The Home Secretary has announced that
because people from certain countries who come to the UK as students are more
likely than those from other countries to then apply for asylum, she will ban
anyone from those countries coming to the UK on a student visa. She could just
as easily – and just as truthfully –
have said that students coming from a country where there is conflict are more
likely to apply for asylum than those from countries where there is no conflict.
Who’d have thought it? It’s almost as though people coming from places where
they have genuine reasons to seek asylum might be more likely to seek asylum.
Treating people on the basis of being able to place
them in a certain category rather than looking at them as individuals is always
going to be problematic. I’m pretty certain that people with dark skin coming
to the UK on student visas are more likely to apply for asylum than people with
fair skin, although I’ll admit that I don’t have hard evidence to back that up,
other than the entirely coincidental fact that it is true of all the countries she
has selected. If the Home Secretary banned all those of a darker hue from
applying for student visas, she would be more roundly condemned than she has
been. Her announcement yesterday was not as overtly racist as that would be, even
if the effect might end up indirectly discriminating on race. It is, though,
much the same thing – treating people on the basis of a collective attribute
rather than their individual circumstances.
It is essentially a lazy response to a complex issue.
“Some of that group might apply for asylum, so we’ll ban all of them from
studying here” might attract a positive headline from the right wing media,
but it doesn’t reflect any sense of fairness or compassion. Insofar as I
understand ‘traditional British values’, it’s also deeply un-British. But then
again, I’ve long stopped trying to understand those values in terms of what
people say they are – actions tell an entirely different story.
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