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OPEN BORDERS: THE CASE AGAINST IMMIGRATION CONTROLS by Teresa Hayter
OPEN BORDERS: THE CASE AGAINST IMMIGRATION CONTROLS by Teresa Hayter
13th April 2005
Immigration controls, which were first introduced in 1905 to restrict the entry of 'aliens' , and then in 1962 to keep out black Commonwealth citizens, have become progressively more vicious. Since 1997 Labour governments, in spite of their supporters' expectations, have introduced virtually nothing in the way of improvement or reform. On the contrary, everything has been done to make the suffering of refugees and migrants worse, in the largely mistaken belief that this will cut their numbers.
The government is conducting what has become known as a 'war on asylum'. It attacks asylum seekers for their supposed abuse of the system and singles them out for harsh treatment. It drives them into illegality, locks them up, does not allow them to work, reduces them to destitution, splits up their families, labels them 'illegal immigrants' and promises to deport more of them if it can't stop them coming in the first place. It also increasingly rounds up others, mostly Caribbean, South Asian and African, who are usually described as 'over-stayers' and who may have lived for years in this country and have jobs, houses and families, for sometimes minor infringements of the immigration rules. It thus bears heavy responsibility for the growth of the hysteria against asylum seekers and so-called 'illegal immigrants' (the terms are often used interchangeably; so much so that the Press Complaints Commission was moved to pronounce that the phrase 'illegal asylum seekers' should not be used, since there is no such thing).
In the process the position of asylum seekers as the new object of race hate campaigns has become entrenched. Their demonisation has no obvious justification. Such increases as there have been in their numbers are, more than ever, related to the wars perpetrated by the major powers: first Kosovans and then Iraqis (in the months before the US/British invasion of Iraq in March 2003) accounted for almost the entire increase. The much vaunted decline in the number of applications for asylum in Britain in 2003 was largely because, after the overthrow of Saddam, Iraqis know that they have virtually no chance of being given asylum in Britain. In 2002 the largest numbers of applicants were from Iraq, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Afghanistan and China, in that order. The overwhelming majority come from areas in which there is severe political persecution or conflict, for which the West moreover bears much responsibility. If such conditions arise, governments impose visa requirements on their nationals, as they have done recently for Zimbabweans, thus making it virtually impossible for refugees to travel legally to Britain. They are nevertheless fully entitled to claim asylum under international treaties, and in the last few years around half of all asylum seekers eventually got refugee status or exceptional leave to remain (ELR - now replaced by the more restrictive 'humanitarian protection'). Many more of them ought to do so, but fall foul of the cruelly unjust and arbitrary system for determining whether they are 'genuine refugees'. Those who have, with exceptional enterprise and courage, managed to flee poverty rather than wars or political persecution are likely to be similarly the victims of the actions of major Western powers. The reality is that most asylum seekers, whatever their reason for migrating, are highly educated and are often dissident members of the elite. Many take a large drop in their standard of living. They cost public money almost entirely because of the escalation of the repressive apparatus which is supposed to stop them coming here, and because they are no longer allowed to work (see below). If they do work, they are forced to work long hours for low wages in jobs that do not require their qualifications. The British are lucky that they come here.
Moreover, whatever the scaremongers may say, the number of asylum seekers migrating to Britain is relatively small, both compared to refugees elsewhere in the world and compared to other types of migration to Britain. Less than 2 per cent of refugees in the world as a whole are in Britain, although a recent poll showed that people believe the figure is 25 per cent. The vast majority of refugees are in Third World countries bordering areas of conflict. In relation to the size of its population, Britain is way below even the European average. According to Home Office statistics on Control of Immigration, there were 84,130 asylum applications in Britain in 2002, which was the peak year. In the same year, and in each of the preceding five years, there were around eight million visitors to Britain from abroad. There were 1,300,000 returning British and other nationals. 369,000 foreign students were given leave to enter. 235,805 people were given official permission to work in Britain. Yet the Labour government constantly reiterates that it is doing its best to reduce the numbers, not of visitors, students, employees of multinational corporations, workers and so on, but of people applying for asylum.
The government says its actions are necessary to defeat racism and the far right. But they both pander to and feed the sections of the media whose political agenda it is to stir up racism. The Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Sun have almost daily headlines disseminating lies and slander about asylum seekers and 'illegals', some of them using language and information which appear to have come from official sources, attacking refugees for supposed crimes, scrounging and ill health, for being too many, or for resorting to catching and eating swans. The government only very rarely seeks to counter the media's lies and distortions with the truth. Its policies encourage the Tories to outbid it. Occasionally even the Tories are moved to criticise some particularly illiberal government measure; Oliver Letwin, when he was shadow home secretary, for example, said that children should not be confined in 'accommodation centres' (see below) for six months; there should be a maximum 10-week limit. More often, the Tories make half-baked proposals such as that all incoming asylum seekers should be confined to an unspecified off-shore island. The British National Party (BNP) has made full use of the growth of prejudice against asylum seekers in its sometimes successful local election campaigns, especially in areas where no asylum seekers or refugees live. Asylum seekers themselves, especially those who are being dispersed outside London and the South East where their communities are strong, are being subjected to increasing levels of violence, such that many fear to leave their accommodation. The Institute of Race Relations has recorded on its web-site 24 deaths in racist attacks since 1999, including four murders of asylum seekers in the last two years, and ten major violent attacks, including, for example, systematic attacks on Iraqi Kurds in Hull, resulting in injuries to at least 13 of them; they held a demonstration in July 2003 to protest against failure by the police to protect them. The government's policies have also helped bring a small organisation called Migration Watch, now widely quoted as an authority on immigration and the supposed dangers of 'over-population', out of the woodwork. Its chair, Sir Andrew Green, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, testified to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee on Asylum Removals in September 2002 as one of three main 'experts'. Yet its chief researcher is Professor David Coleman, of Oxford university, who has held office in the Eugenics Society and its successor the Galton Institute, bodies which promote the notion that the purity of the white race should be preserved.
It is hard to see why the government aids and abets the racists, unless it is that it is so unpopular on most issues that it believes it can regain a little popularity by appearing to be stemming a 'flood' of asylum seekers who might otherwise 'swamp' British schools and the welfare state. The detention of asylum seekers, for example, which is one of the harshest consequences of immigration controls and causes great suffering for migrants and refugees, is little more than window-dressing. It does not serve its main function of deterring potential immigrants, and it does not even make it easy to deport people. In the end the government seems to be doing little other than trying to convince the opponents of immigration that it is keeping people out of Britain.
The laws on immigration change with great frequency. The changes are themselves a reflection of governments' inability to control the movement of people. In Britain there is now a new Act every three years or so. The Tories' Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act of 1993 and their Asylum and Immigration Act of 1996 were followed by Labour's Immigration and Asylum Act of 1999 and their Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of November 2002. Yet another Act was introduced in 2004, speeding up the process in a new frenzy of efforts to appease the racists.
The Labour government's 2002 Act was preceded by a White Paper entitled 'Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity', published in February 2002. This is a curious document. Its first half is devoted to arguing that immigrants make a large contribution to British prosperity and to meeting shortages of skills, and that Britain needs more of them. The second half is about how the government will stop them coming. The explanation, it seems, is that the government wants 'managed' immigration. By this it means that it hopes to be able to select the immigrants it wants, in the numbers and types that it wants, and to bar entry to anybody else. This is an idea that is becoming quite widespread, including among those who believe that immigration controls can somehow be made more humane and fair. The argument is that if legal channels of entry are broadened, then there will be less incentive for people, including asylum seekers who are supposedly not really asylum seekers, to come to Britain without permission. But of course such a policy leaves the whole repressive apparatus of immigration controls intact, and there is no sign that they will do anything other than continue to become more vicious. If the government's renewed interest in attracting immigrants met the level of demand to migrate for asylum or work in Britain, there would be no need for immigration controls. The reality is that, while the government sends out recruiting teams to pillage the skills of trained Third World professionals, it simultaneously spends millions on making skilled people suffer, and perhaps deporting them, if they come to this country on their own initiative to seek asylum or to work. It recruits nurses in Zimbabwe, but imprisons Zimbabwean nurses who flee persecution.
Like other European governments, the Labour government is worried about skills and labour shortages, declining birth rates and an ageing population. Reports by Ceri Gott, Stephen Glover and others, published by the research directorate of the Home Office in 2001 and 2002, argue that immigrants not only contribute to prosperity and economic growth, but make a net contribution of approximately £2.5 billion a year to public finances, since they are mostly young, fit and have been educated at others' expense. The work permit system, under which employers can apply to the government for permission to employ foreigners in specific jobs, has been expanded; work permits have nearly doubled, from 68,400 in 1998 to 120,115 in 2002. The government has launched a Highly Skilled Migrant Programme, under which certain 'highly skilled' people can enter without specific job permits. Foreign students, in demand because they pay higher fees, can stay in Britain if they complete their courses and find a job. The scheme for importing casual labour on short term contracts has been extended from agriculture into other sectors with labour shortages, such as construction and catering. And the government has decided that it will allow nationals of the new European Union accession states to come to Britain to work, provided they register, and provided they do not claim benefits.
