Migrants face many dangers. Are we one of them?

A few weeks ago someone very dear to me passed on a question about The Spectator, asked them by a friend. The friend, who I know and like, had read Douglas Murray’s recent report from Lampedusa about the poor Med-faring migrants, and her question was this: ‘Is everyone at The Spectator a racist?’

Some insults brush past without leaving a mark, others pierce the skin and sink in. This one sunk like a splinter, and like a splinter I’ve been worrying away at it ever since, turning what was a small injury into a painful, bloody mess. I can dismiss the accusation easily enough — the Spectator office is multi-racial, the magazine’s editorial line consistently pro-immigration. It’s the questioner who haunts me. This is a clever woman, Oxbridge–educated, who must have known her comment would get back to me. ‘Racist’ is, she’d agree, the A-bomb of insults — yet she felt quite comfortable hurling it at the entire Spec. She worries me particularly because I hear in her the voice of so many of my generation: left-leaning, urban, socially concerned but closed to discussion. It’s a gang who often conflate ‘right-wing’ with ‘racist’ in conversation; for whom even asking questions about immigration is now taboo.

So what was Douglas’s particular sin? I went back to his article and read it twice. Douglas goes to Lampedusa. Douglas meets some migrants and makes the point that they’re Eritreans for the most part, not Libyans. I found only one conceivably provocative paragraph in which he says it’s difficult to sort the legitimate asylum seekers from the fake ones, and points out that for a migrant, life after asylum can prove tough.