Undod stands in solidarity with all people seeking passage to Britain’s shores, who are forced to face dangerous routes and exploitative brokers by the UK and the EU’s brutal immigration systems. We join in mourning the 16-year-old child who lost their life in the English Channel and in condemning the assault on another 20-year-old migrant as they arrived on the Kent shore. We oppose the violence – structural, individual, economic, environmental, military, and rhetorical – that drives people from their homes only to punish them for seeking another.
From the English Channel, to the Mediterranean, to the ‘Balkan Route’, refugees and migrants are brutalised and killed to keep the UK’s borders “secure”. Yet the UK is not secure. There is no security in a state where 216,000 homes lie empty while 320,000 people are homeless. There is no security in a state that lets over 60,000 of its citizens die of Covid-19 to protect “the economy”. There is no security in a state where some live in luxury while millions live in food poverty. There is no security in a state whose public broadcaster asks of the drowning of a 16-year-old child, “But there has to be an element of personal responsibility here, doesn’t there?”.
As a movement for radical Welsh independence, we seek self-determination for Wales in order to break away from the imperial, xenophobic, racist British state, not to create our own ethno-nationalist version of it. In the independent Wales Undod seeks to build, refugees and migrants will always be welcome.
The threat to security in the UK or in Wales has never been from migrants, but from a system that sees some lives as expendable and the elites who benefit from it. From stoking hatred against starving Irish “strike breakers” in the 19th and 20th centuries, to blaming immigrants for “driving down wages” or “milking the benefits system” today, those in power have always sought to blame “outsiders” for their own cruelty. Too often, the British Left has played along with this story; Undod will never indulge this narrative. In the words of author Sarah Kendzior, “Stigmatize those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.”
What you can do: