By Lynsey Burrows:
COVID-19, Migrants and The Media
The British press is known around the world for several things: on the one hand its lauded for its investigative journalism, and on the other its known for shocking, sensationalist stories and constant court-battles with celebrities over privacies invaded.
Like most things in society these days, the press seems to be divided into two political categories: the left and the right. Very few papers seem to exist in the middle ground. Take any news story and you can read two extremely different versions of the same events in that day’s papers.
One such topic that would leave the reader in no doubt of the publication’s political affiliation is immigration. Again and again we have seen headlines that tell of horrors carried out at the hands of a migrant; articles that manipulate facts and figures; columns that deliberately obfuscate the truth in order to compound fear.
A 2016 study by Statewatch analysed 648 stories on migration that appeared in the run-up to the 2015 general election. Nearly half of those stories painted migration as a threat and migrants as either actual villains or potential villains. Only 10% of articles had migrants as a victim (another problematic role in itself) and only 15% actually referenced a migrant voice or perspective.
During the media coverage of the 2016 EU referendum, immigration took the hot spot of headlines, beating the economy for front page coverage. Turks, Albanians, Romanians and Poles got the ‘VIP treatment’ from the media, gracing the papers with a consistency that Z-list celebrities can only dream of. Headlines such as ‘Migrants pay just £100 to invade Britain’ and ‘New EU Threat to Your Pension’ were commonplace, no doubt to depict the UK’s membership of the EU as a hugely troublesome thing.
So could the all-in-this-together spirit fostered during the national fight against COVID-19 change the narrative after all this time? In recent weeks, the public’s appreciation for what migrants bring to society has increased, and given the reciprocal relationship between media coverage and public opinion, it is plausible that coverage could have changed to reflect this.
On the 16th of April 2020, the Daily Mail ran a headline so out of the ordinary for the publication that it appeared satirical:
“Romanians to the Rescue”
The article outlined the story of workers from Romania who had arrived in the UK to work on farms picking fruit. In and of itself, this is not a particularly surprising story. According to British Summer Fruits, around 98% of the 90,000 fruit pickers needed in the UK every year come from overseas.
Is it surprising that people would risk their lives to get on a plane during a pandemic and come to Britain? No – sometimes people only have bad choices to choose from. Of course, sometimes people just want to help, even if they know that help might never be reciprocated; just look at all our migrant NHS workers and frontline staff who have stayed in Britain fighting for our lives, despite the hostile immigration system, with limited financial help and no guarantee of a future here.
The element of surprise comes from the complete contradiction to previous Daily Mail headlines about immigration, and in particular Romanians. Here is just a few of the selection:
“How 1.5 MILLION Romanians have left their homeland in a decade as immigrants head west in droves”
“’You take it and stash it in here like this’: Romanian immigrants video themselves STEALING from a British supermarket as they smile and warn their countrymen ‘careful, don’t come here guys, life is hard’”
The change in perspective was quickly noted by readers, fans, and foes alike. After causing something of a controversy, the original headline heralding Britain’s latest heroes was changed online to a mildly more neutral:
“First plane carrying 150 ‘critically important’ Romanian fruit pickers who will join ‘land army’ battling to save Britain’s harvest lands at Stansted”
The chapter in which migrants were held up as heroes was brief. It seems the media returned to the status quo quickly – even the fruit-pickers were ‘exposed’ as potential COVID-19 spreading villains, with this headline in The Sun:
“FRUITCAKES! Fury after 180 Romanian crop-pickers who flew into the UK were not tested for coronavirus”
Whilst media coverage of immigration has in some ways changed to reflect the sense of appreciation for what migrants bring to society, the scapegoating and demonisation has far from disappeared. It appears that even a global pandemic cannot press the reset button on such a longstanding vendetta.
Lynsey Burrows is a political correspondent for the Immigration Advice Service, an organisation of immigration solicitors that has offered free legal advice to all NHS staff over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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