In recent years Britain’s immigration controls have extended to new areas of people’s lives, including access to health care, education, housing and employment. These developments predate Brexit and even Theresa May, and began under the Labour government of 1997-2010. They must be resisted. TOM VICKERS reports.
Detention, deportations, death
The racist violence of immigration prisons and deportations continues. In the year ending March 2019, 24,333 people were detained on immigration grounds and 8,637 were forcibly deported. 447 people were deported in shackles, 335 under more than one form of restraint at the same time, and 102 people while subject to three different pieces of restraint equipment. 42% of recorded ‘enforced returns’ were of EU nationals, of which more than half were deported to Romania or Poland, demonstrating that EU migrants are already under attack even while Britain remains within the EU. A further 13,738 people left the country recorded as ‘voluntary returns’ – a misleading label given the government’s deliberate policy of making life so difficult and miserable that many people feel they have no option but to ‘choose’ to leave Britain.
Recently published Home Office figures record more than 3,000 hunger strikes inside immigration detention since 2015, and this is likely to be a significant under-estimate. On 12 September Oscar Okwurime died of unknown causes in Harmondsworth detention centre. Other detainees reported that before his death he had been terrified about the prospect of being deported to Nigeria the following Tuesday, on one of the Home Office’s mass ‘charter flights’. Pregnant women continue to be detained, 133 since 2016 according to Home Office figures, including a woman who had been trafficked from Vietnam and was detained for three days while having a miscarriage – the Home Office eventually admitted this amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment and paid £50,000 in compensation, yet detention continues.
Hostile environment in housing and health care
The hostile environment continues to exclude many migrants from access to state support. A new report by Maternity Action documents the consequences of charging refugees, migrants and overseas visitors for maternity care, starting at £7,000 and increasing further if there are complications. The report found that these charges are undermining trust between midwives and patients, damaging professional standards, and creating additional dangers for undocumented women, who have a heightened risk of maternal death and adverse pregnancy outcomes. In some cases women are delaying accessing help or failing to have scans because of fears they could be charged or detained.
In August The Guardian published evidence of the appalling conditions facing asylum seekers housed by outsourced company Clearsprings, with families of four forced to share small double beds and houses overrun by cockroaches, rats and mice. It is telling that similar conditions have been documented repeatedly, and discussed at numerous parliamentary committees over the years, yet nothing has changed – in the absence of any serious movement that could force improvements, journalistic exposes and legal action can only do so much. In Glasgow Serco has accelerated its evictions of asylum seekers as it comes toward the end of its Home Office contract. The Chief Executive of the Scottish Refugee Council reported that the only provision for those evicted is a 22-bed, men-only shelter, and that those who cannot get a place there are staying with friends or sleeping rough.
Arrests based on suspicion about a person’s immigration status are widespread, often involving collaboration between immigration enforcement, police, local authorities, and in some cases also charities. In Sheffield, which Labour councillors proudly promote as the first ‘City of Sanctuary’ in Britain, nearly 1,600 people were arrested on immigration grounds between April 2013 and December 2017. Local campaign group SYMAAG report evidence that the council’s private housing standards team has been making ‘referrals’ to immigration enforcement teams about tenant identified while investigating ‘rogue landlords’.
Brexit or Remain: working class migrants suffer
At the start of September, it emerged that in the event of a No Deal Brexit the Home Office is preparing to immediately scrap freedom of movement for EU citizens to work or study in Britain and the north of Ireland. It will also immediately end a scheme – which is already limited and difficult to access – for child refugees to join family members already in Britain. Migrants who have been denied a safe and legal way to enter Britain, and are subject to evictions, police violence and racist attacks in France, are crossing the English Channel in whatever boats they can access, with 86 recorded crossings in a single day at the start of September. Dozens of people, including children, have been detained during or after attempted crossings, and talks between the British and French governments at the end of August agreed to fund increased patrols. Prime Minister Boris Johnson threatened that those who have made the crossing will be deported to France, denying their right to claim asylum in Britain.
Brexit is causing widespread fear about further reductions in EU migrants’ rights. In July it was reported that 42% of EU nationals who had applied for ‘settled status’ had instead been awarded ‘pre-settled status’, carrying fewer rights. Whereas any children born to people with settled status will automatically be British citizens, the children of those with pre-settled status will also be allocated pre-settled status, extending their insecurity across generations. In August the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that a Home Office radio advert for the EU settlement scheme had misled people by exaggerating how easy the process was. Minister of state Brandon Lewis responded with an article in The Guardian assuring EU migrants ‘we want you to stay’, but made very clear the kind of EU citizens he was addressing: ‘Our EU citizens are among the business leaders that make the UK a hub for global commerce. They work in our frontline services, keeping us safe and looking after those who are sick.’ In other words, European migrants will continue to be welcome so long as they are part of the ruling class or well-paid public sector workers. As usual it is working class migrants who will suffer.
The British state has a long history of racist violence. British capital’s domination and exploitation of other countries is reflected in the British state’s treatment of people who try to move from those countries, and often their descendants. Border controls not only limit people’s movements, but systematically remove rights from sections of the working class, who can then be subjected to oppressive conditions of exploitation. Immigration controls are a means to divide and discipline the working class, and it is in the interests of all working class people to resist them.
