The author is a ‘Free’ author
“Can you tell me how you got here?” A man sitting in front of me, carrying a little girl in his lap, mumbled something I didn’t understand. His head hangs down, his gaze fixed on the brown tile. He looked worn-out, like many others I had seen this morning. “I’m from Poklek,” he said. “Serbian soldiers burned houses and we marched until we reached Kukës, then . . .” He stopped tiredly.
In 1999, during NATO’s intervention in the former Yugoslavia, hundreds of thousands of Kosovo refugees crossed the border into Albania. I worked briefly for the Red Cross, officially as a translator, though my real job was to distinguish between “real” and “fake” Kosovans. The former were fleeing Slobodan Milošević’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. The latter is a desperate Albanian who pretends to be a Kosovar, so he can receive free food. Because many IDs are destroyed, only local people can tell the difference.
“He said he was from a village in Kosovo,” I translated to my boss. “But there’s an accent, but it doesn’t fit.” The man is broken. “I’m unemployed,” he pleaded. “I have four children. What a difference a bag of rice makes. the stomach is the same.” I shook my head. “Can we have some biscuits?” the little girl quipped. “The boxes are sealed,” I said, and saw her eyes filled with tears.
At that time, I felt that I was part of a noble mission: to protect the border between truth and lies, refugees and frauds, genuine needs and the manipulation of the system. This is probably how most immigration thinkers feel, drawing a line between deserving and undeserving recipients. The distinction between genuine asylum seekers and illegal economic migrants is crucial in deciding who to admit and who to exclude. The former is seen as a victim. The latter is a criminal.
“Is Albania a safe country?” I am now asked. “If so, why should Albanians be accepted in England?”
Albania was technically safe in 1999, when hundreds of thousands of Kosovo refugees arrived. Still, most people are desperate, unable to recover from the collapse of the fraudulent financial scheme in which, according to the IMF, two thirds of the population have invested. Those who tried to flee died at sea or returned immediately. After all, they are economic migrants, even though they are the same people who would generally be defined as asylum seekers if communism had not collapsed.
A significant part of the Albanian diaspora in England came then. They are victims of the same collapse: economic migrants masquerading as Kosova refugees. When his mother died in Albania, he could not return to bury her. They have nothing to do with Kosovo. In the UK, no amnesty has been issued and some are victims of organized crime. Foreigners in three countries, they live in the shadow of a system reluctant to forgive.
On the surface, the distinction between refugees and economic migrants makes sense. For the former, the contractual bond with the country of birth has been broken beyond repair. To provide shelter not only to reduce the burden of suffering, but symbolically restore the democratic meaning of politics.
But for political representation to work, formal rules are not enough. Patients who died waiting for an ambulance were also victims of a broken system. The same goes for old pensioners who freeze to death at home. Likewise, unemployed people cannot provide for their children. We hardly think of this as a systemic failure because we equate democracy with formal procedures: the right to vote, to associate with others, to speak freely. But with economic problems, we tend to blame individuals rather than institutions.
Taking responsibility for economic migration is more demanding than providing shelter to asylum seekers. Vulnerable Albanians are now, simultaneously, victims of communist isolation and collapse, from the shock therapy carried out during the nineties, the great financial crisis, the pandemic, and now the inflation and energy crisis. In the future, they must consider environmental emergencies. One cannot reduce the situation to a simplistic distinction between successful and failed states or to a harsh imperative about fighting authoritarianism and establishing the rule of law. Migration is not about who comes in and who stays out, but about who benefits from globalization and who bears the burden.
I have thought about my work at the Red Cross with a sense of uneasiness, even shame. Boundaries, which we cross geographically and which we create mentally, are always a matter of convention, often inherited uncritically from the narratives of privileged elites in privileged countries. So is the difference between economic migrants and political asylum seekers: legal, of course, but still morally disturbing.