My Lords, I decided to speak today after reading the words of the Immigration Minister, Robert Jenrick, speaking for the Government to Policy Exchange, demonising migrants and failing to recognise our responsibilities to refugees seeking asylum. He said that
“excessive, uncontrolled migration threatens to cannibalise the compassion of the British public”.
“Cannibalise”—what a deliberate and demonising choice of word. He went on:
“And those crossing tend to have completely different lifestyles … to those in the UK … undermining the cultural cohesiveness”.
It was deliberately divisive language and certainly not borne out by the UK experience.
Throughout that speech, there is a constant failure to look at economic migration separately from asylum seeking. I am the daughter of a refugee. My mother was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in a small village in eastern Hungary. When the Hungarian Government brought in anti-Jewish laws in 1938, she and her family tried to obtain visas to go to another country but, like so many others, found that no visas were to be had. She decided to be a survivor: she became a nightclub dancer in order to join a troupe going on tour in the Middle East. Once outside Hungary, she settled in Greece, which she hoped to make her home, but by 1943 the beginnings of civil war in Greece were tearing Athens apart. Her bed was strafed with bullets; friends standing beside her were shot down in the street. Women’s bodies lay butchered—women were particular targets.
She had met my father, a major with the British Army in Greece, but he was denied army permission to marry her and his attempts to get her papers to go to Britain were rejected. He returned with his regiment
to the UK and was demobbed—so you can imagine his astonishment when, on Christmas Eve 1945, he got a call from an airbase in southern England to say that my mother had arrived on a British miliary plane from continental Europe. She had been smuggled on board by the RAF. She was a genuine refugee but no one could argue that she had chosen an official route—or, as this Government would call it, a legal route. This Government would send her to Rwanda as an undesirable.
I see that the Minister is no longer in his place, so I ask the Whips and others to put this point to him, because I want an answer. I want the Minister today to show me the body of evidence and research that shows how British compassion has been “cannibalised” by asylum seekers and by people like my mother and me. I want to see his evidence of damage to cohesion that genuine asylum seekers, never mind migrants, have inflicted on the UK. I suspect that we will find it has no substance. He needs to show why diversity is a weakness not a strength. Ironically, if the Government continue to argue that migration creates such problems, it should never by its own logic return a single refugee to any country that already has a significant migrant population—and that eliminates most of Europe and indeed Africa, including Rwanda.
Limiting economic migration has never required treating asylum seekers as undesirables. I argue for the Britain that we saw this weekend at the Coronation, not threatened by diversity but energised by it, and comfortable with its complex identity. I recognise that not all the children of migrants or refugees share my view. Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, the daughter of migrants, asserted in the Commons on immigration that
“we have had too much of it in recent years”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/3/23; col. 575.]
But many do share my view and say, “Do to others what I would ask you to do for my family”. I repeat to the Minister, who has now returned to his place, that he should put in front of us today the evidence of the damage that he claims underpins and justifies this Bill, without which it should not stand—please feel free to use my mother and me as examples.
12.43 pm