Immigration, asylum and anti-deportation

Borders Bill puts 40% of ethnic minority UK citizens at risk

The protest-criminalising Police Bill is just one element of the Tories' push towards a vicious authoritarian state. Just behind it in the parliamentary queue of measures to assault the rights of people living in, working in or trying to come to the United Kingdom, the Nationality and Borders Borders Bill passed the House of Commons on 8 December and is now on its second reading in the House of Lords. The Bill now attacks the rights not just of the small numbers of refugees the Tories are trying to present as some kind of overwhelming tide , but of vast numbers of UK citizens – mainly with...

Europe’s policies enable Belarus border gambit

The humanitarian crisis continues at the borders between Belarus and Poland, Latvia and Lithuania. Belarus’s government triggered the situation, as retaliation for EU sanctions over President Lukashenka’s authoritarian crackdown. Belarus has cruelly duped desperate people — mainly from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, including many persecuted Yazidis and Kurds — by selling them flights to Minsk and visas that it falsely said would get them legally into the EU. On arrival, they find they can only cross irregularly, through dense, dangerous forest in increasingly harsh weather. Border guards and...

Polish government whips up nationalism

Poland’s hard-right government, previously flagging in the polls, is using the crisis to stir up patriotic support. It has shown itself willing to match Lukashenka’s cynicism and absolute disregard for human life. The militaristic narrative of refugee pushbacks, presented by the government as defending Polish borders against hybrid war, is based on and feeding into racist and xenophobic tropes of Poland as the “bulwark of Christendom”, combined with playing on the fears of imperial appetites of Russia. This allows them to dehumanise refugees: presenting them as either a direct danger (for...

Hundreds protest against immigration detention in North East

On Tuesday 23 November, the day before 27 people drowned in the English Channel trying to reach the UK, Priti Patel announced the official opening of Derwentside Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) in County Durham, a new women-only facility intended to replace the notorious Yarl's Wood detention centre near Bedford. The new facility in Medomsley, near the town of Consett, was formerly Medomsley Detention Centre (for boys) and was the site of historic abuse carried out over decades before closing in 1988. Five former officers have already been jailed for their part in the abuse with many more...

Asylum rights for Uyghur refugees

The vast majority of Uyghurs live in China, mainly in East Turkestan. Nearly a million Uyghurs live outside of China, mainly elsewhere in Central Asia, e.g. in Kazakhstan, or in Middle Eastern countries like Turkey. There is also a small community of about 2,000 to 3,000 Uyghurs in Afghanistan. All communities in Afghanistan face horrors with a collapse of food supplies, health care, and economic life since the Taliban took power. Many of the Uyghurs are especially afraid of how they will be treated by the Taliban because of its growing relationship with the Chinese government. The Uyghur...

Squaring anti-racist instinct with pro-Brexit policy

To be fair to the Morning Star , the fact that it had no coverage of the Wednesday 24 November tragedy in the Channel until its Friday edition (26 November), a day later than the rest of the media, was probably due to its limited resources and inability to extend deadlines. When it did come, the Morning Star ’s coverage was mainly pretty good: a front page headline “Give Safe Routes To Refugees” and a lead story quoting refugee rights groups blaming racist border fortification policies by both the British and French governments. The editorial on Friday 26 November was headed “Britain’s...

Safe routes for refugees! Fight for free movement!

Many hundreds joined the protest at the Home Office initiated by Sisters Uncut on 25 November, to mourn and denounce the deaths of 27 refugees in the Channel the day before. Hundreds joined a Stand Up to Racism rally at Downing Street on the 27th. There have been protests around the country. The PCS civil service union has joined a legal challenge to the Tories’s “pushback” policy, and says : “If the government does not abandon this appalling approach, we will pursue all legal avenues including a judicial review... PCS will not rule out all forms of industrial action, including disrupting the...

Against Fortress Europe and Fortress Britain

At least thirteen people trapped on the Belarus-Poland border have died, the most recent a one-year-old child. Given the magnitude of the barbarism inflicted on these people, it could easily have been many more. Belarus’ noxious regime, which funnelled refugees to the border in order to exert pressure on the European Union over economic sanctions, is undoubtedly in large part responsible for this crisis. But so, equally, are the EU governments (and the UK’s, which has backed them up, including with troops!) This particular confrontation may fizzle out, as Belarus sends many of the migrants...

Morning Star’s Nick Wright praises Wagenknecht

In the Morning Star of 18 November, former Straight Left ultra-Stalinist Nick Wright, now rehabilitated into the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and a regular contributor to the paper, had a lengthy article headed “The truth about immigration waits at the Polish border” While rightly condemning Poland and the EU over the plight of the people at the border, Wright glosses over Lukashenko’s cynical manipulation of desperate migrants in his efforts to destabilise the EU (while his master Putin gloats from the sidelines), and reports of Belarusian troops forcibly turning back migrants attempting...

Poland: let the refugees in!

Speaking about the thousands of refugees stranded without shelter on the Poland-Belarus border, a Polish comrade told us: “There was a pregnant refugee, I think from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Polish border guards took this woman by her hands a legs and threw her back over the border like a sack of potatoes. She lost the pregnancy. The border guards have been made like gods, with power of life and death over people. “The persecution of the migrants divides people in the area. It is a very conservative region, and many are deeply hostile. But then there are people with good hearts who...

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