"We are repeatedly sold a painfully two-dimensional picture of the motivations of those seeking shelter in Britain. According to this picture, migrants are eager to experience the benefits of our society, but they are also out to undermine it, because they come from cultures whose values are dramatically different from our own. Think of the ongoing grooming gangs scandal: an undeniably appalling series of events, institutional failures and victim-blaming that has been"
"So often, all we are allowed to know about asylum seekers is that they are asking with irritating persistence for a place in our social fabric, as if they have no world of their own, no cultural hinterland, no really recognisable human values aside from mysterious and dangerous belief systems. This explains why there is now a feverish pressure to instantly reveal the ethnicity of any suspect in a major crime of unprovoked violence as with the Cambridgeshire train attack"
Public narratives commonly reduce migrants to two-dimensional caricatures: simultaneously eager to benefit from host societies and portrayed as culturally incompatible and threatening. High-profile crimes are framed to imply cultural causation, amplifying sensationalist demands to reveal suspects' ethnicity and reinforcing stereotyped imagery of migrants as young Middle Eastern men. Such framings erase migrants' own worlds, values and voices. Listening to migrant individuals and communities and highlighting migrant-focused art counters reductive myths. Issam Kourbaj, a Syrian-born artist working in Cambridge, produces installations connecting heritage with displacement that exemplify complex migrant experiences.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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