FRFI 201 February 2008 / March 2008
‘200,000 asylum seekers to get amnesty’ Daily Mail, 3 March 2007
‘Secret “Amnesty” for 500,000 asylum cases’ Daily Express, 6 August 2007
‘Shambolic Home Office grants another 100,000 asylum seekers amnesty to stay in Britain’ Mail on Sunday, 21 December 2007
In fact there has not been any amnesty for asylum seekers. These headlines, which fuel racism and give false hope to asylum seekers, are wrong. Their only truth is that government procedures for processing asylum claims have been shambolic. In July 2006 the Home Office announced that there was a backlog of approximately 450,000 asylum cases. These have come to be referred to as ‘legacy’ cases. A ‘legacy directorate’ was set up in summer 2006 by then Home Secretary John Reid, with over 900 staff to sift through the individual cases and make a decision on them.
Many asylum seekers with outstanding applications have now received questionnaires which indicate that their case is being dealt with by a caseworker. The completed questionnaires are considered alongside existing information to make a decision on the asylum claim. There has been widespread confusion amongst asylum seekers about the implications of filling in the questionnaire, with some people equating the questionnaire with the right to remain in Britain.
The ‘legacy’ process is far from being an amnesty, either open or ‘by stealth’, as is being alleged by some racist commentators. Although the review has brought benefits to individual families, for others it has resulted in speedy deportation. In December 2007, Lin Homer, chief executive of the Border and Immigration Agency, reported that out of an initial 52,000 cases dealt with, 18,000 had been granted leave to remain, 16,000 had resulted in people being deported and 17,000 case files had been closed because of errors or because they were duplicate files.
It is important to understand the legacy cases review in the context of the resistance to deportations by asylum seekers and their supporters. In an answer to the Home Affairs Select Committee, Lin Homer quoted a statistic which claimed that 6% of deportations failed because airlines refused to carry the person. Still more deportations are halted due to last minute legal interventions or because of the ill health of the deportee. The most militant political resistance in the last few years has come from asylum seekers and ‘failed’ asylum seekers who are awaiting deportation.
The legacy cases review has succeeded in diffusing this political protest to some extent by encouraging hope in the legal process. However this policy should not be understood as an act of kindness by the Home Office, but rather as an attempt to clear the backlog so that new cases can be dealt with and deported more ‘efficiently’ under the New Asylum Model (reported in FRFI 198). Under NAM many asylum seekers do not even get the chance to leave a detention centre before they are deported, let alone get involved in a political struggle for asylum rights. This will make it more important than ever for anti-racist activists in Britain to support the struggles that are taking place within immigration detention centres.
Annabelle Richardson
