IMIX Statement

We are IMIX, a small charity, and our job is to support the organisations and individuals doing some of the hardest communications work in the country, telling the story of the people they help, the difference they make, and the realities of migration. Most people have never heard of us, and that is by design. We don’t run campaigns of our own instead we work behind the scenes to build capacity and support.

We help frontline organisations build their communications skills and confidence, so that a small charity can talk about its work as powerfully as it carries it out, and knows what to do when a reporter calls or a story breaks. We connect journalists with grassroots groups and with people who have first hand experience of the asylum system, so that reporting on migration is built on facts and real lives rather than assumption. And we support people with refugee and migrant backgrounds to tell their own stories, on their own terms, and to stay safe while they do it. We do this because the conversation about migration in this country is loud, hostile and full of misinformation, and it shapes real decisions about real people. When the only voices in it are the loudest ones, something important goes missing. 

What happened this month

This month, that work was turned against us.

In November of last year we were approached by a national broadcaster, as we often are, to help find audience members for a programme about immigration. They were looking for people with first hand experience of the asylum system who might want to take part. This is everyday work for us, linking up storytellers with lived experience with journalists or producers. Our main concern was safeguarding as this would involve a live television show which we knew could be hostile.

We found two men who were keen to take part. Both have refugee status and settled lives in the UK. We talked them through what to expect and supported them in the days beforehand. Everything else, the vetting of the audience, the briefing in the room, the editorial decisions, the safeguarding on the day, sat with the broadcaster..

Months later, that ordinary work was twisted into something ugly. It was reported as though it were a plot. The two men, who had arrived in the UK seeking safety and wanted nothing more than to be included in the conversation, were recast as part of a covert scheme to rig the programme and were cast as the hidden hand behind it.

We have watched this cycle play out for other organisations many times, and this month we watched it happen to us. It tends to follow the same path. A national newspaper runs a story. A news programme picks it up and repeats it, which makes it feel bigger and more credible. Then it reaches X, where accounts with enormous followings, many of whom profit financially from social media engagement, push it out to millions. The noise that creates becomes a story in its own right, which justifies more coverage, and round it goes. By the time the facts catch up, if they ever do, they reach a fraction of the people the accusation did.

What sections of the press and a crowd of commentators on social media did was horrific. People were named, lied about and held up for strangers to hate, for the crime of taking part in public life. It was done lightly, for clicks and for applause, by people who will never have to live with the fear they created.

This is how anti-migrant misinformation works. Call it misinformation, call it disinformation, the effect is the same. These lies are louder, angrier and faster than the truth. They tell people what they have already decided to believe, and there are platforms and public figures who gain something every time they spread. Within days, this story had turned into a wave of abuse aimed at us, the kind that is meant to make you frightened to keep doing your job.

This is bigger than us

And this is the part that should alarm everyone, because it does not stop with us. Right across the country, organisations and people who work with refugees and migrants are being forced out of public spaces. Pushed off social media, out of the press, and out of public debate altogether. Not because they have done anything wrong, but because the cost of being seen has become so high.

That cost is not abstract. The same false stories, multiplied and shared at scale, are what put families’ addresses online and set homes alight during the unrest in Belfast, and drove the riots that followed Southport. People know where this leads. So those who fled war and persecution, rebuilt their lives here, and finally felt safe enough to speak, are choosing to go quiet again. Organisations that should be telling the country about the good they do are deciding it is safer to say nothing at all.

We understand that choice better than we did a month ago. We have spent years telling others that going quiet is the most natural response to this, and the most costly, and this month we felt the pull ourselves, the urge to take everything down and wait for it to pass. Now imagine that same pull on every small charity, every volunteer, every person with a story to tell, all at once. That is what is happening right now. And every time one of those voices disappears, the conversation is left to the people who shout the loudest and care the least about who gets hurt.

We are not going quiet

We are saying all of this out loud, in our own name, because the alternative is to let silence do the work the abuse set out to do. The people we work with have already shown more courage than their attackers ever will. The least we can do is match it.

The most useful thing you can do today is read this, share it, and refuse to look away. And if you are able to, you can help us keep this work going. We run a programme called Speaking Out, Staying Safe that helps organisations facing this kind of hostility stay safe and stay visible, and we are raising money for it now, with every donation doubled until 2 July.

crowdfunder.co.uk/p/speakingoutstayingsafe

The IMIX team