The case for making "illegals" irregular

When the UK Immigration Minister Phil Woolas spoke out against "illegal immigrants," at a press conference this month, most immediately understood the reference to mean migrants who have cheated their way into the UK. It’s easy to jump to that conclusion when only presented with two options – it’s black or white - you are either here legally – or not. Never mind that you have fled persecution, been trafficked, abducted, cheated or smuggled– foreigners without papers in the UK are “illegal” and are to be hunted down and removed for the sake of public order. But by using this terminology, are we playing into the hands of the real criminals – the ones who facilitate the clandestine crossings, the false documentation or worse still engage in human trafficking or terrorism? While that question goes unanswered, we collectively draw a sigh of relief as yet another batch of Illegals are removed from our doorstep.

In my experience, after almost a decade in the field of migration, we discover many different migrants who although not yet legal, qualify for further consideration: trafficked men, women and children who have been kidnapped, cheated, misled to believe that they are traveling on valid documents on valid grounds, potential asylum seekers searching for refuge, economic migrants, those who have been smuggled, those who have run away, children who have been abducted, those without documents– all of these people are irregular migrants whose cases and life situation deserves closer scrutiny – something that will not happen if society continues to use terminology that precludes further investigation.

By dismissing all migrants without papers immediately as "illegal" rather than allowing for a third category of “irregular migrants” we lose the opportunity to understand the different push and pull factors that influence migration flows. Without that understanding we would not be able to put measures in countries of origin to counter these flows. Additionally, by dividing people into two groups we limit our ability to understand what is happening and why. Once people have been labeled and sorted as legal or illegals, the problem is dismissed. If instead we chose to suspend judgment we can examine the situation more carefully and that would be to our advantage.

As Chief of Mission for the International Organization for Migration in Moldova in early-2000, we noted high numbers of young girls who had been trafficked for sexual exploitation. At the time, the UK was still suspicious of these young women from Eastern Europe who turned up at brothels in parts of the UK – these women had been drugged, beaten and raped repeatedly for profit. Until the proper label was given to these women i.e. as having been trafficked, the general public believed that they were prostitutes who had smuggled their way into the UK to steal a better life for themselves – they were just like all the other ïllegals’ breaking the rules just to get ahead. With that attitude, there was little incentive for UK authorities to ask further questions – these girls suffered immediate deportation – sometimes directly back into the hands of the same pimps who simply retrafficked them. The trafficked victims were scorned as illegals while their traffickers went free. If we had taken a moment back then to look more closely at irregular migration, awareness of “human trafficking,” would have been better understood at an earlier stage, more lives could have been spared and more effort would have focused on apprehending the traffickers who continued to profit from this crime long after the “illegals” were deported.

"Illegal" is a legal term and should be reserved for those who have been proven to have committed a crime against the state without the involvement of a middle-man – all others need to be looked at more closely to ensure that we are not been dealing with people whose own rights have been violated and whose very presence should serve as a signal to our authorities that further investigation is necessary. Unless we revisit our choice of semantics, we could be providing a smokescreen for criminal elements that behind the scenes profit from our ignorance. The greatest danger is our own desire to simplify our understanding of the world by sorting it into boxes we create for ourselves. How we label our world is how we learn to understand it. We can counter that by acknowledging that sometimes when the label doesn’t fit we need a descriptor that makes better sense- and agree that these people are irregular migrants until we have truly understood, why and how they got here.