Against Fortress Britain
Posted on September 15, 2008
To its shame, Britain is a state which imprisons without trial children who have committed no crime. Children of people who have applied for asylum are taken from friends and family and locked up without education or proper healthcare in detention centres. The government which launched the Every Child Matters programme should be called to account for the blatant hypocrisy of imprisoning 2000 children annually in the cause of appearing ‘tough on immigration’, pandering to myths about migrants and asylum seekers and straight out racism.
This contravenes Council of Europe Rec(2003)5 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on measures of detention of asylum seekers:
22. If minors are detained, they must not be held under prison-like conditions. Every effort must be made to release them from detention as quickly as possible and place them in other accommodation. If this proves impossible, special arrangements must be made which are suitable for children and their families.
Britain is not the only European nation to treat children in such a scandalous fashion, and the practice is not confined to ‘Fortress Europe’, as this noxious Australian example demonstrates, however the Australian Immigration Minister’s defence of child detention was in the context of a government driven by a hard right and xenophobic neo-liberal ideology, not an administration which presents itself as committed to social justice and fairness.
Since 1 August 2008, provisions in the 2007 UK Borders Act allow the UK Borders Agency to deport any non-British and non EEA (European Economic Area) citizen, if they have been sentenced to 12 months or more in prison — regardless of how long they have lived in Britain and their residential status — without right of appeal.
The automatic deportation provisions of the 2007 UK Borders Act came into force on 1 August 2008. From that date it became possible for the UK Borders Agency to deport any non-British and non-EEA citizen who has been sentenced to a prison term of 12 months or more, no matter how long settled in the UK and no matter how valuable their work is to their local community, unless they can show that deportation breaches their human rights. There is no right of appeal against deportation - only against the decision that human rights are not breached by deportation. Appellants will have to show either that they face persecution, torture or degradation in the country to which they are being deported, or that separation from family members settled in Britain is ‘disproportionate’ to the crime they committed. Both the Home Office and the immigration judges impose a very high threshold on appellants, generally arguing that British-born spouses and children can uproot themselves to live with their offending partner or parent in, for example, Jamaica, Algeria or Sudan without difficulty.
In 2006, the Home Office detained and attempted to deport 23 year old Shetlander Sakchai Makao, who had lived in Lerwick since he was 10, after he served a 15 month sentence for fire-raising in 2004. Sakchai was allowed to remain after an appeal and a vocal campaign by Shetland Islanders and immigration rights activists. Under the new law, Sakchai’s appeal would not have been heard. Even if an appellant is able to demonstrate their human rights will be breached by deportation, they can be ‘designated’ by the Home Office, removing their right to work or access to social services or medical care — leaving them and their families effectively destitute and unable to support themselves.
There is a tacit assumption that the immigration laws have always been in place, but despite the current obsession of the reactionary press and the right, with the numbers of migrants and policing borders — which are of course arbitrary themselves — Britain’s first immigration law was the Aliens Act 1905, enacted to prevent ‘undesirable immigrants’, ie Eastern European Jews, from entering the country. The law was passed in an atmosphere of hysterical antisemitism, claims of people being turned out of their homes to house Jewish ‘invaders’ and echoing the ‘poisoning the wells’ libels, hints that Jewish bakers laced bread with arsenic. In July 1906, the Clarion newspaper described Jews as
a poison injected into the national veins … unsavoury children of the ghetto … unclean.
The Alien Registration Act 1914, supposedly enacted as an emergency wartime measure, was amended and extended in 1919, preventing the entry of thousands of Jewish refugees from the Nazis. One racist law deserves another, and with staggering chutzpah, and sickening and bitter irony, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 was enacted to prevent the ‘threat’ to the British ‘way of life’ posed by the entry of descendants of slaves, coolies and indentured workers who had been grist in the mill of British imperialism. Current laws which discriminate against people on the basis of their country of origin or perceived ethnicity are no less racist or toxic than these earlier antisemitic and racist laws. Entry to Britain and leave to remain, despite a fistful of legislation proscribing racial discrimination, still depends to a very large extent on skin colour and country of origin.
