The government appears to have lost the moral argument over refusing sanctuary to 3,000 child refugees in Europe and is on the verge of a U-turn, even though it won the vote narrowly in parliament last week. It’s difficult to be a Gradgrind when the numbers are so small and emotions run so high.
Every one of the children who is likely to come will have suffered beyond our imagination and deserves a warm welcome. I’m glad they will have a fresh chance in life but we mustn’t be starry-eyed about the consequences.
Yvette Cooper has found her voice on this issue after faltering in the Labour leadership campaign. The children were sleeping rough and “committing survival sex”, she warned MPs, and by refusing them entry David Cameron was “putting this country to shame”.
I expect all those who voted with the government felt pretty shabby. Yet while each child saved from a life of desperation is a victory, it is also a win for the people traffickers and parents who, often naively, send their children on these perilous journeys. It will undoubtedly encourage more unaccompanied minors to set off for Europe, risking drowning, beatings, rape and robbery along the way.
Although every migrant child’s story is one of suffering, not every case is the same. There are a few tragic examples of lone children separated from their parents on the long road from the Middle East and Africa who merit special consideration.
Advertisement
There are also orphans, some of whom are stuck in Calais’s Jungle camp, who have travelled with neighbours and cousins from their war-torn communities — not quite alone but needing shelter and protection. There are others still who may be able to join relatives in Britain (indeed some may have been sent expressly for that purpose).
There is also a horribly exploitative, burgeoning industry devoted to encouraging children, mostly boys, to take their chances on the road. All too often they vanish into Fagin-style gangs, the sex trade and modern slavery.
If they reach Britain they are still at risk — Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner for England, told a Lords committee last month that many young asylum seekers go missing from local authority care.
“There is a horribly exploitative industry devoted to encouraging children to take their chances on the road
Only one in seven unaccompanied minors in Europe is from Syria, the country that evokes our greatest sympathy. Kent county council is already looking after some 900 child refugees from countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.
When the Sunday Times writer AA Gill was nearly mugged in the Jungle by three Egyptian teenagers recently, it brought to mind a heartbreaking report I’d seen on CNN last year about boys who were sent from Egypt to seek their fortune in Italy.
Advertisement
Parents from a small village had paid traffickers to take their young teenagers on a rickety boat across the Mediterranean. The boys ended up milling around Rome’s main railway station, selling their bodies and drugs, trying to earn the money to pay off their families’ debts to the smugglers, while bravely pretending in calls home that they were doing well. Was this how Egyptian boys came to be thieving in the Jungle?
It seems harsh to talk about the “push factors” of war and poverty in the same breath as the “pull factors” of opportunity and resettlement, but they go
together. A staggering 95,070 unaccompanied minors (including young adults posing as children) applied for asylum in Europe last year, a fourfold rise on the previous year.
America has experienced its own full-blown crisis over undocumented children from Central America — one of the reasons Donald Trump’s promise to “build a great, great wall” along the border with Mexico has had such resonance.
“Cameron is right: the humane policy is to help refugees near their country of origin
For years parents would cross illegally into America and send money home to grandparents to bring up their children. Then, not unnaturally, they wanted their children with them and began paying traffickers (“coyotes”) with green cards to pose as relatives and smuggle them across in their cars.
I went to a crossing 10 years ago just as the border patrol was waking up to this tactic. In the dead of night a coyote tried to bring three young Guatemalan girls into America. When caught, the nine-year-old threw up in anxiety and fear before they were all dumped back in a children’s home on the Mexican side. It was devastating for them.
Advertisement
Later, however, under Barack Obama’s more compassionate regime, word spread that if children were found in the desert they had a good chance of staying in America. In just four years the numbers surged by 1,200% — 52,000 unaccompanied minors were caught in 2014.
Public information campaigns in Central America and some small-scale efforts at deportation led to a fall in numbers last year, but they have surged again in 2016.
Last week border patrol agents rescued a two-year-old girl from El Salvador who had been abandoned by smugglers. She was wearing a T-shirt with a phone number on it.
When the government talks about the pull factor, it’s not just a question of frightening us with statistics. The children who will be encouraged to come will endure great hardship and suffering. Do we really want them to embark on such a terrifying journey?
It’s not pretty, but Cameron is right: the humane policy is to help refugees near their country of origin.