In most cases the chosen immigrants will be admitted on short term contracts for specific jobs. This constitutes a radical break with previous, pre-immigration controls policies, when people who came to meet labour shortages in Britain before 1962 from former colonies in the Caribbean and South Asia obtained full citizenship rights. It will mean not only, as the government intends, that the new immigrants will in theory have to leave when their contracts end, but that, as the government may also intend, they will be highly exploitable even while they are working in Britain legally. Their position will be little better than the position of 'illegal' workers. Attempts by the new legal immigrants to win better wages and conditions or join trade unions could lead to the sack and therefore to deportation (or destitution, in the case of the new European citizens, if they cannot find another job). The government's intention may be that this will contribute to its drive for greater 'flexibility', in other words casualisation and insecurity, and to driving down wages and conditions, both in the sectors in which immigrants are concentrated and in the workforce as a whole. There are signs that trade unions and others are beginning to realise that the only way to counter this is to argue, not for zero immigration because it will not happen, but for full and equal rights for all workers and residents, including the right to join trade unions and struggle for better wages and conditions without the threat of deportation. In particular in the United States the AFL-CIO now argues not for stopping immigration, but for the legalisation of so-called 'illegals'. The British Trades Union Congress may yet follow. In July 2003 the TUC's international department published a report, entitled Overworked, Underpaid and Over Here: Migrant Workers in Britain, which says that the lack of legal protection for migrant workers is 'giving the green light to unscrupulous gangmasters, agencies and employers to exploit foreign workers on a massive scale', and shows that the problem applies to both illegal and legal migrants. TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber was quoted in a press release to launch the report as saying that: 'If every illegal worker was removed from the UK, parts of the econoomy would collapse overnight ? Everyone working in the UK deserves basic rights at work?' In France the Sans Papiers are now arguing that the sudden deprivation of rights for long-term immigrant residents and workers has created a new form of slavery, and argue for solidarity from other workers not out of pity, but to prevent the contagion spreading in European countries which have up to now had relatively strong employment rights. In their joint declaration to the European Social Forum in November 2003, calling for a European day of action in support of migrants on 31 January 2004, the Sans Papiers and their supporters argued for 'citizenship rights for all, based on residence', since 'the undocumented are only the visible tip of an iceberg of job insecurity and casualisation spreading to other migrants and then to workers in general', and because of 'the special position held by the undocumented in the process of restructuring the work environment through generalised casualisation', and the resulting 'centrality of the struggles of the undocumentd'.
At the same time as promoting an increase in the number of insecure or 'managed' immigrants, the government appears intent on making it harder for others to work without legal permission. This too appears contradictory, since illegal workers, as the Sans Papiers recognise, are the ultimately exploitable workforce. It is presumably based on political rather than economic calculations. The government believes, probably correctly, that the fact that it has up to now been relatively easy to get work in Britain without papers is one reason why some refugees are desperate to cross the channel. It also wishes to curry favour with the racists by showing that Britain is not a 'soft touch' and is not an attractive destination for asylum seekers or other migrants, but is, on the contrary, as the home secretary David Blunkett has put it, 'tough as old boots'. The 2002 Act introduced severer penalties and checks on employers. In July 2002, the government removed the 'concession' which in theory allowed asylum seekers to work if their claims were not determined within six months. Asylum seekers have been issued with 'smart' cards which carry their photograph, finger-prints, and a statement on whether or not they are allowed to work. Identity cards, on whose absence in Britain politicians have long prided themselves, are to be introduced, at first, in 2005, for foreigners. As the Guardian of 12 November 2003 reported, David Blunkett stated that: 'An ID card scheme will help tackle crime and serious issues facing the UK, particularly illegal working, immigration abuse, ID fraud, terrorism and organised crime.'
Identity cards would also make clear who is and is not entitled to health care and other public services, as well as to work, and thus facilitate the incorporation of health workers and other public officials as agents of immigration controls. They are no doubt intended to facilitate the current, and oppressive, increase in random immigration checks on people who look foreign, such as have existed in France and elsewhere for many years.
In November 2003, according to the Guardian of 14 November 2003, David Blunkett announced that the government was considering a scheme called 'earned regularisation'. This was intended to deal with the 'emotive' situation of valued but illegal immigrants who would not obtain identity cards when they were made compulsory for foreigners. They would have to demonstrate that 'they had not abused the system and could not be removed', that they were making a valuable 'contribution to the labour market' and had not engaged in 'welfare benefit abuse' or 'entered the country illegally' (which would exclude the majority of asylum seekers - see below). Those who qualified would be given a one-year legal work permit, after which, presumably, they would be deported or forced back into illegality. Sarah Spencer, a researcher who has been influential with New Labour, apparently suggested the 'earned regularisation' idea to Mr Blunkett and was quoted as saying that the scheme 'would need to be selective to avoid the evident problems with the kind of general amnesty that has happened in other parts of Europe that have encouraged other people to come'. The Home Office apparently rapidly back-tracked from even this proposal. But Blunkett's chilling statement that he wanted 'to deal sensibly with people who are prepared to put their hands up' demonstrates the dangers of such 'regularisation' or amnesty schemes. Like the schemes in Britain in 1974, and in France in 1997, they are likely to turn out to be a trap rather than a means of escape for many thousands of people, who risk putting their heads above the parapet and finding they are not among the chosen few.
The government hopes, and has publicly stated, that its policy of making asylum seekers suffer will not only induce existing refugees to give up and leave the country, but will deter future applications. It has introduced some measures of extreme severity. Food vouchers, introduced under Labour's 1999 Act, led, as predicted, to the stigmatisation of asylum seekers who held up check-out queues in their attempt to buy food up to the exact amount of their £30 per week vouchers. Vouchers were supplied late or not at all. Asylum seekers were, and are, dispersed to one 'no-choice' offer of accommodation, sometimes in sub-standard housing, sometimes with unscrupulous private landlords, sometimes in hard-to-let council housing on estates where they are subjected to racist violence, including in Glasgow's Sighthill estate a murder. A parallel administrative system, National Asylum Support Services (NASS), was set up, paying asylum seekers much less than normal state benefits at much greater cost to the state. After widespread criticism, including by Bill Morris who was then general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, the government did a volte-face on the food voucher system, substituting equally low cash payments. But worse was to follow. Section 55 of the 2002 Act provided that, from January 2003, asylum seekers who had failed to apply for asylum at ports of entry, or immediately after their arrival ('in-country' applicants), and others who had had their claims turned down (but who might still be trying to exercise their legal rights to oppose removal) would be denied access to even the poor-law support provided by NASS. Home Office figures show that around two thirds not only of all asylum seekers, but also of the people who are accepted as refugees, have applied for asylum 'in-country'. In 1996 the Conservative government had tried to remove all forms of public support from 'in-country' and 'failed' applicants, and been prevented from doing so by the courts. Now that Labour is trying to do much the same, they too are having trouble with the courts. In February 2003 the High Court condemned the whole scheme of the Act as inhuman, and also said that the Home Office had failed to prove that the apellants had not applied for asylum as soon as they could. The Home Office subsequently got the courts to accept that section 55 would only constitute inhuman treatment if asylum seekers could be proved to be destitute. In September 2003 the first case was won by the Home Office; the court considered that a Malaysian asylum seeker who was sleeping rough in Heathrow airport was not really destitute, since he had access to shelter and some food. A further 200 cases are pending. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of asylum seekers (around 5,000 by the beginning of 2004) were and are in fact being reduced to destitution. They are not allowed to work, and they receive nothing from the state. The government may find that, for the first time in Britain, there is open and widespread revolt by the undocumented, such as has existed for some years in other European countries.
Some of those made destitute, notably Zimbabweans, Iraqi Kurds and Somalis, are people who have had their claims for asylum rejected but cannot be returned to their own countries because they are unsafe, because their governments will not accept them, because they have no documents, or because air travel to their region is unavailable. Some have been denied support because, as is the case with many refugees, they have been forced by government policies to travel in the backs of lorries, have been unaware that they are crossing frontiers, and are deemed not to have found out how to claim asylum quickly enough. An Iraqi Kurd, for example, who was perhaps fortunate to have arrived before the new provisions on destitution, spent 24 hours in the tyre compartment underneath a lorry, hoping he was being taken to Sweden. He was deposited on a dual carriageway, realised he was in England not Sweden, approached the nearest lights, asked for a police station, was collected by the police and provided with their hospitality for the night. In the morning he was told to go to Croydon. When he asked how to get there without money, he was advised to go to Asylum Welcome, a charity in Oxford. Asylum Welcome found him accommodation for the week-end and a lawyer who claimed asylum for him. Two years later he got refugee status.
The government claims that it is taking strong measures to deport (or 'remove') the people who fail to get refugee status. One of the cruel ironies of the current system is that asylum seekers are put through the misery (and heavy public costs) of detention, destitution and continuing threats of deportation to the dangers they have fled from, sometimes over a period of years, but then when their claims are finally turned down they are not deported. Unsurprisingly this is one of the major complaints of the tabloids and the rest of the racists. The government's response is not to abandon the whole pointless exercise, but to promise to deport more asylum seekers. Removals have increased steadily under the Labour government, from 6,990 in 1998 to 10,740 in 2002, but apparently this is not enough. In 2000 the government set a target of 30,000 removals of 'failed asylum seekers' a year. It had to abandon this target as unworkable, even though it would have been less than the recent annual number of asylum claims rejected, let alone the number of people turned down and not removed in previous years. In 2002 it 'removed' 65,460 people, but only 10,740 of them were 'failed asylum seekers'. In an attempt to speed up deportations, the Home Office has been going for soft targets, especially families and people with long associations and commitments in Britain who are easier to find and deport than single men. People may be picked up in the street, on the underground or at work, or their houses may be raided in the early hours. Fathers who are breadwinners are deported, leaving their families dependent on public support. The charity Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID) has on occasion succeeded in persuading the courts to release people on the grounds that the government is violating the human right to family life. There are horror stories of people losing contact with their children, being unable to meet commitments to collect them from school, losing their houses, jobs and even their personal possessions, being deported at short notice without the chance to contact either their families or their solicitors. The Immigration Law Practioners' Association (ILPA), in its submission to the Home Affairs Committee (see above) gave some examples among the many, including the case of:
A Lithuanian minor arrested for a driving offence who was then detained under Immigration Act powers overnight and removed the next day. He had been unable to telephone his mother who was awaiting consideration by the Home Office of her human rights claim; the minor was dependant on his mother's claim yet not only was there no contact between mother and son, but she was left not knowing what had happened to her son for two to three days.
