Former UKBA Employee Blows Whistle
Posted on February 3, 2010
There are no ‘fair’ or ‘just’ or ‘humane’ immigration controls. Immigration controls are implicitly racist, unjust and cruel.
The notion that a human being is or can be ‘illegal’ is absurd. The concept was invented as a divide and rule distraction to protect the power and privilege of the lords of the capitalist elite, to set workers against one another.
It is no surprise that racist laws attract racists to administer those laws.
asylum seekers are mistreated, tricked and humiliated by staff working for the UK Border Agency, who express[ed] fiercely anti-immigration views and take pride in refusing applications [...] One method used to determine the authenticity of an asylum seeker claiming to be from North Korea was to ask whether the person ate chop suey. [...] interviews were conducted without lawyers, independent witnesses or tape recorders [...] Only cases raised by MPs appeared to be dealt with properly [...] one manager said of the asylum-seeker clients: “If it was up to me I’d take them all outside and shoot them.” Another told her this was to be expected, adding: “No one in this office is very PC. In fact everyone is the exact opposite.” [...] “I witnessed general hostility, rudeness and indifference towards clients. It was completely horrific. I highlighted my concerns to senior managers but I was just laughed at.” [...] One of her cases involved a Congolese woman who had the right to remain in the UK. Perrett says a superior nevertheless decided the woman and her children should be removed, and asked officials whether there were any grounds to remove them. Frustrated, she approached a member of the legal department. His reply, according to Perrett, was: “Umbongo, umbongo, they kill them in the Congo.”
Home Affairs select committee chairman Keith Vaz has called for an investigation into the claims, but New Labour is as much a part of the problem as other parties, running as it does to the dog whistle of the BNP-Daily Mail consensus on supposedly uncontrolled ‘mass immigration’, vying with the Tories to be seen as the most anti-foreigner, ‘but not racist’ party. New Labour is fully committed to Fortress Europe and its network of dehumanising concentration camps, where people declared ‘illegal’ by bureaucratic fiat await deportation to persecution, torture and murder for having the wrong skin colour, wrong gender, loving the wrong person or worshipping their god in the wrong way — all justified on the pretext that there are ‘not enough’ jobs and services to go around.
Are there enough houses being built, or being repaired? Is everybody healthy? Is there plenty of care for elderly and disabled people? The answer to all of these questions and more is an emphatic no. There is a crisis in the public housing and the provision of healthcare. Why is there ‘not enough’ to go around? Is it because there are a finite number of jobs and services? No, it is because the capitalist system is irrational. The needs of people are sacrificed in the interest of profit. The only things that matter in capitalism are the things that turn a profit. Human beings are needed only insofar as they are appendages of machines. The machines do not serve workers — it is the workers who serve the machine.
The working class is an international class. It is divided by nationalism, racism, sexism and imperialism into very unequal groups. We must fight for real equality and in doing so unite our class.
No One Is Illegal
