On 24 March 2021 Home Secretary Priti Patel published the ‘New Plan for Immigration’, setting out government proposals for new legislation to further criminalise migrants. Following a period of phony ‘public consultation’, the Plan then featured in the queen’s speech on 11 May and is soon to be put into the form of a parliamentary Bill. It centres on a false dichotomy between legitimate refugees who arrive via ‘legal routes’ and those who ‘jump the queue’ by coming to Britain via dangerous and ‘illegal’ means. NICKI JAMESON reports.
Patel’s Plan is littered with references to, on the one hand, ‘our proud record of welcoming and resettling refugees’ and, on the other, the government’s border control achievements of ‘ending free movement and introducing a new points-based immigration system’. She then paints a spurious picture of two alternative routes by which people seek asylum: one being to ‘pay criminals to facilitate dangerous and illegal journeys… and then claim asylum on arrival’; the other involving an orderly system which sounds as though all someone fleeing oppression need do is fill in a form and wait patiently for the nod from the British government to fly over here. This image is entirely false, not least because asylum seekers cannot apply directly but have to be selected by NGOs based in refugee camps.
Tightening the screws
Much of what Patel is proposing has already been put in place by earlier racist Conservative or Labour Home Secretaries; however, she has still managed to find some new ways in which to tighten the screws.
Her main proposals are:
- A formal distinction between asylum seekers who enter ‘legally’ and ‘illegally’. While, if their cases are successful, the first group will have a path to citizenship, the second will be given ‘temporary protection status’ for up to 30 months and will continue to be reassessed for deportation. They will have limited family reunion rights and no recourse to public funds except in cases of destitution.
- A presumption that anyone who has passed through or has a connection to another ‘safe country’ will be considered inadmissible for asylum here and returned to that country. This has stumbled at the first hurdle: since Brexit there is no obligation on EU countries to co-operate with Britain in this way and, so far, no country has signed up to this arrangement.
- Amending the Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 to allow for asylum claims to be processed outside Britain. This suggestion has been recurrent over the past few years, as Patel took advice from racist, misogynist ex-Australian PM Tony Abbott, who employed this means of keeping asylum seekers out of his country by imprisoning them on Manus Island and Nauru. Locations rumoured to be under consideration by Patel range from the Isle of Man, to Gibraltar and Ascension Island in the South Atlantic.
- The revival of an old proposal made by then Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett in the early 2000s to build ‘reception centres’ or ‘accommodation centres’, for newly arrived asylum seekers – from where those whose claims fail will swiftly be processed on to the existing ‘removal centres’ for deportation.
- Amending the ‘one-stop’ process to require claimants to put forward everything they are going to rely on in their case at the outset. Anyone currently involved in any kind of immigration challenge will attest both to the impossibility of doing this and to the failure of the Home Office to then impose any time-table at all on itself for responding to the material it does receive.
- Redefining the meaning of ‘well-founded fear of persecution’, which is the standard required for a protection claim under the Refugee Convention.
- Increased prison sentences for illegally entering Britain and an increase from 14 years to life imprisonment for people smuggling.
- A more ‘robust approach’ to assessing the age of child migrants.
Exploiting loopholes
The New Plan for Immigration description on the government website contains lots of tabloid-style talk of people ‘cheating the system’ and ‘exploiting loopholes’, by exercising their legal rights. Patel spits bile onto unaccompanied child migrants, migrant parents of British-born children who don’t register them as their own nationality and people threatened with deportation who submit last-minute appeals. Despite having been compelled to shed crocodile tears over the Windrush scandal, Patel is particularly apoplectic about a planned deportation flight to Jamaica in December 2020; backed by publicity and protest, 47 of the 60 people due to be on board successfully challenged their removal. Even the Modern Slavery Referral Mechanism, (introduced by Patel’s Tory colleague Theresa May – the pioneer of the ‘hostile environment’) via which victims of trafficking can seek protection, is depicted as an area to be tightened up in order to prevent abuse.
A network of repressive laws
The Bill which the New Plan for Immigration becomes will join a terrifying raft of legislation being currently pushed through by the government, including the recently passed Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021 and Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021 – both of which provide licence to the police and military to commit crime without fear of legal sanction – alongside the draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which is now being considered by a parliamentary committee prior to its Third Reading in the House of Commons.
Opposition needs to be built urgently against all these laws, in the same way as it has been against the Police Bill. The same energy that was seen on the streets of Glasgow on 13 May, when residents physically prevented the deportation of their neighbour, must continue in support of the rights of all migrants and asylum seekers. An injury to one is an injury to all.