Detainees are sometimes removed from detention with extreme violence, pinned to the floor and made unconscious. Some resist, for example by stripping at airport check-outs, and are returned to detention because pilots refuse to carry them. Others make the journey in handcuffs, surrounded by guards. Even Wackenhut, a private security firm used to 'escort' people to airports, was moved to express its disquiet at the way they were treated in evidence to the Home Affairs Committee on Asylum Removals, describing for example:
An incident where a child, who had recently undergone a splenectomy and was under continual medical supervision with tubes and wires coming out of various parts of his body, was subjected to the ignominy of initial moves towards deportation.
The Chief Executive of another company, Loss Prevention International Ltd, which provides guards on flights, told the committee how they hand over their charges to the authorities they may have fled from:
Some countries insist on us handing the individual over to their own authorities, which we do... In China, for instance, in Beijing, we are always met by their own immigration authorities, the individual is handed over to them, we are asked a number of questions and they are taken away. Down in Lagos, for instance, the agreement that we have there is that we actually hand the returnee over to the ground staff of either British Airways or Virgin Atlantic... Standing right next to them are the Nigerian immigration officers who watch that process and then we walk away from it... The Turks actually take them away so I cannot comment about seeing people out on the airport at Istanbul ... Last year, sir, it was our top destination! ... [they were] Turkish Kurds in general.
To facilitate removals the government has announced its intention to set up a smooth process under which asylum seekers are first to be sent to 'induction centres', then moved on to 'accommodation centres' or, failing that, made to report to 'reporting centres' from the accommodation to which they have been dispersed, and then, if their claims are rejected (but often in practice before they are rejected, see below), to 'removal centres'. One induction centre exists at Margate; in June 2003 some of its enforced occupants went on hunger strike. The government is having trouble with its accommodation centres. It proposed four sites, each to accommodate 750 asylum seekers, including women and children, in isolated rural areas. After vociferous and often racist local objections, it had to abandon its plans for three of them. Although the government's planning inspector turned down the application for a fourth accommodation centre on a military site near Bicester, the Bicester centre is due to open in 2005. The induction centres and accommodation centres are not to be locked, but they are prisons in effect, with strong inducements and penalties for the people assigned to them not to leave, and they will operate a kind of curfew. The Home Office has stated that if people fail to obey 'clear rules' then not only will they lose all future public support, but 'breaking the rules may also affect their claims for asylum' (which must be unlawful under the rules of the refugee conventions). The centres will be built and run by private contractors. According to the Oxford Mail of 1 October 2003, three companies are bidding to operate the Bicester accommodation prison: United Kingdom Detention Services, Group 4 and Premier Prisons. There are to be medical, legal and educational facilities and meals provided within the centres, but no self-catering facilities and probably little transport to local towns. Children will not be allowed to go to local schools, so the chances of them learning English, let alone getting an adequate education and having the chance to integrate, will be minimal. The home secretary David Blunkett, outdoing his predecessor Jack Straw, said that schools were in danger of being 'swamped' by asylum seekers' children.
The existing immigration detention centres have been renamed 'removal centres'. The Labour government announced that it would more than quadruple the numbers detained under immigration laws to 4,000; the numbers initially more than doubled but then declined to 1,690, including 1,355 people who had claimed asylum, at the end of June 2003. The reason for the recent decline is loss of capacity. The government announced at the beginning of 2002 that it would no longer detain asylum seekers in ordinary prisons (although by the end of 2002 the numbers in prisons were up again, to 19 per cent of immigration detainees). The two big new detention centres at Harmondsworth, near Heathrow, and Yarl's Wood, near Bedford, opened in 2001, were meant to replace this loss of capacity and expand the 'detention estate'. But half the 550 spaces at Harmondsworth are no longer in use. The Home Office claimed this was to enable fire sprinklers to be fitted (see below), but it seems the real reason was that the private contractors UK Detention Services Ltd (UKDS) could not prevent widespread violence within Harmondsworth, involving both guards and detainees, at least one suicide and several attempted suicides. And in February 2002 the occupied half of Yarl's Wood, which was supposed to contain 900 asylum seekers, was burnt down (see below). Yarl's Wood remained closed until September 2003. Meanwhile, a Young Offenders' Institution at Dover, a prison at Dungavel near Glasgow and part of Lindholme prison near Doncaster have been redesignated as immigration prisons. In October 2003 20 people escaped from Lindholme, 8 or 9 people escaped from Dover, and there was a big protest at Haslar which closed one of the dormitories. And so on. The Institute of Race Relations has recorded on its website 14 suicides of 'victims of the asylum system' in the last five years, three of them in immigration prisons.
The government says that the purpose of removal centres is to detain for short periods people who have had their asylum claims rejected. But only a small proportion of the people detained have exhausted their rights to appeal against refusal, some have not been given an initial decision by the Home Office, and some are detained, in continuing arbitrary fashion, when they apply for asylum at ports and airports. The government will not give figures on what the proportions are. But after Yarl's Wood prison was opened in November 2001, and the home secretary David Blunkett had said on local radio that it was a 'removal centre' where 'failed' asylum seekers would be held for short periods prior to their removal, Lord Rooker, then immigration minister, announced that of the 385 people imprisoned there, only 46 had dated removal notices. Many had already been detained for many months. According to Home Office statistics, of the total numbers detained at the end of 2002, 28 per cent had been so for more than four months, including 35 for over a year, 105 for over six months, and 100 for between four and six months. People who flee death, prison or torture can find themselves taken to a place called a 'removal centre' before they have even entered the country. Others are picked up for not having their immigration papers in order; such people, who are threatened with immediate deportation, now form a growing proportion of those detained.
The 2002 Act repealed the provision for automatic bail hearings for immigration detainees which had been in the 1999 Act but had not been implemented. It thus removed the government's one response to repeated criticisms of the lack of judicial supervision of detention. The Home Office now moves people around from centre to centre at frequent intervals without notice or reason; it is hard to escape the conclusion that this is to deny them contact with their lawyers, families and supporters, and to reduce further the possibility of bail. Possibly because the private security companies running the prisons cannot process the paperwork fast enough, some detainees have been kept in vans for more than 24 hours, deprived of food, water and even toilet facilities. There are well documented cases of detainees being treated with violence by the private companies transferring them.
Perhaps the worst innovation of the current Labour government is that, unlike any other government in Europe, it now detains whole families, including young children and babies, and pregnant women. At the end of 2002 115 women were detained. The Home office gives no figures on the number of children, apparently considered non-persons, detained. Because of the inability of UKDS to protect the women and families detained in Harmondsworth, they have been moved elsewhere. Yarl's Wood was reopened in September 2003 for women and apparently, in future, children. Children and their mothers are detained at Dungavel, Tinsley and Oakington. Some children have been moved from mainstream schools, where they were much appreciated by their friends and teachers, and have been locked up in prison-like conditions, at Dungavel for example, for months on end, in spite of numerous protests, in the House of Lords and elsewhere. Pregnant women have inadequate medical attention. Mothers have to queue for hours to receive powdered milk or nappies, which are allocated one at a time. A report by Bail for Immigration Detainees, A Crying Shame:Pregnant Asylum Seekers and Their Babies in Detention, gives a harrowing account based on interviews with some of these women.
Most of the immigration prisons continue to be run by private security firms. Group 4 in particular continues to display its brutal incompetence, and continues to be hired by the government. It won the contract to build and run the new Yarl's Wood prison. On 14 February 2002, a few months after it was opened, the occupied half of it was destroyed in a fire. The best the police could say was that 'we can categorically say it is unlikely' that anyone died. As had happened after a protest in 1997 at Campsfield immigration prison, some of the detainees were arbitrarily picked out by Group 4 and prosecuted, in this case for arson, violent disorder and affray. It remains unclear why and how the fire was started; there were no convictions for arson, and the defendants themselves were appalled by the fire and spent much of their time helping other detainees, nurses and even Group 4 employees to escape from it. At their trial in 2003 much of Group 4's evidence was thrown out. The very active local Campaign to Stop Arbitrary Detentions at Yarl's Wood, SADY, has commented as follows:
The Home Office showed a total disregard for human life by detaining people at Yarl's Wood in unsafe conditions operated for private profit by Group4, described by the prosecution in court as a 'national laughing stock ever since they first blundered into the field of private custodial services'. It is the Home Office and Group4 who should be prosecuted for Unlawful Imprisonment and Recklessly Endangering Lives. Their responsibility for what happened at Yarl's Wood is significant. Firstly the Home Office arbitrarily detained men, women and children who are not accused of a crime, indefinitely - in a wooden framed building they decided not to fit sprinklers to. Then Group4 pinning a 51 year old woman to the ground, dragging her along the floor, triggering the whole incident, which they went on to grossly and negligently mis-manage - including delaying access to fire fighters and police, and locking detainees into the burning building. Not enough, they went on to hinder the defence of those picked for prosecution - Group4 subverted the investigation process by a series of 'wholly improper' actions and the Home Office deported most of the detainee eye witnesses.
Group4 were under investigation for Corporate Manslaughter, and under threat by police of being interviewed about obstruction ...
