The film Toy Story shows us how new UK asylum proposals work
This piece was contributed by Rob McNeil, Deputy Director of the Migration Observatory. It was originally published by the Centre of Migration Policy & Society on 9 April 2021.
In Toy Story, the hero of the film, Buzz Lightyear, a clueless action-figure who believes he is a real space-hero, finds himself at an amusement arcade in Pizza Planet, a space-themed pizza restaurant. One of the games in the arcade is a rocket-shaped claw machine (the sort kids use to try to grab a toy to win it as a prize), into which Buzz clambers in the hope that he can zoom into space. The machine, he discovers, is filled with toy aliens whose entire existence is built around their worship of “The Claw” – a deity, as far as they are concerned, that selects a chosen-one to travel to “a better place.” These little green toys all dream of escape from their incarceration to some imagined utopia, but have no control of whether they are selected.
Under Priti Patel’s new proposals, people who have fled persecution and are hoping for asylum in the UK find themselves in a surprisingly similar position to the toys in the claw machine. [Read more here.]