Cate Blanchett’s luxury beliefs on illegal migration

There are likely very few things you care less about than Cate Blanchett’s views on refugees and immigration. But the Oscar-winning actress and ‘goodwill ambassador’ for the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, is going to tell you anyway. That’s just what famous people do. She wants you to know that the ‘toxic narrative’ about refugees and asylum seekers that you have been ‘spoon-fed’ by the media is wrong. And she wants to use the power of art to open the cold hearts and narrow minds of the British public.

Blanchett’s recent sermon reached us courtesy of BBC current-affairs show Newsnight. She was being interviewed alongside Hasan Kattan, a Syrian filmmaker and refugee whose recent documentary had been funded by the Displacement Film Fund – an organisation Blanchett launched in 2025 ‘to champion and fund the work of displaced filmmakers’. Kattan has produced what looks to be a challenging documentary about the Syrian civil war and his experiences in the UK’s asylum system, which he documents as a citizen-journalist.

But the interview was as much about Blanchett as it was about Kattan. In fact, it was mostly about Blanchett, who appears to have used Kattan as a launchpad to express her not-so-original take on the UK’s immigration crisis.

‘There’s a narrative around displacement that’s been politicised’, Blanchett said, in reference to widespread opposition in Britain to illegal immigration. ‘Those people who have the good fortune to be housed, to be in nations that are free of conflict at the moment, [are] being asked to be displaced from [their] own humanity.’ It was time, she continued, to ‘move beyond the stereotype that we’re being spoon-fed about refugees and asylum seekers… we’re being asked to lean into our worst selves’.

Blanchett didn’t stop there. In pastoral tones, she urged us to show greater charity to the ‘lawyers, doctors, nurses, mothers [and] children’ who she believes are landing on the shores of southern England. ‘Remember that we all risk being climate-displaced’, she cautioned.

Blanchett’s views are the very definition of luxury beliefs. They’re also plain wrong. The British people aren’t opposed to ‘asylum seekers’ because they have been brainwashed by the Daily Mail. They’re opposed to illegal immigration because it reflects the state’s loss of control of the nation’s borders – a situation that has made people’s communities poorer and less safe. This is why voters continue to vote for lower immigration and the right to decide who enters their country. But Blanchett will never understand these concerns because she, like many ‘virtuous’ celebrities, has enough money to keep the nation’s problems at bay.

Blanchett is, of course, just one of the many singers, actors and other celebs who think they possess some unique insight into human affairs. Yet almost without fail, they end up propagating the same monotonously right-thinking views, whether on Gaza, trans or climate change. Blanchett tells us that ‘the foundation of art is to allow people to make pathways of connection and to remind us that we have more in common with people who are displaced than we realise’. This is the kind of nonsense that could only come from a celebrity.

This impulse to lecture the supposedly poor, ignorant masses seems to be ubiquitous in showbiz. Earlier this year, American singer Billie Eilish felt compelled to tell everyone what she thought about Donald Trump’s attempts to deport illegal immigrants from America. ‘No one is illegal on stolen land’, she told an audience at the Grammy Awards in February.

An extreme example of this messianic self-importance was provided by Benedict Cumberbatch in 2015. While playing Hamlet at the Barbican, Cumberbatch made a habit of keeping his audience hostage at the end of each night’s performance while lecturing them about the migrant crisis and how badly the Tories were handling it.

This is not to say Blanchett herself doesn’t deserve credit for initiatives such as the Displacement Film Fund. No doubt Kattan has produced a moving and original documentary. But it would have been far better if Blanchett simply allowed the films of Kattan and others to speak for themselves.

After all, the last thing we all need right now is yet another celebrity defending illegal immigration while dismissing people’s very real concerns. If you want to ‘toxify’ a debate, that’s a sure-fire way to do it.