The Fire Brigades Union, from the start, stated publicly that their members had been prevented from entering the burning building for over an hour, confirming what detainees, who desperately wanted them to come and rescue them, had told us. Andy Gilchrist, General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, commented as follows at the Trades Union Conference Annual Congress in Brighton in September 2003:
Of course the main conclusion to be drawn from this incident is that asylum seekers were treated as sub-humans. So the building was put up on the cheap, the staff supervising the inmates (for that is how they were treated) were untrained and poorly paid, and the exigencies of so called Riot Control overrode those of firefighting. At every stage fire safety took a back seat.
Campaigns against detention continue, and new active campaigns have started, especially against Yarl's Wood and the Dover removal centre. In September 2003 there was a demonstration of 2,000 people against the refugee prison at Dungavel. Most of these campaigns have joined together and set up Barbed Wire Britain, a network to end refugee and migrant detention. The Campaign to Close Campsfield won a victory when, in the House of Commons on 7 February 2002, David Blunkett announced that: 'I can also confirm that I intend to close Campsfield House. This outdated centre is no longer appropriate to the 21st century. These places will be transferred to the new high-standard removal centres.'
Campsfield was refurbished in 1993, at a cost of £20 million, from buildings much newer than some of the buildings in which refugees are locked up. The only possible explanation for the decision to close it was the protests, inside and outside it. As I wrote in 2000, such protests had not occurred at other detention centres. Since then the government has had troubles at both its 'new high-standard removal centres', and in others too (see above). This presumably explains why, on 22 October 2003, the immigration minister Beverley Hughes announced that the government would keep Campsfield open and, shamefully, expand it to 290 places.
Campaigners for the rights of refugees frequently point to the injustice of the procedures for determining asylum claims, which means that many who need protection are removed to possible death, persecution and extreme hardship, and argue for greater fairness. The government moves steadily in the other direction. The White List of supposedly safe countries, attacked by Labour and formally abolished by them, has reappeared. People coming from countries which the Home Secretary designates 'safe' are considered to have 'clearly unfounded' cases and are subject to accelerated procedures, unless the Home Office decides otherwise. They have only 'non-suspensive' rights of appeal, which means they can only appeal from abroad, a virtual impossibility. The list included all the European Union accession states. Therefore, for example, Roma who fled severe persecution in Poland or Hungary, from which the state authorities do little or nothing to protect them, could be returned to those countries without the right to appeal in Britain. Since EU accession in May 2004, they have lost the right to claim asylum at all; if they cannot find work, it appears they will be deported or become destitute. Under the 2002 Act the government attempted to remove rights to judicial review of Home Office decisions; after outcry by judges and others, it had to back-track on this proposal. But legal aid for asylum seekers to pursue their claims has been drastically reduced, so that in most cases conscientious solicitors know that they cannot remotely stay within the prescribed limits, and many have withdrawn from the work, leaving what the government calls the 'legal aid gravy train' in the hands of the charlatans. Blair, in his speech to the Labour party's October 2003 conference, said the following: 'We should cut back the ludicrously complicated appeal process, we should derail the gravy train of legal aid, fast-track those from democratic countries, and remove those who fail in their claims without further judicial interference.'
So much for the rule of law.
Refugees and migrants are being further penalised by their supposed association with terrorism, both in government actions and in public perceptions. In 2000 the government passed a Terrorism Act. The Act criminalised members and supporters of 'terrorist organisations' including, for example, the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party). Kurdish refugees from Turkey are put in a double bind. If they fail to tell immigration officials that they are members of the PKK, they diminish their chances of refugee status. But if they confess to their membership, they are liable to prosecution under the Terrorism Act. The act has been used against British protestors as well, for example in 2003 against people expressing solidarity with 'terrorist organisations' and people protesting against the Fairford Air Force base and the arms fair at Canary Wharf, demonstrating that the repressive powers acquired against foreigners are liable to spread and poison society as a whole. In 2001, shortly after the attack on the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001, the government passed another act, the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act. This Act gave the government powers to detain without trial and indefinitely non-British citizens whom it suspected of terrorist links but did not have enough evidence to prosecute, claiming that a national emergency existed which warranted derogation from the European Convention on Human Rights. It took these special powers because some of those whom it wished to detain could not be deported to their countries of origin, and its existing powers of indefinite detention without trial enable it to detain only those who are liable to deportation. But in other respects the situation of those who are suspected of terrorism differs little from those who are suspected, often wrongly, of not really being refugees. The differences between migrants and refugees and 'terrorists' is blurred in other ways by the act, which tends to intimidate refugees and migrants and to deter solidarity with resistance against repressive regimes abroad, many of which are supported by the British government. One of the goals of the new Campaign Against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC) is to 'defend the democratic freedom to dissent and to resist oppression, nationally and internationally', both for British and non-British citizens.
The government seems anxious to escape its legal obligations under the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees without formally repudiating the convention. Its opponents have attacked many of its new measures on the grounds that they fail to comply with these obligations; 'death of asylum by a thousand cuts', Amnesty International calls it. Most blatantly, in February 2002, the government made a proposal to the European Union, entitled New Vision, that asylum seekers who make it to Britain and other EU countries should be transferred, before their cases are considered, to two categories of camps: 'transit processing centres' in states bordering, but outside, the European Union, and, apparently for people whose claims had been rejected but who could not be returned to their own countries, 'regional protection areas' in 'refugee-producing' regions. Both types of camp would be in effect prisons. In the transit processing centres claims would be processed by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). The British government's New Vision report states that: 'As UNHCR would be an independent body the only remedy would be an administrative review of the decision, perhaps by a senior board on the papers only'. These centres would be designed, the British report stated, to act as a deterrent to persons abusing the asylum system. As Amnesty International commented in a mimeo document entitled 'Unlawful and unworkable - extra-territorial processing of asylum claims', dated June 2003:
The real goal behind the proposals appears to be to reduce the number of spontaneous arrivals in the UK and EU states by denying access to territory and shifting the asylum-seekers to processing zones outside the EU, where responsibility, enforceability and accountability for refugee protection would be weak and unclear.
The UNHCR made an almost equally shocking 'counter-proposal'. This included the immediate transfer of asylum-seekers whose claims were considered 'manifestly unfounded', on the grounds of their national origins, to closed 'common processing centres', or in effect prisons, within the EU but near its borders, where their claims would be processed with even fewer rights of appeal than exist within most European countries. 'No Borders' and other protest groups in Europe, which have already started a campaign against the Organisation for International Migration, are now considering extending it to the UNHCR. A Communication adopted by the EU Commission on 3 June 2003 was cautious about the proposals, and the EU summit at Thessaloniki in Greece in June 2003 rejected them. But they remain on the table.
The Amnesty International report makes clear that the proposals for transferring asylum seekers to closed camps outside the countries in which they have applied for asylum are likely to violate several international treaties. It also comments that these are not the first attempts to ''extra-territorialize'' asylum procedures, referring for example to the treatment of Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s and 90s. The false assumption was made that they were economic migrants and resulted in arbitrary, long term detention of Vietnamese refugees who arrived in Hong Kong and elsewhere, and the forced repatriation of many hundreds of them. Some, at least, had escaped torture and long prison sentences for supposed anti-state activities in Vietnam (a novel called The Ghost Locust by Heather Stroud, who spent six years working in the refugee camps in Hong Kong and did research in Vietnam, gives a gripping fictionalised account of some of their stories).
The more governments cast around for ever more brutal and repressive ways of trying to keep people out, the clearer it becomes that it is impossible to win any particular improvements in immigration controls, important though it is to expose and campaign against their harshest consequences. The suffering imposed on asylum seekers and other migrants is not some random or unintended consequence of immigration controls. It is deliberate government policy. Governments believe in deterrence, or the potential for reducing the number of people applying for asylum by making conditions harsh. Even supposing there was any prospect that governments might abandon this belief, suffering is an inevitable consequence of immigration controls, which give to the state the right to chose between the deserving and the undeserving. The people best able to decide whether they need to migrate, or to seek refuge, are migrants themselves.
It is also not enough to argue, as some do, including Nigel Harris in his new book Thinking The Unthinkable, that people should be free to migrate for work, just as capital and goods are supposedly free, and that decisions on whom to employ should be left to employers rather than determined by the state. If migrant workers do not have citizenship rights, they will constitute, as they now do, a threatened and precarious underclass, and they will be open to extreme forms of exploitation. Trade unions and all workers have an interest in supporting the rights of migrants, in order to prevent their own rights and working conditions being undermined (see above). New migrants need to have exactly the same rights as all others who are living and working in a particular country or area, whatever their nationality. A demand which is now widespread in France and other European countries is for citizenship based on residency, rather than on nationality. New migrants must have not only the right to work, but the right to join trade unions, to employment protection, to go on strike and to vote, and they must have full access to all the benefits enjoyed by other citizens, including health care, education, unemployment benefits and social security. They must not be threatened with deportation if they attempt to assert their rights.
Finally, it remains true that whatever the economic rationale for securing a cheap and compliant workforce through 'managed immigration', ultimately immigration controls are explicable only by racism. If governments merely wanted a compliant workforce they could allow employers to make free use of the vast reservoir of labour which now exists in the world because of centuries of imperialist theft, as many employers in the United states and elsewhere urge. It is perhaps conceivable that immigration controls could disappear under capitalism. Many disagree, believing that free movement of people will only become a political possibility once the capitalist expropriation of the wealth of the Third World, and the wars to enable this, end. But while the abolition of immigration controls may require a revolution, what is clear is that, as we said in our manifesto No One Is Illegal, to render them fair would require a miracle. There can be no such thing as fair or non-racist immigration controls. Immigration controls have their origins in racism, and they legitimate and breed racism. They are inherently discriminatory, since they exclude foreigners or outsiders. They need to be opposed in their totality.
Teresa Hayter, May 2004.
13th April 2005
- NOTE: This article is based on edited extracts from the second edition of Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls by Teresa Hayter, published in June 2004.
