Mistreatment of asylum seekers must end

Ellie Keen — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 03:03:25 +0000

In the last week of Parliament, before the Christmas recess, I held the last debate in Westminster Hall on the subject of allegations of abuse of failed asylum seekers during the deportation process.

I have always had a number of reservations against the deportation of failed asylum seekers. The Home Office is notorious for getting asylum decisions wrong. Pushing to remove high numbers of asylum seekers risks sending people back to places where they are in danger. This is clearly illustrated by the fact that failed asylum-seekers are returned to countries known to be unsafe, like Iraq, the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe.

The Foreign Office recommend that UK citizens do not travel to these countries. I have concerns over sending people back to their countries of origin when they have been in this country for many years and have settled their families here. And as Liz Fekete point out in her report The Deportation Machine, cows leaving the EU are better monitored than people are. It is near impossible to know that a person returned to their country of origin has reached safety.

However, my concern during the debate was to draw attention to the specific problems occurring during the deportation process. A case had been brought to my attention of a Cameroonian woman who alleged that during deportation she was assaulted by members of a private escort team contracted by the Home Office. Once she reached Cameroon she was so badly injured the Cameroonian immigration officials refused to allow her entrance to the country. The deportation was abandoned, she was flown back to Heathrow and immediately taken to hospital traumatised, and was treated for severe genital bleeding and multiple bruising.

While it would appear that this must be an isolated case, asylum rights organisations and groups that visit detention centres hear allegations of abuse every day. Back in 2004 the Medical Foundation published a report in which they argued that the use of gratuitous force and assaults on detainees were systematic within the deportation process. They showed how the UK’s obligation under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights means there is no justification to the use of unnecessary force during deportation. They made recommendations to the Home Office to improve the capacity for investigation abuses.

Needless to say three years later the Home Office still do not give automatic medical examinations for any individual who is the subject of a failed deportation attempt, they do not allow victims to stay in the country in order that allegations may be investigated properly and there are still questions to be asked about the quality of training removals officers receive.

The problem of mistreatment starts with the Home Office contracting out services to private security companies. At present, most of the deportation work is done by the infamous Group 4 Securicor. A rudimentary delve into the recent history of the company finds that the company’s management of a juvenile detention centre was criticised by the Youth Justice Board for its overuse of dangerous restraint techniques. Eight short-term immigration holding facilities managed by the company were condemned by the Chief Inspector of Prisons for being inadequate, inhumane and for holding detainees in facilities described by staff as ‘dog kennels’. The Inspector said that immigrants were treated ‘as though they were parcels, not people, and parcels whose contents and destination were sometimes incorrect’.

This does not seem to me to be a company competent in carrying out deportations and running immigration detention centres. There must be some relationship between under-trained, underpaid private security personnel and allegations of abuse. There must also be a relationship between the culture of targets that has infiltrated the deportations process and the way in which those being detained are treated. If we must deport people, we must put safeguards in place to ensure deportees are treated as people not parcels.

This Racist Appetite Will Never Be Sated

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 16:09:03 +0000

New Labour tends to believe that history began when Tony Blair became the leader of the Labour party. This may explain why it thinks that the public panic about immigration is unprecedented. The truth is that immigration panics are cyclical and have followed an unvarying pattern for more than half a century.
First, public panic is stoked by a media campaign. “The government must introduce legislation quickly to end the tremendous influx of people from the Commonwealth … Overcrowding has fostered vice, drugs, prostitution and the use of knives. For years the white people have been tolerant. Now their tempers are up.” This quote, from the Daily Sketch in 1958, would not be out of place in current tabloid discussion on immigration and asylum.

Faced with a tabloid onslaught, politicians then start to bleat about the need to deal with people’s fears. Finally comes the “crackdown”, the “five-year plan” or the hastily compiled legislation.

Almost every piece of immigration and nationality legislation on the statute book was put through parliament in the face of media panic. The very first piece of immigration legislation, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, was driven through in response to scare stories about Caribbean immigrants. Famously, the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act was rushed through all its parliamentary stages in seven days because of a panic about the onrushing hordes of Kenyan Asians.

The other historic reality is that immigration has always been synonymous with race in British political discourse. The 1958 Royal Commission on Population said: “Immigration on a large scale into a fully established society like ours would only be welcomed without reserve if the immigrants were of good stock and were not prevented by their religion or race from intermarrying with the host population and becoming merged in it.” In other words, immigration is only a subject of public controversy because it is assumed that immigrants are of “inferior stock”, a different race or religion.

Successive immigration acts have closed down legal routes for economic migration. The rise in the number of asylum seekers has partly reflected the incidence of wars and instability. But, if there is no legal means of economic migration, people will try the asylum route. Consequently, just as immigration has been conflated with race, asylum has been conflated with immigration.

Accordingly the asylum seeker has been transformed from a person deserving of pity into a tabloid hate figure. The government is baffled as to why the public continues to be angry about asylum when the numbers are coming down. It assumes that the answer is to take ever more repressive measures. But the truth is that fear of asylum is really about fearing a stranger “of inferior stock” in our midst.

People do not really care whether these people are technically designated work-permit holders, legal immigrants or asylum seekers. So long as the number of strangers does not fall steeply (and the government does not fundamentally challenge the terms of the debate), the public panic will not subside.

Some people like to cite West Indian or Asian complaints about asylum seekers as proof that the debate is not really about race. But the truth is that West Indians complain about asylum seekers in the same way that the Irish complained about West Indians. As each successive immigrant group moves up the ladder it seems that a rite of passage is to complain about more recent arrivals.

The other long-standing truth about immigration is that the pull factor is the underlying labour needs of western economies. Ever since the industrial revolution, the demands of British capital have led to massive labour migration. Originally that migration was within the British Isles. In the past 50 years it has occurred across the boundaries of nation states.

The biggest myth about immigration is that people are coming here to live on benefits. People come for the same reason that my parents’ generation of West Indian immigrants came in the 1950s. They come to work. They do the jobs, skilled and unskilled, that British workers will not do and they provide a pool of cheap labour that helps keep wages down and creates the “labour market flexibility” that is so prized by New Labour.

If the debate on immigration seems particularly frenzied in the run-up to this election, it is not because the essentials of the debate are any different. Politicians complained bitterly in the early years of the 20th century that Jewish migrants to the East End were riddled with disease. So Michael Howard and his “health checks” are nothing new.

Part of the frenzy is caused by the “tyranny of momentum politics” and the demands of the 24-hour news cycle. If the Tories have their “crackdown” on the lunchtime news, the Labour party wants to have an even better “crackdown” in the evening bulletins. Panicked by their focus-group findings and polling, ministers have taken to saying that the public is right to be worried. This is despite the fact that ministers know perfectly well that Britain has lower levels of foreign-born nationals as a proportion of its total population than France, Germany or the United States.

Focus groups are fine if you are trying to decide between different names for a bottle of perfume. But, in the hysterical politics of race, immigration and asylum, focus group-led policy has created the bidding war between Labour and the Conservatives as to who can be “tougher” on immigrants.

New Labour strategists pride themselves on being tough-minded pragmatists. But the fears and irrationality that have, historically, been behind the British debate on immigration will not be dealt with by an extra pledge. In trying to outdo the Tories on race and immigration, they are fighting a war they cannot win.

Diane Abbott is the Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.

Diane Abbott | ukwatch.net

Mistreatment of asylum seekers must end

This Racist Appetite Will Never Be Sated