Home - SR Editions - Socialist Resistance No.48

Migrant rights are human rights

Liz Peretz

All new asylum seekers now are processed through a New Asylum Model. This may benefit a very small number of people because under the new rules each new applicant has only one home office worker to relate to, called a ‘case owner’ and there is an assumption that people should have a decision much more quickly than they have in the past. But the government’s stated reason for the changes is to allow “rapid removal” – and in grinding through the processes of fact finding and investigation at breakneck speed it is even more likely than before that migrants seeking asylum will not be listened to, not have quick enough access to legal advice, and that refugees fleeing persecution will end up back in the countries they came from facing the problems they fled from plus the ones gained by seeking refuge here.

New applicants will be divided on arrival into 5 rough categories, or ‘segments ’ in the new jargon; – people who should have claimed in the first country they entered (third country), people from so called ‘safe countries’ like Iraq, people who are fast tracked whose case may be decided quickly but who will be detained in the first case, minors, and general case work.

Most of these ‘segments’ will have their conclusive first (and last) interview within five days of their claim, which will not be long enough for most of them to get legal advice, or to gather their evidence together.

Those from so-called safe countries will be told to go home if they want to appeal against a decision – effectively removing their right to appeal.

The noose is tightening all round on migrants wishing to stay in the UK.

What is happening to people newly seeking asylum is only one part of the picture. Other aspects of new legislation include:

• Having irregular or false papers attracts a charge and a prison sentence
• Working without papers attracts a prison sentence. (Employers face fines for this offence but not a single employer has been prosecuted yet.)
• If you don’t have a UK passport and you have been in prison you automatically face deportation at the end of your sentence.
• Legal aid, which used to be available as long as asylum seekers needed it if they lacked the means to fight their cases themselves is now severely limited to a few hours support, and even this funding has been suspended currently.
• Public servants – health workers, social workers etc – and employers are meant to turn in people without papers and face charges unless they do this. In other European countries people have been sent to prison for providing such help – not here yet but it will no doubt come.

Those already in the labyrinthine Home Office system, of whom in the home office’s own estimate at least 450,000 are already ‘failed’, face all the old problems, and are not to be assigned new processes or their own case worker. Increasingly people who have been here for many years and have jobs and families but irregular papers are being picked up detained and deported.

For the majority of migrants, the new legislation is a continuing nightmare and a threat to their family and working lives. For employers and the British Immigration Agency, it is a further instrument for intimidation and to force employees to accept poor wages and conditions. For those of us engaged in campaigning and union work it is yet another sign of the erosion of all our rights.