- The manifesto of the No One Is Illegal group is appended. We hope it will help to win campaigners for migrants and refugees to the view that freedom of movement is an elementary human right, a view that is so far more widespread in other parts of Europe than it is in Britain, and that groups will be set up in Britain to campaign for this right.
Immigration controls, which were first introduced in 1905 to restrict the entry of 'aliens' , and then in 1962 to keep out black Commonwealth citizens, have become progressively more vicious. Since 1997 Labour governments, in spite of their supporters' expectations, have introduced virtually nothing in the way of improvement or reform. On the contrary, everything has been done to make the suffering of refugees and migrants worse, in the largely mistaken belief that this will cut their numbers.
The government is conducting what has become known as a 'war on asylum'. It attacks asylum seekers for their supposed abuse of the system and singles them out for harsh treatment. It drives them into illegality, locks them up, does not allow them to work, reduces them to destitution, splits up their families, labels them 'illegal immigrants' and promises to deport more of them if it can't stop them coming in the first place. It also increasingly rounds up others, mostly Caribbean, South Asian and African, who are usually described as 'over-stayers' and who may have lived for years in this country and have jobs, houses and families, for sometimes minor infringements of the immigration rules. It thus bears heavy responsibility for the growth of the hysteria against asylum seekers and so-called 'illegal immigrants' (the terms are often used interchangeably; so much so that the Press Complaints Commission was moved to pronounce that the phrase 'illegal asylum seekers' should not be used, since there is no such thing).
In the process the position of asylum seekers as the new object of race hate campaigns has become entrenched. Their demonisation has no obvious justification. Such increases as there have been in their numbers are, more than ever, related to the wars perpetrated by the major powers: first Kosovans and then Iraqis (in the months before the US/British invasion of Iraq in March 2003) accounted for almost the entire increase. The much vaunted decline in the number of applications for asylum in Britain in 2003 was largely because, after the overthrow of Saddam, Iraqis know that they have virtually no chance of being given asylum in Britain. In 2002 the largest numbers of applicants were from Iraq, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Afghanistan and China, in that order. The overwhelming majority come from areas in which there is severe political persecution or conflict, for which the West moreover bears much responsibility. If such conditions arise, governments impose visa requirements on their nationals, as they have done recently for Zimbabweans, thus making it virtually impossible for refugees to travel legally to Britain. They are nevertheless fully entitled to claim asylum under international treaties, and in the last few years around half of all asylum seekers eventually got refugee status or exceptional leave to remain (ELR - now replaced by the more restrictive 'humanitarian protection'). Many more of them ought to do so, but fall foul of the cruelly unjust and arbitrary system for determining whether they are 'genuine refugees'. Those who have, with exceptional enterprise and courage, managed to flee poverty rather than wars or political persecution are likely to be similarly the victims of the actions of major Western powers. The reality is that most asylum seekers, whatever their reason for migrating, are highly educated and are often dissident members of the elite. Many take a large drop in their standard of living. They cost public money almost entirely because of the escalation of the repressive apparatus which is supposed to stop them coming here, and because they are no longer allowed to work (see below). If they do work, they are forced to work long hours for low wages in jobs that do not require their qualifications. The British are lucky that they come here.
Moreover, whatever the scaremongers may say, the number of asylum seekers migrating to Britain is relatively small, both compared to refugees elsewhere in the world and compared to other types of migration to Britain. Less than 2 per cent of refugees in the world as a whole are in Britain, although a recent poll showed that people believe the figure is 25 per cent. The vast majority of refugees are in Third World countries bordering areas of conflict. In relation to the size of its population, Britain is way below even the European average. According to Home Office statistics on Control of Immigration, there were 84,130 asylum applications in Britain in 2002, which was the peak year. In the same year, and in each of the preceding five years, there were around eight million visitors to Britain from abroad. There were 1,300,000 returning British and other nationals. 369,000 foreign students were given leave to enter. 235,805 people were given official permission to work in Britain. Yet the Labour government constantly reiterates that it is doing its best to reduce the numbers, not of visitors, students, employees of multinational corporations, workers and so on, but of people applying for asylum.
The government says its actions are necessary to defeat racism and the far right. But they both pander to and feed the sections of the media whose political agenda it is to stir up racism. The Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Sun have almost daily headlines disseminating lies and slander about asylum seekers and 'illegals', some of them using language and information which appear to have come from official sources, attacking refugees for supposed crimes, scrounging and ill health, for being too many, or for resorting to catching and eating swans. The government only very rarely seeks to counter the media's lies and distortions with the truth. Its policies encourage the Tories to outbid it. Occasionally even the Tories are moved to criticise some particularly illiberal government measure; Oliver Letwin, when he was shadow home secretary, for example, said that children should not be confined in 'accommodation centres' (see below) for six months; there should be a maximum 10-week limit. More often, the Tories make half-baked proposals such as that all incoming asylum seekers should be confined to an unspecified off-shore island. The British National Party (BNP) has made full use of the growth of prejudice against asylum seekers in its sometimes successful local election campaigns, especially in areas where no asylum seekers or refugees live. Asylum seekers themselves, especially those who are being dispersed outside London and the South East where their communities are strong, are being subjected to increasing levels of violence, such that many fear to leave their accommodation. The Institute of Race Relations has recorded on its web-site 24 deaths in racist attacks since 1999, including four murders of asylum seekers in the last two years, and ten major violent attacks, including, for example, systematic attacks on Iraqi Kurds in Hull, resulting in injuries to at least 13 of them; they held a demonstration in July 2003 to protest against failure by the police to protect them. The government's policies have also helped bring a small organisation called Migration Watch, now widely quoted as an authority on immigration and the supposed dangers of 'over-population', out of the woodwork. Its chair, Sir Andrew Green, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, testified to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee on Asylum Removals in September 2002 as one of three main 'experts'. Yet its chief researcher is Professor David Coleman, of Oxford university, who has held office in the Eugenics Society and its successor the Galton Institute, bodies which promote the notion that the purity of the white race should be preserved.
It is hard to see why the government aids and abets the racists, unless it is that it is so unpopular on most issues that it believes it can regain a little popularity by appearing to be stemming a 'flood' of asylum seekers who might otherwise 'swamp' British schools and the welfare state. The detention of asylum seekers, for example, which is one of the harshest consequences of immigration controls and causes great suffering for migrants and refugees, is little more than window-dressing. It does not serve its main function of deterring potential immigrants, and it does not even make it easy to deport people. In the end the government seems to be doing little other than trying to convince the opponents of immigration that it is keeping people out of Britain.
The laws on immigration change with great frequency. The changes are themselves a reflection of governments' inability to control the movement of people. In Britain there is now a new Act every three years or so. The Tories' Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act of 1993 and their Asylum and Immigration Act of 1996 were followed by Labour's Immigration and Asylum Act of 1999 and their Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of November 2002. Yet another Act was introduced in 2004, speeding up the process in a new frenzy of efforts to appease the racists.
The Labour government's 2002 Act was preceded by a White Paper entitled 'Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity', published in February 2002. This is a curious document. Its first half is devoted to arguing that immigrants make a large contribution to British prosperity and to meeting shortages of skills, and that Britain needs more of them. The second half is about how the government will stop them coming. The explanation, it seems, is that the government wants 'managed' immigration. By this it means that it hopes to be able to select the immigrants it wants, in the numbers and types that it wants, and to bar entry to anybody else. This is an idea that is becoming quite widespread, including among those who believe that immigration controls can somehow be made more humane and fair. The argument is that if legal channels of entry are broadened, then there will be less incentive for people, including asylum seekers who are supposedly not really asylum seekers, to come to Britain without permission. But of course such a policy leaves the whole repressive apparatus of immigration controls intact, and there is no sign that they will do anything other than continue to become more vicious. If the government's renewed interest in attracting immigrants met the level of demand to migrate for asylum or work in Britain, there would be no need for immigration controls. The reality is that, while the government sends out recruiting teams to pillage the skills of trained Third World professionals, it simultaneously spends millions on making skilled people suffer, and perhaps deporting them, if they come to this country on their own initiative to seek asylum or to work. It recruits nurses in Zimbabwe, but imprisons Zimbabwean nurses who flee persecution.
Like other European governments, the Labour government is worried about skills and labour shortages, declining birth rates and an ageing population. Reports by Ceri Gott, Stephen Glover and others, published by the research directorate of the Home Office in 2001 and 2002, argue that immigrants not only contribute to prosperity and economic growth, but make a net contribution of approximately £2.5 billion a year to public finances, since they are mostly young, fit and have been educated at others' expense. The work permit system, under which employers can apply to the government for permission to employ foreigners in specific jobs, has been expanded; work permits have nearly doubled, from 68,400 in 1998 to 120,115 in 2002. The government has launched a Highly Skilled Migrant Programme, under which certain 'highly skilled' people can enter without specific job permits. Foreign students, in demand because they pay higher fees, can stay in Britain if they complete their courses and find a job. The scheme for importing casual labour on short term contracts has been extended from agriculture into other sectors with labour shortages, such as construction and catering. And the government has decided that it will allow nationals of the new European Union accession states to come to Britain to work, provided they register, and provided they do not claim benefits.
