicate all ethical responsibility. If we are incapable of recognising a human face in the faces of the refugees or a human place in the places of the refugees, then how can we claim to have humanity in our own faces and hospitality in our own places? There is a radical denial of humanity and hospitality in the UK asylum system, and this denial amounts to a refusal of the subjectivity of the refugee. Reversing this denial of subjectivity requires intercultural and inter-epistemic communication between cultures, languages, bodies, and minds outside of the state-sanctioned violence. It necessitates imagining asylum and integration otherwise and recognising the fact that we might need what the refugees have to offer us in order to accommodate them – to “integrate” them.
