The Visitor

Another rainy day KPA coffee. This time accompanied by The Times. One article on changing immigration policy (1) prompted me to write this blog entry. Thomas McCarthy's film The Visitor (2007) was also an inspiration. I think anyone who has ever commented on immigration policy should watch this film.

The last time I flew from Stansted was with my university windsurfing club at the end of the hot summer of 2004. We were off to Vassiliki on the Greek island of Lekada for a week of sleeping-in, afternoon windsurfing, and nights of ouzo-fuelled dancing. I reached the airport late at night before the trains stopped running, and then snoozed on the floor and chatted vaguely about alcohol and existentialism with the other windsurfers until check-in opened for our early morning flight.

It is presumably for the benefit of the large numbers of travellers taking cheap early morning flights that Stansted dims the lights at night. Yet even though I realised this as I flew into Stansted at midnight a few days ago, I still felt uneasy about the semi-darkness surrounding my fellow passengers and I as we waited to get through immigration. Although we were organised into queues, looking around it was hard to see gaps between the queues, giving the impression of a vast and chaotic crowd of mostly silent and half-asleep people. Ahead of us were the immigration desks, each of them eerily lit by a single white light that focused on the place where a passport would be examined, leaving the immigration officer and the immigrant in semi-darkness. Above us, a vast sign: UK Border. I had a sudden sense that although my feet were on the ground, I was not in Britain yet; I was still outside.

When I reached the immigration desk, the officer scanned my passport and asked, "Where are you travelling from?" I had slept on the flight, and was not fully awake. I opened my mouth but my brain did not immediately engage. Eventually I was able to blurt out "Berlin". The officer smiled sympathetically. "It's that time of night, isn't it." She returned my passport and I crossed the border.

Thinking back to this moment, I recall an article in The Guardian a couple of months ago that described the working life of an immigration officer at Heathrow (2). What had particularly struck me about the article was the description of the psychology involved in 'trying to weed out suspicious passengers'. I wonder how much difference it would make if I was not a white man with a British passport unable to answer the question "Where are you travelling from?" but was instead an Asian woman with a non-British passport. Would I find myself faced with further questions, for example the question "Are you coming into the UK to marry an English man?" which a Korean friend on a student visa faced recently.

I stumbled out of the airport and found the bus that would take me to the car park where my car was parked. On the bus I overheard an irritated English man comparing what he had just experienced with the UK Border Agency with what he had experienced at his holiday destination. "In Rome they just looked at the passport and waved us through. Why do they need to ask us here where we're coming from? When they scan the passport they'll know, won't they?"

I think I need to educate myself further about the new UK Border Agency, formed in April 2008 (3). The UK border is changing rapidly; the border is not only becoming harder to cross but - as today's Times article suggests - is imposing new and vague restrictions on those who do cross it. In the process, we are further institutionalising a divide in society between citizens with full rights and those who have far fewer rights because they are not citizens. We may disagree about whether this division is just, and if it is just, then how it should be managed. One - of many - groups that has strong views and a lot of information on these questions is No Borders (4). Maybe some of us would take different positions on these questions if we knew more about what is going on at our borders today, and if we were able to see that those who are trying to enter our country are humans, just like us. Thomas McCarthy's film is powerful precisely because it reminds us of this.

References:
1. Ford, Richard (2009) "Anti-war migrants could damage citizenship hopes", The Times, August 4, 2009 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6737429.ece
2. Snowdon, Graham (2009) "Stamp Duty", The Guardian, June 27, 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/jun/27/immigration-officer-heathrow
3. UK Border Agency website, http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/aboutus/
4. No Borders website, http://www.noborders.org.uk/