Richard Haley, Scotland Against Criminalising Communities, 28.7.13
On
9 July, an inquest in London ruled that Jimmy Mubenga was unlawfully when he
died on a plane at Heathrow while being restrained by G4S guards who were
trying to deport him to Angola.
Jimmy
Mubenga came to Britain in 1994, a student activist who had to get out of
Angola because the regime was after him. He came here shortly after his wife
(Makenda Kambana), whose father had already been killed by the regime and his
child. He found work, they had more children. Then he got into a fight in a
nightclub and in 2006 he was convicted of actual bodily harm jailed. After he'd
served his sentence he was in line for
deportation – a far more severe punishment than his jail term.
Jimmy
Mubenga was killed in October 2010, in the words of the inquest jury
"pushed or held down by one or more of the guards, causing his breathing
to be impeded".
Like
all migrants and asylum-seekers living in Britain, he was living in a different
country from British citizens, with a different legal system and different
rights, subject to the old sentence of transportation for even a minor offence.
Jimmy
Mubenga's death was exceptional. But violence and abuse during deportation is
routine. In 2008 campaigners and lawyers published a dossier of nearly 300
cases of alleged assaults on deportees by private security guards. People were
beaten, punched, kicked, knelt on, sat on, handcuffed in ways that caused
injury, racially abused.
Those
aren't the only ways that asylum-seekers are abused.
At
the end of March, 180 people were being held at Dungavel, not for any crime,
but because the government doesn't want them here. In the course of the
previous year, over 28,000 people were taken into immigration detention across
the UK, with about 2800 in detention at any one time. Some have been detained
for years. [Of the people coming out of detention in the year to the end of
March, 76 had been held for more a year.]
If
you're suspected of a crime, you can be held without charge for at most a few
days.
Some
asylum-seekers have their liberty, and absolutely nothing else.
They
aren't destitute by accident or oversight, but because the law has
systematically destituted them. They aren't allowed to work. If they are
refused asylum and don't have a new claim or an appeal in progress, they are
shortly afterwards denied access to any publicly-funded support, unless
(Section 4 support) they choose to co-operate in their own deportation back to
countries where they believe themselves to be at risk of torture.
Why
is the system so vicious? British immigration policy is openly based on a
strategy of deterring people from seeking asylum here.
Asylum-seekers
in Scotland
Only
a handful arrive at Scottish ports and airports looking for asylum. Anyone who
does that has to go down to Croydon to file their asylum claim. The
overwhelming majority of Scotland's asylum-seekers enter Britain south of the
border.
However
they arrive, they then have very limited choices. If they have family or
friends they can stay with, they can opt to do that and receive
subsistence-only support from NASS. Most don't have that option. Under the
dispersal scheme created by the 1999 Asylum and Immigration Act they'll be sent
to one of the various locations around the UK where NASS has arranged
accommodation. The only place in Scotland where they'll be sent is Glasgow.
So
almost all Scotland's asylum-seekers live in Glasgow, with a small number
receiving subsistence-only support in Edinburgh and one or two other places.
There's
no accurate figure for the total number of refugees and asylum-seekers in
Scotland, but based on UK trends the Scottish Refugee Council estimates that
there are about 20,000 refugees, asylum seekers and others who come under the
UNHCR term "persons of concern."
This
isn't a very big figure, but it's quite a significant addition to Scotland's
small BME population (100,000 people in the 2001 census). Economic migration to
Scotland is much bigger – in each of the last few years 36-37,000 migrant
workers entering Scotland were given national insurance numbers.
The
number of asylum-seekers receiving support in Scotland reached a peak of around
6000 people in 2004 and fell steadily to about 2000 in March 2011. This March
the number was just under 2300.
[This
is partly a UK-wide trend. The number of people applying for asylum in the UK
peaked at 84,000 in 2002 and settled down to somewhere between 20,000 and
25,000 from 2005 onwards. Worldwide the number of refugees has marginally risen
over that period.]
Dispersal
is driven by cost. Glasgow City Council was one of the most expensive
accommodation providers in the UK, which is why in 2011 UKBA ended its contract
with the Council, giving the contract first to Ypeople then to SERCO, whose
normal business is running prisons and detention centres (including Dungavel).
The housing crisis for asylum-seekers is still unfolding, with evictions going
through the courts.
Besides
the asylum-seekers who are receiving support, there are others who have ceased
to get any support. It's impossible to make a respectable guess about the
number of people in that situation.
Last
year the charity Positive Action in Housing helped about 313 people out of its
destitution fund. 111 of those people
had been destitute for over a year, and out of those 111, 24 had been destitute
for 3-5 years.
Independence
|
It's
often said that Scotland's needs are different from England's because of aging
population.
North
or south of the border, we need open borders so that we can stand in solidarity
with working people all over the world. We need to protect all our rights in
the workplace by making sure that no-one is a second-class citizen or an
un-citizen, and no one is stuck in a black economy.
An
independent Scotland ought to work towards dismantling the oppressive
immigration system that we're going to inherit. But there will be some very
immediate problems.
We'll
probably inherit 180-200 detainees held in Dungavel. We'll inherit an uncertain
number – maybe 2000 – asylum-seekers living in poor housing and poverty. And
we'll inherit an unpredictable but smaller number of asylum seekers who are
facing absolute destitution.
The
things that need to be done are things that various organisations have been
campaigning about for years.
The
first thing we need to do is to end detention and destitution.
That's
to say, as soon as the Scottish Parliament gains authority over immigration
matters, we need an act of parliament that abolishes the power to detain
asylum-seekers and that gives all asylum-seekers – even those whose claim has
been refused – an entitlement to support and a right to work.
We
also need to limit the powers of immigration officials so that there are no
more dawn raids like the one in February this year that split up a young
Nigerian family in Glasgow.
It
would also be a good idea to grant an amnesty – a right to Scottish residence -
in all the legacy cases from before independence. On current trends, that would
probably only be around 2000 people.
These
are just minimal humanitarian demands – band-aid not reform.
It
would be a bad mistake to think that they will be easy to achieve.
They
fly in the face of the culture of deterrence that's shaped British immigration
policy and policies right across Europe. But the groundwork for the struggle
has already been done.
There's
been cross-party sympathy in the Scottish Parliament, and there's been a fair
amount of sympathy in the media. The issue needs to be pulled into the politics
of independence.
Some
Further reading
"Improving
the Lives of Refugees in Scotland after the Referendum: An Appraisal of the
Options" – Scottish Refugee Council - http://www.scottishrefugeecouncil.org.uk/assets/5495/4087_SRC_Referendum_Report_V3.pdf
http://www.migrationscotland.org.uk/ -
COSLA strategic migration partnership – some useful and up-to-date stuff
-
report by NCADC, Medical Justice, Birnberg Peirce (2008)
Europe:
http://www.statewatch.org/asylum/obserasylum.htm is a
useful resource on European policy developments
Institute
for Race Relations - http://www.irr.org.uk/ -
British based group with an international outlook (especially Europe)
