It’s fascinating to see elements familiar from fictional
crime drama appearing in real life: the smashed, charred mobile phone fished
out of a drain and the broken SIM card found some distance away, yielding
crucial information on who the driver had contacted between discovering the
bodies and calling the ambulance; the painstaking analysis of CCTV to trace the
movements of the lorry and the trailer; the extraordinary luck of finding an
eyewitness in the French countryside.
Above all, though, this is heartbreaking. The film-makers
travelled to Vietnam to speak to the families of the victims: a father, a
mother, a young widow left to raise her children alone. All those who died in
that lorry were fairly young – the youngest two were fifteen – and they weren’t
refugees fleeing war or persecution, just young people setting out to seek
their fortune, to escape relentless rural poverty, and to try to make enough
money to improve their own lives and those of their families.
To enable them to take that step, the families had borrowed
the huge sums demanded for the journey; one family had paid $22,000, another
person paid £13,000 just for the passage from France to the UK. Sacrifices had
been made. One father describes how he borrowed money from the banks and from
relatives, some of whom had sold their cows and buffaloes to lend the money. Interviews
with the family members are interspersed with footage of their everyday lives and
their agricultural work, hinting at the hardship those young people were hoping
to escape.
One mother talks about how her daughter had resisted
pressure to marry young, and had even concocted the story of a fortune teller informing
her “she would only be happy if she got married after she turned 30”. Like many
of the others, this young woman had hoped to work overseas for a few years and
then come home. Her mother had known she was waiting to get from France to the
UK, but hadn’t known the details – only that she was travelling “VIP class”.
For $22,000 one would certainly expect VIP treatment, but
the reality was long hours sealed in an overcrowded lorry trailer, where the
temperatures gradually rose from a chilly 12 degrees to over 38 degrees (all
the victims were found stripped to their underwear). At the same time, with
more than twice as many people in the trailer than on previous trips, the
oxygen level was dropping. In the end, everyone in that lorry died of
suffocation shortly before reaching the English coast. Their final phone
messages to their families make devastating reading. The mother of the
free-spirited young woman mentioned above confesses that she has not yet been
able to bring herself to read the last messages her daughter sent.
Thanks to the police investigation, the criminals most
directly involved in the deaths were eventually convicted (of thirty-nine counts of
manslaughter) and sentenced to long prison terms. The policeman who had led the
investigation made a brief statement outside the court, beginning with the
words: “Every man, woman and child that died in that trailer was following the
false promise of a better life abroad.”
I found myself wondering about this false promise, this hope
of a better life, as I watched the programme. How many of those who make the
same journey, but are still breathing when the doors are flung open, actually
do succeed in the UK? How many earn enough money not just to support
themselves, but to repay the horrendous loans taken out for their passage, and
to support their wives, children and parents back home? Given that they live in
the UK illegally, what leverage do they have to demand even the minimum wage
from any future employer? I suspect that for many, the long and difficult
journey to the UK does not lead to prosperity, but to poverty and exploitation.
My fleeting research into the topic suggests that this is
probably true. Many illegal immigrants from Vietnam to the UK are smuggled
rather than trafficked; that is, they consent to being brought here and their
relationship with the smugglers ends on their arrival. However, this report
from the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner suggests that the difference between trafficking and smuggling is not always
clear-cut: many of those who pay smugglers to transport them are exploited en
route, or end up in conditions of complete dependence and even captivity,
working long hours and in unhealthy conditions in nail salons and cannabis-growing
operations. A large proportion of women and girls illegally transported from
Vietnam become victims of sexual exploitation. For a good overview of these issues,
have a look at this article in the New York Times.
Is there any way we can stop unscrupulous people smugglers
from exploiting the hopes of the poor, and extracting huge sums that may
condemn their families to worse hardship than before? Is stricter border
control the answer? Checking the contents of every single lorry before it
boards the ferry? This particular group would have been intercepted if that had
happened. But such a level of control is probably not feasible, and even if it
were, smugglers might resort to hiding smaller numbers of people, packed into
tiny spaces among other, legal imports, or sending them across the Channel in
small boats. Either possibility would certainly result in more deaths.
So perhaps tighter controls are not the answer. What about
legal migration? What about giving young people from Vietnam (and elsewhere) a
chance to come and work in the UK for a couple of years? One suggestion I have seen
(though I’ve unfortunately lost track of the source) is to sell visas at a
price that compares favourably to the sums paid to smugglers for illegal entry,
then pay some or all of the price back to the migrants when they return to
their home country. Worth considering, perhaps?
At present the UK does not seem to be contemplating any such
scheme. Instead it has intensified efforts to uncover and stop people-smuggling
operations, while warning people not to attempt the journey with a hard-hittingadvertising campaign in Vietnam.
In some ways this seems a reasonable approach: the more awareness there is of
trafficking mechanisms, and of the possible negative outcomes of migration, the
less likely it is (one would hope) that people will be sucked into the worst kinds
of exploitation. It is unclear how much impact such campaigns can have, however.
Given the irreducible complexity of migration issues, it’s
hardly surprising that I can’t produce a conclusion here, let alone a solution.
I do recommend Hunting the Essex Lorry Killers, however. At the very
least, it reminds us that migrants – legal or illegal – are not just an
anonymous mass, but individuals who are ultimately not all that different to us,
with hopes and dreams, parents who worry about them, and collections of silly
selfies on their phones. Humans, in other words. Perhaps, if enough of us
watched it, it might even inspire a useful public debate, informed by
compassion rather than hostility and fear.
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