A word game we all lose

“What’s in a word?” asked Shakespeare, who then answered himself along the lines of not very much. The great man thus predated by four centuries Jacques Derrida with his silly deconstructionism.

I disagree, most respectfully. Not wishing to step on the toes of either our national poet or France’s faux-philosopher, I still maintain that in our prosaic life words are crucially significant.

Take the term ‘illegal migrants’, which is always in the news these days. Most people who use it in the media tend to slide over the adjective and stress the noun, evoking horrific images and appealing to our charitable instincts.

True enough, vast areas of Africa, the Middle East and, these days, Eastern Europe are suffering horrific wars, genocide and famines. That compels thousands, or rather millions, of people to save themselves and their families by fleeing.

The safest harbours they identify are all in the West, emphatically including Britain known for her munificence. And it’s also true that whatever is left of Christian charity (or, barring that, basic decency) should make us welcome those poor people and do as much as we can for as many as we can.

Yes, politics tends to be based not on Christian charity or even basic decency, but on cold-blooded pragmatism (however misconstrued). Yet there have to be exceptions. Shrugging our shoulders when proverbial women and children are being slaughtered means betraying everything good in our civilisation.

That’s why we have generous immigration quotas, and it could be argued that they should be made even more generous in some situations, with extra provisions for cases of genocide. Agreed? Good. We’ve now milked the noun part of ‘illegal migrants’ for all it’s worth.

Now let’s talk about the adjective. My trusted dictionary defines ‘illegal’ as “contrary to or forbidden by law, especially criminal law.” That’s where the word game comes in, called ‘transformation’ in linguistics.

This means replacing lexical or grammatical structures with their full equivalents that clarify their meaning without distorting it. Thus, using the above definition as the starting point, we can transform ‘illegal migrants’ into ‘criminal migrants’. Rather than relying on our generous immigration quotas, they choose to break the law.

People who cross the Channel in small boats and then seek asylum in Britain aren’t legitimate migrants or refugees. They are law-breakers, otherwise known as criminals. And their numbers, though still short of the D-Day force going in the opposite direction, are still significant.   

In 2020, 8,466 crossed over in small boats, which number increased to 28,526 in 2021 and more than 40,000 in 2022. This year it’s estimated to grow to 56,000, creating an unmanageable backlog in asylum applications.

That’s a lot of criminals to swell the ranks of the rapidly expanding homegrown variety. This raises the question of what to do with them.

The most obvious stratagem would be to prevent them from landing in Britain in the first place, and the Royal Navy has a fair amount of relevant experience. At different times in our history, it prevented the invasion of such formidable adversaries as Philip II, Napoleon and Hitler.

While admitting that firing broadsides at those small boats would be ill-advised, one still likes to hope that the Royal Navy could do something to turn those boats around. After all, they aren’t shooting at our ships either.

That hope seems to be forlorn. The Royal Navy lacks either the incentive or orders or capacity to stop the influx of small boats carrying criminals to our shores. So what happens next?

The government started out by spending millions to accommodate the arrivals at hotels boasting a various number of stars (up to four). Alternatively, they are housed in abandoned military bases – due to Britain’s lackadaisical approach to defence, there exist many of those.

This creates all sorts of problems, and funding is the least of it. You see, many, I’d even dare say most, of the new arrivals are – what would be an inoffensive term? – differently civilised. Their hygienic, amorous and acquisitive practices are often at odds with the local mores, which creates conflicts.

The locals sign petitions, demonstrate outside migrant centres and sometimes even resort to violence. So far no deaths have been reported, but that situation is likely to change.

I don’t think people in the Home Counties are blood-thirsty Little Englanders, but they do have legitimate concerns about their tranquil neighbourhoods turning into hellholes. They feel their home is where charity should begin.

The most obvious solution is to remove those criminals from Britain, send them somewhere where their habits would be less jarring to the ambient mores and ban them from ever applying for asylum in Britain. Rwanda was mooted as a possible destination first.

That sounds like a good idea to me, but not to those who accentuate the noun in ‘illegal migrants’ at the expense of the adjective. Thus possible deportation to Rwanda was tied up in legal challenges. And in June the Court of Appeal ruled it unlawful because the Rwanda asylum system wasn’t deemed to be up to scratch.

Ascension Island is the current candidate, which also strikes me as appropriate. After all, if St Helena was good enough for Napoleon, Ascension Island in the same part of the South Atlantic should be good enough for those criminal migrants. And if they find that not being the case, then many others could well be deterred from entering Britain illegally.

Yet I fear that any deportation scheme, to Ascension Island or elsewhere, will suffer the same fate. After all, it goes against the grain of the dominant ethos declared and enforced by our lumpen intelligentsia.

This group spouts humanitarian slogans with the best of them, but in fact it’s driven by neither Christian charity nor even basic decency.

As one of their intellectual leaders, Peter Mandelson, once explained with refreshing candour, importing large groups of cultural aliens expands the electoral base of the leftmost parties. Thus, what his boss Blair described as “the forces of conservatism” would be neutralised.

Neither Blair nor Mandelson nor their current followers have bothered to put any upper limit on their generosity. That’s a serious oversight, considering that billions of people worldwide would rather live in Britain than in their own countries. The size of our island suggests that some sort of limit is necessary.

The seminal difference between legitimate and criminal migrants also seems to be moot. Thwarting the forces of conservatism is vital; upholding the law isn’t. Those gentlemen are, however, adept at camouflaging their cynicism with bien pensant jargon.  

Thus Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, is appalled by the Ascension Island scheme: “This is more shameful demonisation of men, women and children fleeing from countries such as Afghanistan, the bloodshed in Syria and Sudan and persecution in Iran.

“It is time for the government to stop its obsession with unworkable and inhumane schemes that treat people like human cargo and address the shocking mismanagement of the asylum system with seriousness and accountability.”

In other words, let’s fling our doors wide open and admit them all, legal or otherwise. Never mind legality, feel the empathy.

The causal relationship between crime and punishment immortalised by Dostoyevsky has fallen by the wayside – the noun in ‘illegal migrants’ has trumped the adjective. That’s like arresting a man who has stolen £10,000 and, instead of sending him down, awarding him the same sum by court order.

If you think this is a spurious simile, I suggest you look up the meaning of ‘illegal’ in any dictionary you trust.