In most cases the chosen immigrants will be admitted on short term contracts for specific jobs. This constitutes a radical break with previous, pre-immigration controls policies, when people who came to meet labour shortages in Britain before 1962 from former colonies in the Caribbean and South Asia obtained full citizenship rights. It will mean not only, as the government intends, that the new immigrants will in theory have to leave when their contracts end, but that, as the government may also intend, they will be highly exploitable even while they are working in Britain legally. Their position will be little better than the position of 'illegal' workers. Attempts by the new legal immigrants to win better wages and conditions or join trade unions could lead to the sack and therefore to deportation (or destitution, in the case of the new European citizens, if they cannot find another job). The government's intention may be that this will contribute to its drive for greater 'flexibility', in other words casualisation and insecurity, and to driving down wages and conditions, both in the sectors in which immigrants are concentrated and in the workforce as a whole. There are signs that trade unions and others are beginning to realise that the only way to counter this is to argue, not for zero immigration because it will not happen, but for full and equal rights for all workers and residents, including the right to join trade unions and struggle for better wages and conditions without the threat of deportation. In particular in the United States the AFL-CIO now argues not for stopping immigration, but for the legalisation of so-called 'illegals'. The British Trades Union Congress may yet follow. In July 2003 the TUC's international department published a report, entitled Overworked, Underpaid and Over Here: Migrant Workers in Britain, which says that the lack of legal protection for migrant workers is 'giving the green light to unscrupulous gangmasters, agencies and employers to exploit foreign workers on a massive scale', and shows that the problem applies to both illegal and legal migrants. TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber was quoted in a press release to launch the report as saying that: 'If every illegal worker was removed from the UK, parts of the econoomy would collapse overnight ? Everyone working in the UK deserves basic rights at work?' In France the Sans Papiers are now arguing that the sudden deprivation of rights for long-term immigrant residents and workers has created a new form of slavery, and argue for solidarity from other workers not out of pity, but to prevent the contagion spreading in European countries which have up to now had relatively strong employment rights. In their joint declaration to the European Social Forum in November 2003, calling for a European day of action in support of migrants on 31 January 2004, the Sans Papiers and their supporters argued for 'citizenship rights for all, based on residence', since 'the undocumented are only the visible tip of an iceberg of job insecurity and casualisation spreading to other migrants and then to workers in general', and because of 'the special position held by the undocumented in the process of restructuring the work environment through generalised casualisation', and the resulting 'centrality of the struggles of the undocumentd'.
At the same time as promoting an increase in the number of insecure or 'managed' immigrants, the government appears intent on making it harder for others to work without legal permission. This too appears contradictory, since illegal workers, as the Sans Papiers recognise, are the ultimately exploitable workforce. It is presumably based on political rather than economic calculations. The government believes, probably correctly, that the fact that it has up to now been relatively easy to get work in Britain without papers is one reason why some refugees are desperate to cross the channel. It also wishes to curry favour with the racists by showing that Britain is not a 'soft touch' and is not an attractive destination for asylum seekers or other migrants, but is, on the contrary, as the home secretary David Blunkett has put it, 'tough as old boots'. The 2002 Act introduced severer penalties and checks on employers. In July 2002, the government removed the 'concession' which in theory allowed asylum seekers to work if their claims were not determined within six months. Asylum seekers have been issued with 'smart' cards which carry their photograph, finger-prints, and a statement on whether or not they are allowed to work. Identity cards, on whose absence in Britain politicians have long prided themselves, are to be introduced, at first, in 2005, for foreigners. As the Guardian of 12 November 2003 reported, David Blunkett stated that: 'An ID card scheme will help tackle crime and serious issues facing the UK, particularly illegal working, immigration abuse, ID fraud, terrorism and organised crime.'
Identity cards would also make clear who is and is not entitled to health care and other public services, as well as to work, and thus facilitate the incorporation of health workers and other public officials as agents of immigration controls. They are no doubt intended to facilitate the current, and oppressive, increase in random immigration checks on people who look foreign, such as have existed in France and elsewhere for many years.
In November 2003, according to the Guardian of 14 November 2003, David Blunkett announced that the government was considering a scheme called 'earned regularisation'. This was intended to deal with the 'emotive' situation of valued but illegal immigrants who would not obtain identity cards when they were made compulsory for foreigners. They would have to demonstrate that 'they had not abused the system and could not be removed', that they were making a valuable 'contribution to the labour market' and had not engaged in 'welfare benefit abuse' or 'entered the country illegally' (which would exclude the majority of asylum seekers - see below). Those who qualified would be given a one-year legal work permit, after which, presumably, they would be deported or forced back into illegality. Sarah Spencer, a researcher who has been influential with New Labour, apparently suggested the 'earned regularisation' idea to Mr Blunkett and was quoted as saying that the scheme 'would need to be selective to avoid the evident problems with the kind of general amnesty that has happened in other parts of Europe that have encouraged other people to come'. The Home Office apparently rapidly back-tracked from even this proposal. But Blunkett's chilling statement that he wanted 'to deal sensibly with people who are prepared to put their hands up' demonstrates the dangers of such 'regularisation' or amnesty schemes. Like the schemes in Britain in 1974, and in France in 1997, they are likely to turn out to be a trap rather than a means of escape for many thousands of people, who risk putting their heads above the parapet and finding they are not among the chosen few.
The government hopes, and has publicly stated, that its policy of making asylum seekers suffer will not only induce existing refugees to give up and leave the country, but will deter future applications. It has introduced some measures of extreme severity. Food vouchers, introduced under Labour's 1999 Act, led, as predicted, to the stigmatisation of asylum seekers who held up check-out queues in their attempt to buy food up to the exact amount of their £30 per week vouchers. Vouchers were supplied late or not at all. Asylum seekers were, and are, dispersed to one 'no-choice' offer of accommodation, sometimes in sub-standard housing, sometimes with unscrupulous private landlords, sometimes in hard-to-let council housing on estates where they are subjected to racist violence, including in Glasgow's Sighthill estate a murder. A parallel administrative system, National Asylum Support Services (NASS), was set up, paying asylum seekers much less than normal state benefits at much greater cost to the state. After widespread criticism, including by Bill Morris who was then general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, the government did a volte-face on the food voucher system, substituting equally low cash payments. But worse was to follow. Section 55 of the 2002 Act provided that, from January 2003, asylum seekers who had failed to apply for asylum at ports of entry, or immediately after their arrival ('in-country' applicants), and others who had had their claims turned down (but who might still be trying to exercise their legal rights to oppose removal) would be denied access to even the poor-law support provided by NASS. Home Office figures show that around two thirds not only of all asylum seekers, but also of the people who are accepted as refugees, have applied for asylum 'in-country'. In 1996 the Conservative government had tried to remove all forms of public support from 'in-country' and 'failed' applicants, and been prevented from doing so by the courts. Now that Labour is trying to do much the same, they too are having trouble with the courts. In February 2003 the High Court condemned the whole scheme of the Act as inhuman, and also said that the Home Office had failed to prove that the apellants had not applied for asylum as soon as they could. The Home Office subsequently got the courts to accept that section 55 would only constitute inhuman treatment if asylum seekers could be proved to be destitute. In September 2003 the first case was won by the Home Office; the court considered that a Malaysian asylum seeker who was sleeping rough in Heathrow airport was not really destitute, since he had access to shelter and some food. A further 200 cases are pending. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of asylum seekers (around 5,000 by the beginning of 2004) were and are in fact being reduced to destitution. They are not allowed to work, and they receive nothing from the state. The government may find that, for the first time in Britain, there is open and widespread revolt by the undocumented, such as has existed for some years in other European countries.
Some of those made destitute, notably Zimbabweans, Iraqi Kurds and Somalis, are people who have had their claims for asylum rejected but cannot be returned to their own countries because they are unsafe, because their governments will not accept them, because they have no documents, or because air travel to their region is unavailable. Some have been denied support because, as is the case with many refugees, they have been forced by government policies to travel in the backs of lorries, have been unaware that they are crossing frontiers, and are deemed not to have found out how to claim asylum quickly enough. An Iraqi Kurd, for example, who was perhaps fortunate to have arrived before the new provisions on destitution, spent 24 hours in the tyre compartment underneath a lorry, hoping he was being taken to Sweden. He was deposited on a dual carriageway, realised he was in England not Sweden, approached the nearest lights, asked for a police station, was collected by the police and provided with their hospitality for the night. In the morning he was told to go to Croydon. When he asked how to get there without money, he was advised to go to Asylum Welcome, a charity in Oxford. Asylum Welcome found him accommodation for the week-end and a lawyer who claimed asylum for him. Two years later he got refugee status.
The government claims that it is taking strong measures to deport (or 'remove') the people who fail to get refugee status. One of the cruel ironies of the current system is that asylum seekers are put through the misery (and heavy public costs) of detention, destitution and continuing threats of deportation to the dangers they have fled from, sometimes over a period of years, but then when their claims are finally turned down they are not deported. Unsurprisingly this is one of the major complaints of the tabloids and the rest of the racists. The government's response is not to abandon the whole pointless exercise, but to promise to deport more asylum seekers. Removals have increased steadily under the Labour government, from 6,990 in 1998 to 10,740 in 2002, but apparently this is not enough. In 2000 the government set a target of 30,000 removals of 'failed asylum seekers' a year. It had to abandon this target as unworkable, even though it would have been less than the recent annual number of asylum claims rejected, let alone the number of people turned down and not removed in previous years. In 2002 it 'removed' 65,460 people, but only 10,740 of them were 'failed asylum seekers'. In an attempt to speed up deportations, the Home Office has been going for soft targets, especially families and people with long associations and commitments in Britain who are easier to find and deport than single men. People may be picked up in the street, on the underground or at work, or their houses may be raided in the early hours. Fathers who are breadwinners are deported, leaving their families dependent on public support. The charity Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID) has on occasion succeeded in persuading the courts to release people on the grounds that the government is violating the human right to family life. There are horror stories of people losing contact with their children, being unable to meet commitments to collect them from school, losing their houses, jobs and even their personal possessions, being deported at short notice without the chance to contact either their families or their solicitors. The Immigration Law Practioners' Association (ILPA), in its submission to the Home Affairs Committee (see above) gave some examples among the many, including the case of:
A Lithuanian minor arrested for a driving offence who was then detained under Immigration Act powers overnight and removed the next day. He had been unable to telephone his mother who was awaiting consideration by the Home Office of her human rights claim; the minor was dependant on his mother's claim yet not only was there no contact between mother and son, but she was left not knowing what had happened to her son for two to three days.
