On 18 March 2022, the British government opened the ‘Homes for Ukraine’ scheme. Accompanied by a blue and yellow masthead and the proclamation that ‘The UK is one of the most generous nations in the world’, the state is now encouraging British residents to open their homes to people fleeing the war in Ukraine. Hosts will be paid £350 per month and local councils £10,000 per person; Ukrainians granted visas will be allowed to work and claim benefit for up to three years; there is no cap on the numbers who can come under this scheme. All this is in sharp contrast to the government’s vicious treatment of asylum seekers from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and its continuing drive to make most migrants lives even tougher via the implementation of the Nationality and Borders Bill. NICKI JAMESON reports.
Good refugees and bad refugees
The Borders Bill has been going through Parliament since July 2021. As we have reported previously, the main premise of the Bill is to draw a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ asylum seekers. Such divide and rule is intrinsic to British immigration law, which endlessly shifts around who it wants to allow in and who to keep out. In this instance, the ‘good’ refugees are those who come via some kind of official route, while the ‘bad’ arrive under their own steam, usually at huge personal and financial cost. Good refugees will get a legal path towards eventual citizenship, while bad ones – even if their asylum claims are accepted as valid – will remain in a state of continuing uncertainty and precariousness.
In support of this division, the 28,300 people who risked their lives crossing the Channel to England from France in small boats in 2021 to seek asylum in Britain were depicted by the government-supporting tabloid media as an invading swarm. This same xenophobia had been rising since the ‘Syrian refugee crisis’ of 2013/14, in which approximately 1.5 million of the 6 million people displaced by the imperialist-manufactured war in that country sought sanctuary in Europe. Hatred was then ramped up to build support for suggested measures in the Borders Bill, such as off-shore processing centres as far away as the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, illegal ‘push-back’ of boats in the Channel and criminalisation of charities who assist migrants. Even the Royal National Lifeboat Association came under attack in 2021 for carrying out its mission of saving lives at sea without fear or favour. All this took place within the racist climate of Brexit and the accompanying closing off of easy access to Britain for European migrant workers. Such hyperbolic anger has been noticeably absent in relation to the about four million Ukrainians who have so far left that country.
House of Lords amends Borders Bill
At a series of sittings in February-March 2022, the unelected but sometimes strategically useful House of Lords made 19 amendments to the Borders Bill, striking down many of its most draconian provisions. These include Clause 11, which sets out the two-tier system, and Clause 9, which allows the Home Secretary to remove a person’s British citizenship without notice or right of appeal in this country. The power to strip someone of their citizenship is already being exercised increasingly frequently, with recent research by the Free Movement legal blog revealing that it has been used 462 times since 2006.
The Lords’ votes are of course, a welcome development; however, they may ultimately have no effect. Like the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, the Borders Bill is now going back and forth between the two Houses in the process known as ‘parliamentary ping-pong’. The government has already voted against the adoption of any of the Lords’ amendments in the first stage of this. If no agreement is reached, the Commons retains the power to veto the Lords. One way or another, the racist Bill will become law in the next few months.
Hong Kong, Afghanistan, Ukraine
Even in the unlikely event that the amendments to the Bill stand, current events demonstrate how, in practice, the grading of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants and refugees is not restricted to methods of arrival, nor purpose of stay, and is prone to sudden change, in response to economic or political circumstances. For the third time in just over a year, the British government’s political involvement in world events has led it to bypass its own general migration and asylum processes, and introduce tailored schemes which grant visas and status to specific groups of migrants. This is in addition to the various seasonal work visa schemes which have been introduced since Brexit.
Firstly, in January 2021, there was the opening up of the visa scheme for Hong Kong citizens – a propaganda move in the war of words with China over Britain’s former colony. 104,000 visas have been issued under this scheme during the past year.
Then in August 2021, as imperialist troops pulled out of Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation, some – but definitely not all – Afghans had to be designated as ‘good refugees’ and airlifted to Britain. While Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab waxed lyrical about Britain’s ‘big heart’, in practice there was a lot of delay and confusion, during which some domestic animals were prioritised over human refugees. Ultimately, the Afghanistan Resettlement Scheme opened in January 2022 and will allow 20,000 Afghan refugees to settle in Britain, including 8,000 who are already here.
And now there is Ukraine. Ukrainian refugees are undoubtedly ‘good’ because they are fleeing a conflict in which Britain is entirely partisan and deeply involved. Britain supplies arms to Ukraine and has air, land and sea armed forces deployed in Eastern Europe as part of NATO. British news shows 24/7 propaganda against the Russian invasion, public buildings are draped with Ukrainian flags and lit up with light shows, and anarchist squatters who took over the Belgravia mansion of a Russian ‘oligarch’ are no longer domestic terrorists but heroes. So, whilst the government might still prefer that Ukrainians didn’t come here – other than via the Seasonal Workers Scheme to pick fruit and veg – it is a hostage to its own propaganda. Logic says that if the Russian attack is as bad as the government says, then those fleeing it must be good and we must help them. It is entirely understandable that people feel this way, although at the same time utterly bizarre to see people in areas of the country which voted for a government which would happily drown asylum seekers in the Channel, now cleaning out their spare rooms to ‘welcome refugees’.
