Sarah Parker

Over the last eighteen months a debate has been taking place amongst asylum seekers, other migrants, and migrant support groups, about the need for a campaign to regularise the status of migrants with irregular status. Sarah Parker looks at the arguments and the campaigns.

From time to time the debate has been reflected in Parliament and the media, where the demand has been met with a firm rejection of any idea of an amnesty or regularisation by the Home Office.

Unfortunately the only campaign around the issue, Strangers into Citizens, operates under the aegis of Church of England and the Catholic Church.

It involves elements of the Labour bureaucracy including Ken Livingstone and Jack Dromey, who are probably in regular contact with the New Labour inner circle desperate to ease the pressure on the crisis-and scandal-ridden Home Office while avoiding any possibility that resistance from migrants and their allies could be seen to pose an effective challenge to the government’s agenda.

The demands of the campaign are quite right wing, and a deliberate effort has been made to exclude the far left.

In the past they have produced material calling for regularisation only for people with no serious criminal convictions - ignoring the argument that deporting people who have served sentences is to inflict a double punishment on them. They have suggested that a person would need a reference from an employer or religious leader, thus giving these forces completely unacceptable powers to decide people’s fate.

Their latest statement (at http://www.strangersintocitizens. org.uk/) combines a call for compassion for asylum seekers who are afraid of returning to their original countries and for irregular workers whose lives are now here and do not wish to return, with arguments which Socialist Resistance completely rejects.

They use the selfish argument that Britain’s economy needs their work and taxes (no worries about how this distorts the economies of third world countries), and that regularising people who have been put outside the law through no fault of their own will aid in maintaining border controls, the rule of law, and so on.

Such arguments gloss over the way in which New Labour and company bosses are happy to cherry pick and exploit poor workers while continuing to perpetuate a world system which ensures a steady supply of migrants into cities and into the rich countries.

They also play into the hands of Gordon Brown and John Reid, currently chief commentators on race, identity, migration etc for New Labour.

In the last month we have even heard calls for all immigrants to be forced to learn English before they even set foot in the country! This was said, with a straight face, on a TV news programme, by someone who did not even mention refugees and asylum seekers, as though political persecution and flight from oppressive regimes do not actually take place - so grotesque are the attempts at brain-washing by New Labour ideologues.

Linked to Strangers into Citizens is a body called the Independent Asylum Commission, run by a former judge which is taking evidence from the public over the next few months and reporting to the government.

It may be worth asylum seekers and other anti-deportation campaigners giving evidence, in the hope that pressure can be brought to bear on the Home Office. But its deliberations will presumably take place within quite narrow parameter - accepting the right of the Home Office and courts to maintain border controls.

There is no guarantee that its work will actually help force the Home Office to ease up and at worst the government could use the report as an endorsement of some elements of current immigration policy.

Strangers into Citizens are holding a march on May 7 in Central London. The march and the demand for a regularisation programme should be supported, but socialists should make clear their opposition to attempts to divide migrants into “deserving” and less deserving.

The fact that the campaign is run on such a basis shows up the weakness of the far left and of the self-organised refugee movement in this country - the self-organised movement of migrants and their allies in the anti-deportation campaigns and at the grass roots of the trade unions have not been strong enough to mount an effective fight. It has been impossible to push the churches and the trade union bureaucracy to fight on a better platform, indeed the effort has scarcely even been made.

London No Borders and others organised a small but lively demonstration with a good proportion of self-organised migrants (including migrant cleaners organising through the TGWU and rejected asylum-seekers) on October 7 last year, with a call for regularisation and with a completely different and of course far better political perspective.

But their resources are limited and unfortunately the initiative has not really been able to build anything solid in the way of alliances from the far left and the base of the trade union movement, and it does not look as though they will be able to mobilise in any strength for this year’s May Day demonstration.

The last Respect conference did actually pass a resolution broadly welcoming the calls for regularisation and agreeing to have a speaker on regularisation at the Respect trade union event, but it did not prove possible to get such a speaker, so the resolution remained on paper with no follow-through.

This leaves a situation that is dangerous for migrants who will mostly continue to be at risk of deportation and the dangers entailed by that, and dangerous for anyone in Britain who cares about equality, human rights etc, as the debate around migrants shifts ever further to the right.

This is of course one of many debates around the sort of society that Britain is turning into where the terrain has shifted rightwards, including the battles around anti-terrorist legislation, persecution of Muslims, the sharp increase in surveillance in recent years.

The emphasis by Strangers into Citizens’ most recent statement on “decent” immigrants is all of a piece with the increasing pressure throughout society on people to conform to New Labour’s rules, whether through being a hard-working docile migrant worker eager to pay taxes (including for Trident no doubt), through accepting privatisation of the NHS, or through not expecting from now on, if they are overweight, to be able to access

NHS services already paid for via taxation, or through accepting to work the longest hours in Europe without complaint.

What else can be said briefly on the positive side about campaigning relevant to the regularisation debate and to the struggles on the ground that it reflects?

Every year thousands of people, with the help of their relatives and friends and sometimes their lawyers, survive in the often hostile environment of Britain and resist deportation, some successfully, and the National Coalition of Anti- Deportation Campaigns continues to support them.

Some national or ethnic communities such as the Zimbabweans and the Iraqi Kurds have in the face of considerable difficulties been able to keep up a certain level of self-organised campaigning, and campaigners from Democratic Republic of Congo are also raising their profile at the moment. Steady campaigning continues in and around many detention centres, and it is quite common for trade unions to support members facing deportation.

The campaign against cuts in teaching of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), which is being run by the University and Colleges Union, and does have some other trade union backing, held a lobby of Parliament this month, and may have some success in fending off the cuts in ESOL provision if the pressure is kept up.

No One is Illegal organise periodic conferences around the question of how to work towards the abolition of immigration controls, and their members are some of the most active in anti-deportation campaigns and campaigns to close detention centres.

Their March 31 conference in Liverpool has been given unexpected prominence by the attempts to deport one of its keynote speakers in advance of the event. The day should provide an interesting opportunity to discuss strategy as well as share practical experiences of campaigning.

But it seems likely that the far left and the trade union activists have thrown away their best chance of having a strong influence on the way the debate on regularisation has gone.

Indeed it is not even clear whether the Strangers into Citizens campaign will even result in anything that could formally be called a regularisation programme. Instead the government has just announced a staggering list of vicious new anti-migrant measures which the movement will need to address.

But the Home Office deportation machine will roll on, and those fighting discrimination and deportation will still welcome any new allies in their continuing battle with the Home Office and its New Labour cheerleaders.