Detainees are sometimes removed from detention with extreme violence, pinned to the floor and made unconscious. Some resist, for example by stripping at airport check-outs, and are returned to detention because pilots refuse to carry them. Others make the journey in handcuffs, surrounded by guards. Even Wackenhut, a private security firm used to 'escort' people to airports, was moved to express its disquiet at the way they were treated in evidence to the Home Affairs Committee on Asylum Removals, describing for example:
An incident where a child, who had recently undergone a splenectomy and was under continual medical supervision with tubes and wires coming out of various parts of his body, was subjected to the ignominy of initial moves towards deportation.
The Chief Executive of another company, Loss Prevention International Ltd, which provides guards on flights, told the committee how they hand over their charges to the authorities they may have fled from:
Some countries insist on us handing the individual over to their own authorities, which we do... In China, for instance, in Beijing, we are always met by their own immigration authorities, the individual is handed over to them, we are asked a number of questions and they are taken away. Down in Lagos, for instance, the agreement that we have there is that we actually hand the returnee over to the ground staff of either British Airways or Virgin Atlantic... Standing right next to them are the Nigerian immigration officers who watch that process and then we walk away from it... The Turks actually take them away so I cannot comment about seeing people out on the airport at Istanbul ... Last year, sir, it was our top destination! ... [they were] Turkish Kurds in general.
To facilitate removals the government has announced its intention to set up a smooth process under which asylum seekers are first to be sent to 'induction centres', then moved on to 'accommodation centres' or, failing that, made to report to 'reporting centres' from the accommodation to which they have been dispersed, and then, if their claims are rejected (but often in practice before they are rejected, see below), to 'removal centres'. One induction centre exists at Margate; in June 2003 some of its enforced occupants went on hunger strike. The government is having trouble with its accommodation centres. It proposed four sites, each to accommodate 750 asylum seekers, including women and children, in isolated rural areas. After vociferous and often racist local objections, it had to abandon its plans for three of them. Although the government's planning inspector turned down the application for a fourth accommodation centre on a military site near Bicester, the Bicester centre is due to open in 2005. The induction centres and accommodation centres are not to be locked, but they are prisons in effect, with strong inducements and penalties for the people assigned to them not to leave, and they will operate a kind of curfew. The Home Office has stated that if people fail to obey 'clear rules' then not only will they lose all future public support, but 'breaking the rules may also affect their claims for asylum' (which must be unlawful under the rules of the refugee conventions). The centres will be built and run by private contractors. According to the Oxford Mail of 1 October 2003, three companies are bidding to operate the Bicester accommodation prison: United Kingdom Detention Services, Group 4 and Premier Prisons. There are to be medical, legal and educational facilities and meals provided within the centres, but no self-catering facilities and probably little transport to local towns. Children will not be allowed to go to local schools, so the chances of them learning English, let alone getting an adequate education and having the chance to integrate, will be minimal. The home secretary David Blunkett, outdoing his predecessor Jack Straw, said that schools were in danger of being 'swamped' by asylum seekers' children.
The existing immigration detention centres have been renamed 'removal centres'. The Labour government announced that it would more than quadruple the numbers detained under immigration laws to 4,000; the numbers initially more than doubled but then declined to 1,690, including 1,355 people who had claimed asylum, at the end of June 2003. The reason for the recent decline is loss of capacity. The government announced at the beginning of 2002 that it would no longer detain asylum seekers in ordinary prisons (although by the end of 2002 the numbers in prisons were up again, to 19 per cent of immigration detainees). The two big new detention centres at Harmondsworth, near Heathrow, and Yarl's Wood, near Bedford, opened in 2001, were meant to replace this loss of capacity and expand the 'detention estate'. But half the 550 spaces at Harmondsworth are no longer in use. The Home Office claimed this was to enable fire sprinklers to be fitted (see below), but it seems the real reason was that the private contractors UK Detention Services Ltd (UKDS) could not prevent widespread violence within Harmondsworth, involving both guards and detainees, at least one suicide and several attempted suicides. And in February 2002 the occupied half of Yarl's Wood, which was supposed to contain 900 asylum seekers, was burnt down (see below). Yarl's Wood remained closed until September 2003. Meanwhile, a Young Offenders' Institution at Dover, a prison at Dungavel near Glasgow and part of Lindholme prison near Doncaster have been redesignated as immigration prisons. In October 2003 20 people escaped from Lindholme, 8 or 9 people escaped from Dover, and there was a big protest at Haslar which closed one of the dormitories. And so on. The Institute of Race Relations has recorded on its website 14 suicides of 'victims of the asylum system' in the last five years, three of them in immigration prisons.
The government says that the purpose of removal centres is to detain for short periods people who have had their asylum claims rejected. But only a small proportion of the people detained have exhausted their rights to appeal against refusal, some have not been given an initial decision by the Home Office, and some are detained, in continuing arbitrary fashion, when they apply for asylum at ports and airports. The government will not give figures on what the proportions are. But after Yarl's Wood prison was opened in November 2001, and the home secretary David Blunkett had said on local radio that it was a 'removal centre' where 'failed' asylum seekers would be held for short periods prior to their removal, Lord Rooker, then immigration minister, announced that of the 385 people imprisoned there, only 46 had dated removal notices. Many had already been detained for many months. According to Home Office statistics, of the total numbers detained at the end of 2002, 28 per cent had been so for more than four months, including 35 for over a year, 105 for over six months, and 100 for between four and six months. People who flee death, prison or torture can find themselves taken to a place called a 'removal centre' before they have even entered the country. Others are picked up for not having their immigration papers in order; such people, who are threatened with immediate deportation, now form a growing proportion of those detained.
The 2002 Act repealed the provision for automatic bail hearings for immigration detainees which had been in the 1999 Act but had not been implemented. It thus removed the government's one response to repeated criticisms of the lack of judicial supervision of detention. The Home Office now moves people around from centre to centre at frequent intervals without notice or reason; it is hard to escape the conclusion that this is to deny them contact with their lawyers, families and supporters, and to reduce further the possibility of bail. Possibly because the private security companies running the prisons cannot process the paperwork fast enough, some detainees have been kept in vans for more than 24 hours, deprived of food, water and even toilet facilities. There are well documented cases of detainees being treated with violence by the private companies transferring them.
Perhaps the worst innovation of the current Labour government is that, unlike any other government in Europe, it now detains whole families, including young children and babies, and pregnant women. At the end of 2002 115 women were detained. The Home office gives no figures on the number of children, apparently considered non-persons, detained. Because of the inability of UKDS to protect the women and families detained in Harmondsworth, they have been moved elsewhere. Yarl's Wood was reopened in September 2003 for women and apparently, in future, children. Children and their mothers are detained at Dungavel, Tinsley and Oakington. Some children have been moved from mainstream schools, where they were much appreciated by their friends and teachers, and have been locked up in prison-like conditions, at Dungavel for example, for months on end, in spite of numerous protests, in the House of Lords and elsewhere. Pregnant women have inadequate medical attention. Mothers have to queue for hours to receive powdered milk or nappies, which are allocated one at a time. A report by Bail for Immigration Detainees, A Crying Shame:Pregnant Asylum Seekers and Their Babies in Detention, gives a harrowing account based on interviews with some of these women.
Most of the immigration prisons continue to be run by private security firms. Group 4 in particular continues to display its brutal incompetence, and continues to be hired by the government. It won the contract to build and run the new Yarl's Wood prison. On 14 February 2002, a few months after it was opened, the occupied half of it was destroyed in a fire. The best the police could say was that 'we can categorically say it is unlikely' that anyone died. As had happened after a protest in 1997 at Campsfield immigration prison, some of the detainees were arbitrarily picked out by Group 4 and prosecuted, in this case for arson, violent disorder and affray. It remains unclear why and how the fire was started; there were no convictions for arson, and the defendants themselves were appalled by the fire and spent much of their time helping other detainees, nurses and even Group 4 employees to escape from it. At their trial in 2003 much of Group 4's evidence was thrown out. The very active local Campaign to Stop Arbitrary Detentions at Yarl's Wood, SADY, has commented as follows:
The Home Office showed a total disregard for human life by detaining people at Yarl's Wood in unsafe conditions operated for private profit by Group4, described by the prosecution in court as a 'national laughing stock ever since they first blundered into the field of private custodial services'. It is the Home Office and Group4 who should be prosecuted for Unlawful Imprisonment and Recklessly Endangering Lives. Their responsibility for what happened at Yarl's Wood is significant. Firstly the Home Office arbitrarily detained men, women and children who are not accused of a crime, indefinitely - in a wooden framed building they decided not to fit sprinklers to. Then Group4 pinning a 51 year old woman to the ground, dragging her along the floor, triggering the whole incident, which they went on to grossly and negligently mis-manage - including delaying access to fire fighters and police, and locking detainees into the burning building. Not enough, they went on to hinder the defence of those picked for prosecution - Group4 subverted the investigation process by a series of 'wholly improper' actions and the Home Office deported most of the detainee eye witnesses.
Group4 were under investigation for Corporate Manslaughter, and under threat by police of being interviewed about obstruction ...
