Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 148, April/May 1999
Forget all the hand-wringing we are all to blame’ act performed by Tony Blair and Jack Straw on the publication of the Lawrence Inquiry Report. Even as they squealed about rooting out institutionalised racism, parliament was giving the second reading to its latest manifestation. Britain’s immigration laws are institutionalised racism. They set out a legal framework whereby a section of the population is branded as ‘alien’ and provide official permission for police and immigration officers, judges, adjudicators, employers, travel operators and now even marriage registrars to act in accordance with any racial prejudices they may harbour. And they are an open invitation to any other freelance racists out there to direct their violence against the ‘intruders’. by NICKI JAMESON.
Croydon headquarters of the Immigration and Nationality Department
History
The first British immigration law was the 1905 Aliens Act, which was designed specifically to prevent the entry of impoverished East European Jews fleeing pogroms. It referred to them as ‘undesirable immigrants’, their definition of which was someone who ‘cannot show that he has in his possession or is in a position to obtain the means of supporting himself’.
Following the Second World War, Britain deliberately invited immigration from the countries it had earlier colonised. Caribbean, African and Asian workers were encouraged to come to Britain to take low-paid jobs and, as ‘Commonwealth citizens’, were exempt from the immigration legislation then in force. However, there was an almost immediate demand for controls, which was backed by some trade unions and discussed by both Labour and Conservative governments throughout the 1950s, culminating in the introduction of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, Trinidadian communist Claudia Jones, then editor of the West Indian Gazette, was among those who spoke out against the act, saying it reflected the government’s fear of the ‘unity of coloured and white workers’.
The 1962 Act was followed by a further Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1968 and the Immigration Act of 1971. Since then, control after control has been introduced. By the 1980s the government had largely dealt with the immigration of black ‘Commonwealth citizens’ by a series of measures, including changing the status of their British passports to an inferior one which removed the right to settle here. It then turned its attention to refugees, The tightening of restrictions on asylum-seekers has been accompanied by a sustained media campaign of vilification. This sets up an entirely spurious division between ‘genuine refugees’ and ‘economic migrants’, as though attempting to improve your lot in life by fleeing a country whose economy has been enslaved and impoverished by imperialism and multinational capital, is somehow in itself a heinous crime.
Fortress Britain
In the 1990s the British economy does not need to call on a ‘reserve army of labour’ from outside its borders, as the government is busy forcing the unemployed, disabled, single parents and young people into the worst paid jobs via the New Deal and Jobseeker’s Allowance.
Labour fears, as the Tories did, that an expanding Europe and the gift it will hand to the racist, anti-European right if it is seen to be weak in this respect. The government is deliberately ensuring that its immigration laws remain harsher than those of its neighbours. Within Fortress Europe, Straw and Blair are ensuring the preservation of Fortress Britain.
This year’s Bill
The 1999 Asylum and Immigration Bill ensures that even those who, under the government’s own narrow definition, will ultimately be recognised as ‘genuine’ refugees’. will have to endure extreme hardship and degradation on the way to establishing their right to settle here. The National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns sums it up succinctly: ‘The clear intention of this bill is that from the moment anyone arrives in the UK and asks for ‘Asylum’ they will be punished. Not only they but anyone who advises them can also be punished.
The main measures of the Bill are as follows:
Part I includes the powers to give or refuse leave prior to arrival in the UK and to charge fees for applications; the abolition of deportation appeal rights in cases where conditions are breached or the person overstays —they will simply be ‘removed’; the power to require financial security for granting of entry or extension of stay; the imposition of a duty on registrars to report possible ‘sham’ marriages to the Home Office; a new criminal offence of obtaining or seeking leave to enter or remain by ‘means which include deception’. This criminalises virtually all asylum-seekers, as it is nigh on impossible to acquire the correct official documentation in order to legally leave a country in which you are being persecuted.
Part II extends ‘carriers’ liability’, the system of fining any road-haulier, shipping firm, rail service or airline which brings illegal immigrants into the country, including those who do so unwittingly. Such a policy will ensure that transport personnel mark out anyone they think looks like an illegal entrant for searching and surveillance. The result of this will be, inevitably, that anyone who is black or looks foreign will be harassed.
Part III deals with routine bail hearings after one week and five weeks in detention. These can be heard in court or within a prison or detention centre, or at any other ‘specified’ place. The detainee will not necessarily be able to attend in person, provided they can see and hear and be seen and heard ‘by means of a live television link or otherwise’.
Part IV introduces the much-vaunted ‘firmer, faster, fairer’, ‘one-stop’ appeal procedure. Legal Action magazine describes this section using expressions such as ‘apparent’, ‘not defined’, ‘unclear exactly how provisions will work’ and ‘extremely complicated and uncertain how it would work in practice’ — so what hope is there for the lay-person?
This section also introduces fines for anyone pursuing appeals ‘without merit’, ie any appeal which is outside the ever-narrowing parameters prescribed by this Act and its predecessors. This applies both to asylum-seekers themselves and to their legal representatives.
