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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Review by Neal Ascherson in The Observer, 19 May 2000
By A Customer
.....'Marvellous sharp-end reportage is a big part of this book. But what makes Jeremy Harding's writing so compelling is the way he interprets what he sees and hears. From Ceuta, he points out that the sheer horror of these immense desert pilgrimages fulfils, accidentally, a European requirement. It sieves out the applicants. 'These job seekers' says Harding drily, 'are among the most highly motivated in Europe.'........In the same way, he goes down to the Puglian cast of Italy to watch the patrol boats chasing gommoni - the rubber dories which rush illegal migrants across the Adriatic from the Albanian shore - and finds that the traffickers can be brave and unselfish with their passengers as well as extortionate....... And up the coast at the Regina Pacis refuge camp, he meets a defiant pries who claims that the illegals have only two friends in the world: his refuge and organised crime. Harding traces the history of what he calls 'Europe's project of exclusion', the slow slinking-away of commitment to the 1951 Convention on refugee status towards a new dream of 'Fortress Europe', which he bitingly calls a 'dreary pastoral fantasy, in which the European Union resembles an Alpine valley surrounded by impregnable, snow-capped mountains'...... It is now almost incredible to recall the way in which France, for example, simple opened its frontiers between the world wars to hundreds of thousands of White Russians, Armenians fleeing genocide, German anti-Nazis and Jews, Spanish Republicans or Italian opponents of Mussolini. Britain was generous too, once. Jeremy Harding suggests that the first real sign of a change came in 1900, when the SS Cheshire arrived at Southampton, in an uproar of publicity, with a party of South African Jews hoping to take refuge from the Boer War. They were depicted in the Daily Mail much as the same paper would describe Kurdish or Tamil asylum-seekers now...... It is ironic, as Harding observes, that those who passionately believe in the sort of globalisation which is based on the free movement of capital are equally passionately opposed to the free global movement of people..... The first key to understanding migration is understanding that the distinction between 'genuine asylum seeker' (good) and 'economic migrant' (bad) is rubbish. In the refugee camp at Ceuta, Africans are envious because the Algerians pass the EU criteria of 'political persecution' and they do not, but they also consider - as people who have known real want and hunger - that the distinction between persecution by a state or a terrorist movement and persecution by starvation is utterly unreal...... The second part of wisdom is simpler: realising that in the end, legally or illegally, the rest of the world is going to get into this Sound of Music valley of ours, and that they will make it younger, higher-earning and altogether a less oppressive place.' adapted from a review that appeared in The Observer on 7 May 2000.
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by Philip Marfleet
by Charles Watters
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