A coach carrying Pakistan’s Under-19 cricket team pulled into a Portsmouth hotel this week and, because the passengers appeared to be foreign, word soon spread online that asylum seekers had been brought into the city. Masked protesters gathered outside. The error may have been corrected, but the circumstances in which it was made deserve more attention than the embarrassment of having identified the wrong hotel guests.
Britain is dealing with a combustible argument over irregular migration and border control. Only two days earlier, 625 people had reached the country in eight small boats, followed by another 143 the next day, according to provisional Home Office figures. Hundreds of anti-immigration demonstrators had also gathered in the same port city after asylum seekers were brought ashore, with some attempting to obstruct their movement and confronting police. Questions about who enters Britain, by what route and under what authority, are neither invented nor illegitimate.
The episode involving the Pakistani team becomes even more troubling when considering how the appearance of a group of young men and an unverified social-media claim were enough for suspicion to harden into action before anyone had established who the guests actually were. Reform councillor George Madgwick later cleared up the confusion, but by then a crowd had already assembled. When appearance begins doing the work of evidence, the distinction between an asylum seeker, a tourist, a student and a visiting sportsman can disappear remarkably quickly.
Mr Madgwick later argued that the protesters left as soon as they learnt of their mistake and that “literally nothing happened.” It is fortunate that there was no violence, but that cannot be the only test. Pakistan Cricket Board chief operating officer Sumair Syed said members of the team reported people knocking on their doors.
The PCB is entitled to expect firm assurances from the ECB and British authorities for the rest of the tour. England and Pakistan have shared a cricketing relationship for more than seven decades, reinforced by generations of British Pakistanis for whom the game remains a durable link between the two countries. That young Pakistani cricketers, invited to England to compete, could be caught up in a domestic immigration dispute because strangers decided their presence required explanation is an embarrassment Britain should examine rather than explain away.
Britain can argue as fiercely as it wishes over migration policy, but that argument cannot become a licence to classify strangers by appearance. Pakistan’s youngsters returned to the field the following day and beat England Under-19 by 177 runs. Nevertheless, Portsmouth should be remembered for the more disheartening fact that, for a few hours, merely looking foreign had been enough to place them under suspicion.
