Daniel Trilling

Official refugee resettlement programmes – often held up by Western politicians as the alternative to smuggler routes – only take ‘measured sips’ from the world’s displaced populations. To be considered for resettlement you’re judged on what Matthieu Aikins’s Afghan friends call your ‘story’ (your asylum claim), and must make the details of your life sound heart-rending.

Poring over family stories to give meaning to our lives is something most of us do. For the descendants of people who have survived traumatic historical events, it takes on an added intensity – and, Menachem Kaiser suggests, complexity. ‘Every year hundreds or even thousands of Jews travel to the difficult-to-pronounce towns their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents came from. They fly to Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Hungary, Belarus, they schlep onto creaky trains and cramped buses, hire zany guides, knock on ancestral doors.’

When things go wrong, punishment by the state has become harsher. The police have become increasingly reliant on stop and search – which, in London, disproportionately affects young Black people – and heavy-handed raids based on shaky intelligence. When Ciaran Thapar took a job as a life coach for young people in prison, he found a system collapsing for lack of resources, with little attention paid to rehabilitation.