The Fire Brigades Union, from the start, stated publicly that their members had been prevented from entering the burning building for over an hour, confirming what detainees, who desperately wanted them to come and rescue them, had told us. Andy Gilchrist, General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, commented as follows at the Trades Union Conference Annual Congress in Brighton in September 2003:
Of course the main conclusion to be drawn from this incident is that asylum seekers were treated as sub-humans. So the building was put up on the cheap, the staff supervising the inmates (for that is how they were treated) were untrained and poorly paid, and the exigencies of so called Riot Control overrode those of firefighting. At every stage fire safety took a back seat.
Campaigns against detention continue, and new active campaigns have started, especially against Yarl's Wood and the Dover removal centre. In September 2003 there was a demonstration of 2,000 people against the refugee prison at Dungavel. Most of these campaigns have joined together and set up Barbed Wire Britain, a network to end refugee and migrant detention. The Campaign to Close Campsfield won a victory when, in the House of Commons on 7 February 2002, David Blunkett announced that: 'I can also confirm that I intend to close Campsfield House. This outdated centre is no longer appropriate to the 21st century. These places will be transferred to the new high-standard removal centres.'
Campsfield was refurbished in 1993, at a cost of £20 million, from buildings much newer than some of the buildings in which refugees are locked up. The only possible explanation for the decision to close it was the protests, inside and outside it. As I wrote in 2000, such protests had not occurred at other detention centres. Since then the government has had troubles at both its 'new high-standard removal centres', and in others too (see above). This presumably explains why, on 22 October 2003, the immigration minister Beverley Hughes announced that the government would keep Campsfield open and, shamefully, expand it to 290 places.
Campaigners for the rights of refugees frequently point to the injustice of the procedures for determining asylum claims, which means that many who need protection are removed to possible death, persecution and extreme hardship, and argue for greater fairness. The government moves steadily in the other direction. The White List of supposedly safe countries, attacked by Labour and formally abolished by them, has reappeared. People coming from countries which the Home Secretary designates 'safe' are considered to have 'clearly unfounded' cases and are subject to accelerated procedures, unless the Home Office decides otherwise. They have only 'non-suspensive' rights of appeal, which means they can only appeal from abroad, a virtual impossibility. The list included all the European Union accession states. Therefore, for example, Roma who fled severe persecution in Poland or Hungary, from which the state authorities do little or nothing to protect them, could be returned to those countries without the right to appeal in Britain. Since EU accession in May 2004, they have lost the right to claim asylum at all; if they cannot find work, it appears they will be deported or become destitute. Under the 2002 Act the government attempted to remove rights to judicial review of Home Office decisions; after outcry by judges and others, it had to back-track on this proposal. But legal aid for asylum seekers to pursue their claims has been drastically reduced, so that in most cases conscientious solicitors know that they cannot remotely stay within the prescribed limits, and many have withdrawn from the work, leaving what the government calls the 'legal aid gravy train' in the hands of the charlatans. Blair, in his speech to the Labour party's October 2003 conference, said the following: 'We should cut back the ludicrously complicated appeal process, we should derail the gravy train of legal aid, fast-track those from democratic countries, and remove those who fail in their claims without further judicial interference.'
So much for the rule of law.
Refugees and migrants are being further penalised by their supposed association with terrorism, both in government actions and in public perceptions. In 2000 the government passed a Terrorism Act. The Act criminalised members and supporters of 'terrorist organisations' including, for example, the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party). Kurdish refugees from Turkey are put in a double bind. If they fail to tell immigration officials that they are members of the PKK, they diminish their chances of refugee status. But if they confess to their membership, they are liable to prosecution under the Terrorism Act. The act has been used against British protestors as well, for example in 2003 against people expressing solidarity with 'terrorist organisations' and people protesting against the Fairford Air Force base and the arms fair at Canary Wharf, demonstrating that the repressive powers acquired against foreigners are liable to spread and poison society as a whole. In 2001, shortly after the attack on the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001, the government passed another act, the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act. This Act gave the government powers to detain without trial and indefinitely non-British citizens whom it suspected of terrorist links but did not have enough evidence to prosecute, claiming that a national emergency existed which warranted derogation from the European Convention on Human Rights. It took these special powers because some of those whom it wished to detain could not be deported to their countries of origin, and its existing powers of indefinite detention without trial enable it to detain only those who are liable to deportation. But in other respects the situation of those who are suspected of terrorism differs little from those who are suspected, often wrongly, of not really being refugees. The differences between migrants and refugees and 'terrorists' is blurred in other ways by the act, which tends to intimidate refugees and migrants and to deter solidarity with resistance against repressive regimes abroad, many of which are supported by the British government. One of the goals of the new Campaign Against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC) is to 'defend the democratic freedom to dissent and to resist oppression, nationally and internationally', both for British and non-British citizens.
The government seems anxious to escape its legal obligations under the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees without formally repudiating the convention. Its opponents have attacked many of its new measures on the grounds that they fail to comply with these obligations; 'death of asylum by a thousand cuts', Amnesty International calls it. Most blatantly, in February 2002, the government made a proposal to the European Union, entitled New Vision, that asylum seekers who make it to Britain and other EU countries should be transferred, before their cases are considered, to two categories of camps: 'transit processing centres' in states bordering, but outside, the European Union, and, apparently for people whose claims had been rejected but who could not be returned to their own countries, 'regional protection areas' in 'refugee-producing' regions. Both types of camp would be in effect prisons. In the transit processing centres claims would be processed by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). The British government's New Vision report states that: 'As UNHCR would be an independent body the only remedy would be an administrative review of the decision, perhaps by a senior board on the papers only'. These centres would be designed, the British report stated, to act as a deterrent to persons abusing the asylum system. As Amnesty International commented in a mimeo document entitled 'Unlawful and unworkable - extra-territorial processing of asylum claims', dated June 2003:
The real goal behind the proposals appears to be to reduce the number of spontaneous arrivals in the UK and EU states by denying access to territory and shifting the asylum-seekers to processing zones outside the EU, where responsibility, enforceability and accountability for refugee protection would be weak and unclear.
The UNHCR made an almost equally shocking 'counter-proposal'. This included the immediate transfer of asylum-seekers whose claims were considered 'manifestly unfounded', on the grounds of their national origins, to closed 'common processing centres', or in effect prisons, within the EU but near its borders, where their claims would be processed with even fewer rights of appeal than exist within most European countries. 'No Borders' and other protest groups in Europe, which have already started a campaign against the Organisation for International Migration, are now considering extending it to the UNHCR. A Communication adopted by the EU Commission on 3 June 2003 was cautious about the proposals, and the EU summit at Thessaloniki in Greece in June 2003 rejected them. But they remain on the table.
The Amnesty International report makes clear that the proposals for transferring asylum seekers to closed camps outside the countries in which they have applied for asylum are likely to violate several international treaties. It also comments that these are not the first attempts to ''extra-territorialize'' asylum procedures, referring for example to the treatment of Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s and 90s. The false assumption was made that they were economic migrants and resulted in arbitrary, long term detention of Vietnamese refugees who arrived in Hong Kong and elsewhere, and the forced repatriation of many hundreds of them. Some, at least, had escaped torture and long prison sentences for supposed anti-state activities in Vietnam (a novel called The Ghost Locust by Heather Stroud, who spent six years working in the refugee camps in Hong Kong and did research in Vietnam, gives a gripping fictionalised account of some of their stories).
The more governments cast around for ever more brutal and repressive ways of trying to keep people out, the clearer it becomes that it is impossible to win any particular improvements in immigration controls, important though it is to expose and campaign against their harshest consequences. The suffering imposed on asylum seekers and other migrants is not some random or unintended consequence of immigration controls. It is deliberate government policy. Governments believe in deterrence, or the potential for reducing the number of people applying for asylum by making conditions harsh. Even supposing there was any prospect that governments might abandon this belief, suffering is an inevitable consequence of immigration controls, which give to the state the right to chose between the deserving and the undeserving. The people best able to decide whether they need to migrate, or to seek refuge, are migrants themselves.
It is also not enough to argue, as some do, including Nigel Harris in his new book Thinking The Unthinkable, that people should be free to migrate for work, just as capital and goods are supposedly free, and that decisions on whom to employ should be left to employers rather than determined by the state. If migrant workers do not have citizenship rights, they will constitute, as they now do, a threatened and precarious underclass, and they will be open to extreme forms of exploitation. Trade unions and all workers have an interest in supporting the rights of migrants, in order to prevent their own rights and working conditions being undermined (see above). New migrants need to have exactly the same rights as all others who are living and working in a particular country or area, whatever their nationality. A demand which is now widespread in France and other European countries is for citizenship based on residency, rather than on nationality. New migrants must have not only the right to work, but the right to join trade unions, to employment protection, to go on strike and to vote, and they must have full access to all the benefits enjoyed by other citizens, including health care, education, unemployment benefits and social security. They must not be threatened with deportation if they attempt to assert their rights.
Finally, it remains true that whatever the economic rationale for securing a cheap and compliant workforce through 'managed immigration', ultimately immigration controls are explicable only by racism. If governments merely wanted a compliant workforce they could allow employers to make free use of the vast reservoir of labour which now exists in the world because of centuries of imperialist theft, as many employers in the United states and elsewhere urge. It is perhaps conceivable that immigration controls could disappear under capitalism. Many disagree, believing that free movement of people will only become a political possibility once the capitalist expropriation of the wealth of the Third World, and the wars to enable this, end. But while the abolition of immigration controls may require a revolution, what is clear is that, as we said in our manifesto No One Is Illegal, to render them fair would require a miracle. There can be no such thing as fair or non-racist immigration controls. Immigration controls have their origins in racism, and they legitimate and breed racism. They are inherently discriminatory, since they exclude foreigners or outsiders. They need to be opposed in their totality.
Teresa Hayter, May 2004.
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