Ukrainian refugees are also ‘good’ because, unlike the people of Hong Kong or Afghanistan, they are overwhelmingly white and European. As the Russian army rolled into Ukraine and the first people began to pack up and leave, news hacks reporting for audiences in Britain, France and the US made explicit their horror that scenes they had routinely seen in Iraq, Syria etc were now unfolding in a ‘civilised’ and ‘European’ country where people with ‘blonde hair and blue eyes’ could be seen fleeing their homes. This attitude prevailed, not just in the media, but on the Ukraine-Poland border, where non-white people trying to cross to safety were met with racism. The organised welcome from East European EU countries to the white Ukrainians was also in stark contrast to the earlier violent repression of Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan and other asylum seekers who tried to cross into Poland from Belarus in 2021.
At the same time, skin colour is only a partial guarantee of better treatment in Britain, as the historic experience of the Irish and recent experience of East European workers demonstrates.
Ukrainian visa and migration schemes
There are now two main routes for Ukrainians fleeing the war to come to Britain. The Ukraine Family Scheme, which necessitates having a family member already here, and the Homes for Ukraine Scheme, whereby British families can offer to house Ukrainians for between six months and three years. 100,000 people registered as potential hosts on the scheme’s first day; however the process is chaotic and there is no central system for matching offers of hospitality with those who need it.
Registering for a visa under these schemes involves either an on-line application or attendance in-person at a processing centre, such as the one at Rzeszow in Eastern Poland. These centres are run by private contractor TLScontact, a subsidiary of Teleperformance Group, which provides such services to governments around the world, and describes itself as ‘the global leader in customer experience management’.
As workers, Ukrainians who are expected to stay only until the conflict in their home country is resolved, will be extremely welcome by post-Brexit British capitalism. Immigration Minister Kevin Foster sparked a backlash when he tweeted that those fleeing the conflict could come to Britain as fruit pickers, but British businesses are hungry for Ukrainian labour. Ukrainians already comprise two-thirds of workers in Britain under the Seasonal Worker Scheme, with nearly 20,000 visas issued in 2021, and a consortium of businesses which includes M&S, Asos and Lush began lobbying the government in mid-March to issue visas to Ukrainians to fill labour shortages.
An ungenerous history
Britain has an invidious history of immigration control and ‘generous UK’ is a myth. For centuries the British state has used divide-and-rule tactics, labelling some groups of migrants as ‘deserving’ and others as ‘undeserving’ of support. The first British immigration law was the 1905 Aliens Act, which was specifically designed to limit the numbers of impoverished East European Jews fleeing pogroms who could seek sanctuary in Britain. The Act was accompanied by a media campaign against a threatened invasion of ‘dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous and criminal foreigners’. Further Aliens Restrictions Acts followed in 1914 and 1919, and in 1938 Britain introduced visa requirements for nationals of Germany or Austria, directly reducing the possibility of seeking asylum for Jews fleeing Nazism.
After World War II, workers from British colonies – the Windrush Generation – were encouraged to come here to fill labour shortages, but their welcome was short-lived and immigration laws in 1962 and 1971 brought in curbs on migration and set the pattern for the complicated network of immigration laws which we have today. These include five increasingly punitive pieces of legislation introduced by the 1997-2010 Labour government, which sought to penalise asylum seekers and ‘foreign criminals’ while ‘managing migration’ in the interests of capitalism, as the expansion of the EU opened up Freedom of Movement to workers from Europe. The Conservatives followed on with the 2014 and 2016 immigration acts, which introduced the ‘hostile environment’. The Nationality and Borders Bill is just the latest brick in this racist wall.
No divisions!
Ukrainians fleeing Russian attack are useful to Britain’s post-Brexit labour shortage, as well as politically being the latest ‘good migrants’. However, both the demand for labour and world political circumstances are prone to change, so how long this will last is hard to say. In the late 1990s Kosovans fleeing the war in Yugoslavia, were ‘good refugees’, as their adversary Serbia was being bombed by NATO, of which Britain is a key member. Today, Kosovans in Britain are repeatedly accused by the racist media of being ‘fake asylum seekers’, criminals and gangsters, and of lying about their age, nationality and status.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! rejects all these divisions. In an imperialist nation like Britain, which wages war and exploits oppressed peoples around the world, all forms of immigration control are, by their very nature, racist and imposed in the interests of capital. This is the case irrespective of whether they target refugees and asylum seekers, ‘economic migrants’ or any other type of migrant, and regardless of who is temporarily accorded the label of ‘good refugee’. We campaign against all British immigration controls and oppose all detentions and deportations.
No to the Nationality and Borders Bill!
No divide and rule!
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!
