Thread by @AlasdairMack66

Let’s say you are– for sake of argument – involved in a democracy movement in a post-Soviet dictatorship. Recently the police picked you up, beat the hell out of you & assaulted you in ways you’d rather not dwell on > 1/

Then they booted you out of the police station and told you to keep quiet if you value your life. Recovering at home, you’re aware of the blokes in parked cars outside the flat, & your neighbour’s friend in the police warns you you’re on the list next time it all kicks off 2/

You climb down a drainpipe in the middle of the night and make it to your aunt’s house.

What do you do now? 3/

What Priti Patel would like you to do – other than ceasing to be her problem, even hypothetically – is sit in a refugee camp & hope some beneficent Western country deems you to be deserving & rescues you – or so it seems from her incoherent plans today 4/

https://twitter.com/maybulman/status/1374634902000394240?s=20

But where are these camps? There are no safe zones in your country & even if they existed in a neighbouring one, the land borders are sealed. Nor (if you even think about it) are you confident that, if camps did exist, people like Patel would sincerely be trying to get you out 5/

You can’t come legally to the UK, or any other safe country, because they won’t give you a visa & anyway the police have kept your passport.

But a friend of a friend knows a people-smuggler & if your family cobbles together enough money they’ll get you out in secret 6/

Maybe you believe the UK respects human rights – maybe you’ve heard UK ministers boasting about this – maybe your cousin lives here, maybe it’s just because the first flight which a corrupt border guard can help you get on is bound for Heathrow. Anyway, you end up in the UK. 7/

You’re afraid immigration officers will just send you back if you claim asylum at the airport, you’re feeling exhausted & scared & want to speak to a lawyer, & anyway the smuggler has told you to pretend to be a tourist, so you do. Then you claim asylum a few days later 8/

You’re likely to find seeking asylum humiliating & stressful, with dismal accommodation & a confusing application process. Perhaps you find it hard to talk about just what happened in that police station. But you fight on & a couple of years later get asylum 9/

Under Patel’s proposals, you won’t get permanent residence or even something leading to it, just temporary, renewable status. You’re told this is bc of your means of travel & the need to deter smugglers, & it’d be different if you’d only waited in that imaginary refugee camp 10/

You hear Patel on the radio saying you elbowed aside women & children patiently waiting in camps (you may even be a woman and/or a child, let’s not follow PP in leaping to conclusions here, tho there are reasons why many asylum-seekers in 🇬🇧 are men) 11/

https://twitter.com/4refugeewomen/status/1374650365963014147?s=20

You find this mind-achingly disingenuous, but more pressingly you have nightmares of what will happen if you’re sent back at the end of your temporary status. You find it hard to work & settle down, while politicians blame you for not integrating. 12/

https://twitter.com/BennnyH/status/1374651557220904962?s=20

When you do re-apply to stay, your application sits in a queue for years bc the Home Office don’t have the staff to deal with it (they already can’t cope with initial applications, altho they’re fewer than before). Your nightmares & anxieties increase. 13/

https://twitter.com/BBCDomC/status/1374669458560720896?s=20

Sometimes you wonder where the deserving refugees are, who were supposed to be disadvantaged by your secret journey, and begin to suspect that the UK government wasn’t being 100% sincere when it said it’d increase the numbers it accepted from camps or "official routes" 14/

Details obvs vary, but this kind of experience – using clandestine means to save your life urgently – is common & is caused by restrictive visa policies & carriers’ liability legislation (fining airlines etc who bring people with the wrong documents) 15/

https://twitter.com/sabir_zazai/status/1373671190871609344?s=20

Let’s be clear: the govt’s proposals are going to cause more pain & misery to people who've already suffered too much. There’s no decent, sincere basis for playing off one kind of refugee vs another, acc to means of travel, or gender, or anything else 16/

https://twitter.com/SonyaSceats/status/1374619279388213253?s=20

It’s unclear (to say the least) that Patel’s proposals are in line with the Refugee Convention – which broadly prohibits penalties based on means of entry + requires states to help refugees integrate – or the non-discrimination provisions of the ECHR 17/

https://twitter.com/leoniehirst/status/1374615256169873410?s=20

But this is what happens when the humanitarian intentions of refugee law – forged, let’s recall, in the shadow of Nazism & the shameful failure to protect its victims – come into the sights of people whose worldview is to punish, control & exclude 18/

https://twitter.com/trillingual/status/1374644257831714816?s=20

And of course this viciousness isn’t only something that comes naturally to some kinds of politicians, it’s also something many of them see as electorally advantageous. 19/

https://twitter.com/sabir_zazai/status/1374630293450207235?s=20

Amazingly there are still some who think supposedly progressive people can win that sort of arms race with the right. We can’t. That’s why it’s so important that we don’t only oppose these measures but also try & change the whole narrative. /end (for now)

https://twitter.com/GMIAU/status/1374666833870094338?s=20