The attorney general, the illegal immigrant, the city worker, the civil servant, the health worker are all the same in the pursuit of happiness and the struggle for a better life. What was missing in Baroness Scotland’s Illegalgate was a narrative that saw things from the housekeeper’s point of view, that climbed into under her skin and walked around in it. Loloahi Tapui like everyone else was just in her quest for self-transcendence. When we see pictures of illegal immigrants braving deaths at seas and in the jungles, it not only says a lot about where they are running from in fact it adds a new meaning to home. This is again why many who managed to secure visas are willing to overstay rather than go back ‘home’. Immigration and police officers carry out frequent dawn raids, invade privacy of homes, workplace, hospitals, barge into weddings, colleges and universities in the search for illegal immigrants. They sever fathers from their screaming children or at time both parents and herd them off to the deportation camps. Anyone who has witness these scenes would not only feel sympathy but also revulsion at the system. And yet the Border Agency now boasts of carrying out one deportation every eight seconds. Why should Britain, the land of the magna carter, bill of rights and J.S. Mill be a huge prison to some fellow human beings simply because they happen to have a different nationality? Migration, says J.K. Galbraith, is the oldest action againt poverty.
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Lord Darlington compels himself to fire two of her housemaids for no other reason than they belong to a hounded class of that time. His butler, Mr Stevens, the protagonist of the novel who In the totality of his professional commitment believes that in achieving greatness and dignity recognising emotions or feeling them do not count no matter the circumstance. In the end, both lost their humanity and went down in history. Baroness Scotland in sacking her maid in the name of the law, the French immigration minister in moving ruthlessly against the migrant’s camp in Calais, the churches in choosing to acquiesce to the Home Office demand of not permitting marriage for illegal immigrants are all repeating the dark practices of 20th century Europe.
Philippe Legrain in his frequently brilliant book, Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them' have already articulated a compelling case for the economic necessity of immigrants both legal and illegal thought I don’t think human life should be reduced to its economic worth. The Mayor of London has added his voice to the demand for amnesty. All of the Queen’s Christmas Message of 2007 was a plea for the illegals ‘people who feel cut off and disadvantaged; people who, for one reason or another, are not able to enjoy the full benefits of living in a civilised and law-abiding community.’The struggle to make our illegal brothers and sisters equal to us in status and opportunities belongs to the same spectrum as the abolition of slavery, women suffrage, fight against racism and fight for gay rights. Everyone has to take a stand.
The is something finer than visas and nationalities; the heart. And a heart that can beat beyond gates and rules is a heart worth having.