Part V deals with immigration advisers. Advance publicity condemned `unscrupulous’ immigration advisers, who rip off desperate people. These do indeed exist, from the ‘immigration pirates’ who arrange entry in lorries for a large fee, to high-street firms offering quasi-legal advice and phoney guarantees of guidance through the red-tape. However, the government’s concern is not to save refugees from being exploited but to make it harder for them to receive any form of assistance and to discourage lawyers and advice workers from taking on immigration cases.
If this vicious attitude wasn’t obvious enough, the Home Office has made clear that any asylum-seeker challenging a decision by means of judicial review, will have all support cut off, stating: ‘Appellants should, look to their own community or the voluntary sector for support’. (The Guardian 18 February 1999)
Part VI deals with ‘support for asylum-seekers’ — or more to the point with removing virtually any remaining form of support. Labour is now blatantly admitting that it wants to make life as difficult as possible for immigrants; it aims ‘to minimise the incentives to economic migration, particularly by minimising cash payments to asylum seekers’. As the Tories were hauled through the courts for removing benefits, Labour has thrown in a few riders about provision of non-cash benefit lie food vouchers) for the ‘destitute’, That apart, this entire section makes terrifying reading, as it is littered with amendments to social legislation as far back as the 1948 National Assistance Act, removing the right of ‘a person subject to immigration control’ to any state benefit, National Health care or help from Social Services. Following extensive lobbying by local councils, such meagre provision as there is will be centrally controlled by the Home Office and asylum-seekers will be dispersed around the country, with no choice in where they are sent.
Part VII massively extends the powers of immigration officers to arrest, detain, search and seize property and documents. Some parts of their powers are now greater than those of the police and they are even less accountable.
Part VIII deals with the operation and management of detention centres, in what appears to be a response to the revolt by and subsequent farcical trial of detainees at the Campsfield House Immigration Detention Centre (see FRFI 144 for detailed account).
And Part IX amends the Marriage Act so that anyone at all marrying is expected to give 15 days notice, so that the Registrar’s job of flushing out ‘sham’ marriages can be facilitated. Interestingly, the Explanatory Notes to the Bill state ‘There is no evidence to suggest that religious marriages after ecclesiastic preliminaries are abused for immigration advantage and accordingly these proposals do not extend to the procedures for marriages celebrated in the Church of England and Church of Wales. However, they do apply to all other religious marriages solemnised after civil preliminaries’.
Chaos
As we have frequently pointed out in FRFI on a whole range of issues, this Labour government has the confidence to go beyond the Conservatives’ wildest and most repressive dreams. Jack Straw recently boasted: ‘We are effecting men more removals than previously and under this system we shall certainly get the number of removals to a much higher level than before (quoted in ICAD Bulletin 13 March 1999).
This said, any such claims appear increasingly ridiculous in the light of the mounting chaos at the Immigration Directorate’s Lunar House headquarters. The backlog of asylum applications stands at around 65,000, with the number processed per month having dropped from 3,000 to 800. A £70 million computer upgrade has made matters worse, not better, and up to 10,000 letters have not even been opened. Embarrassingly for the Home Office, not only destitute refugees are affected, and foreign businessmen have begun complaining about the difficulties of working in Britain.
Penny-pinching
Jack Straw’s other boast is that the Bill will save money. The Explanatory Notes emphasise this: ‘On the basis that the new support scheme will be a disincentive to economic migrants who do not have a well founded fear of persecution, £35 million for 1999/2000, £300 minim for 2000/2001 and £250 million for 2001/2002 was allocated in the Comprehensive Spending Review. This was based on estimated costs; it compared with spending of about £400 million a year when the Government announced its immigration and asylum strategy in July 1998. which would have increased to £800 million by 2002 if remedial action had not been taken’.
Racist Britain
In 1979 the Revolutionary Communist Group launched its newspaper. We called it Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! specifically because the left at that time was taken up with campaigning against racism and fighting the National Front but did not seriously oppose imperialist plunder abroad. In particular, it did not link that oppression to the situation here. The Communist Party, for example, believed it was possible for Britain to implement ‘non-racist’ immigration controls. Our position was then, and still is, that in an imperialist nation such as Britain, any immigration legislation will, by definition, be racist.
When an imperialist nation oppresses other nations, either through direct colonisation, or via its multinationals or by ‘policing’ countries such as Iraq and former Yugoslavia through the UN, NATO or collaboration with the US, it draws a line between its ‘own’ working class and that or the working class in the oppressed nations. It fuels this division by encouraging racism among the ‘home’ working class. Fighting racism is not therefore just a question of improving race relations in Britain, nor is it simply one of liberal support for oppressed groups abroad. A real struggle against racism is still a question of fighting imperialism — the link between the struggles is all important. It’s a link which Blair and Straw specifically don’t want us to make and are deliberately obscuring when they promise to root out institutionalised racism, even as they bring in the next law which institutionalises it yet more deeply.
