Immigration and asylum - new material (8)
01 January 2011
The Wages of Fear: risk, safety and undocumented work, Jon Burnett and David Whyte. PAFRAS and the University of Liverpool 2010, pp 42. In this report Burnett and Whyte expose the institutional exploitation involved in undocumented work, based on interviews with 14 migrant workers and “failed” asylum seekers in one northern city. It describes the reality behind so-called “flexible” working and how: “...employers exploit undocumented workers in some of the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs as a matter of routine, and how they pay poverty wages for backbreaking work. They force long hours when needed, and summary dismissals when not. They coerce injured workers to carry on working and they fire those whose injuries are so bad that they cannot continue to work. With their very presence in the country criminalised, workers are much less able to formally organise themselves or join a trade union; they are less able to seek redress if and when they are abused; and are hesitant to seek medical assistance, sometimes after serious injuries.” It is a system in which “economic flexibility is exchanged for increasing the physical risks experienced by undocumented workers” and in which the “contradiction of law enforcement...ensures legal health and safety protections for workers are directly undermined by the enforcement of immigration law.”: http://www.pafras.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2011/01/The_Wages_of-Fear.pdf
Unsustainable: the quality of initial decision-making in women’s asylum claims, Helen Muggeridge and Chen Maman. Asylum Aid January 2001, pp. 90. This research was conducted to examine the quality of the initial decisions made by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) when women claim asylum and is the first in-depth study of decision-making for women seeking asylum since the introduction of the New Asylum Model in 2007. It found that “women were too often refused asylum on grounds that were arbitrary, subjective, and demonstrated limited awareness of the UK’s legal obligations under the Refugee Convention. Many of the UKBA’s decisions proved to be, in the words of an immigration judge examining one of the cases included in this research, “simply unsustainable”, and 50% were overturned when subjected to independent scrutiny in the immigration tribunal.” http://www.asylumaid.org.uk/data/files/unsustainableweb.pdf
The work of the UK Border Agency. Volume I: Report, together with formal minutes, oral and written evidence Home Affairs Select Committee 21.12.10, pp. 30. Since 2006, the HAC has received regular updates from the UK Border Agency (UKBA) on the deportation of foreign national prisoners, the backlog in asylum cases and other issues such as child prisoners and detainees with special needs. This report includes evidence from Lin Homer, Chief Executive of the UK Border Agency.
Coping with Destitution: survival and livelihood strategies of refused asylum seekers living in the UK, Heaven Crawley, Joanne Hemmings and Neil Price. Oxfam GB Research Report February 2011, Pp. 69. This research uncovers how the hundreds of thousands of people currently living in the UK, with no access to legitimate means of securing a livelihood, survive on a day-to-day and longer-term basis. “UK asylum policy has increasingly restricted asylum seekers access to welfare support, both while their application is being processed and if they are refused. Over recent years, there have been growing concerns about the scale and impact of destitution among refused asylum seekers...Existing evidence suggests that many asylum seekers have been destitute for more than six months and a significant proportion for more than two years.” The report makes key findings in the areas of institutional resources, social resources, economic resources and access to resources. It concludes that: “Destitute asylum seekers...are forced to lead little more than a hand-to-mouth existence, with no hope that their situation will ever come to an end.” http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/right_heard/downloads/rr-coping-with-destitution-survival-strategies-uk-040211-en.pdf
Los controles de identidad, Grupo Inmigración y Sistema Penal. Mugak no. 53 (December 2010) pp.32-34. This article looks at identity checks in Spain that target migrants, highlighting that large-scale operations in which foreigners are systematically subjected to police controls on the basis of racial profiling are becoming commonplace, with certain neighbourhoods periodically swarmed by police officers. Certain aspects that are noted include the issuing of quotas to the police for the number of migrants who live in Spain irregularly who must be arrested, the damaging effects of these controls on migrant communities and their integration, and instructions by the interior ministry to arrest migrants whose documents are not in order and to try to expel them using a fast-track procedure, instructions against which lawyers have protested, labelling them “xenophobic”. A leading police officers’ trade union has also filed a complaint because they are instructed to treat irregular status in a way that should be reserved for the investigation of criminal offences.
“Una storia sbagliata. Rapporto sul centro di identificazione ed espulsione di Ponte Galeria”. Medici per i Diritti Umani (MEDU), November 2010, pp. 13. A report on Rome’s detention centre that starts by looking at the legal framework for detention centres and their switch to “identification and expulsion centres” (CIEs) on 8 August 2009, when a longer limit was introduced (from 60 to 180 days). It is based on a visit on 14 October 2010 by MEDU to the Ponte Galeria centre, the largest in Italy, which has been the setting for revolts, protests and hunger strikes by detainees complaining about inadequate care and inhumane living conditions, the latest one in March 2010. It has a capacity of 366 people (176 men and 190 women), and the most represented nationalities are Romanian, Nigerian, Moroccan, Algerian, Ukrainian and Serbian. The facility is described as “entirely inadequate to ensure dignified living conditions to people who stay there for 24 hours per day, facing periods of detention that may last for up to six months”. Self-inflicted injuries reportedly decreased in late 2010, although they were very frequent between March and July 2010, particularly multiple cuts with razor blades and mock hangings in a centre where three of the four deaths in Italian CIEs in 2009 occurred, one of them a suicide. It notes the routine practice of prescribing excessive amounts of sedatives to detainees, there are no written regulations. 747 out of 1,727 detainees from the start of 2010 to 27 September were expelled (43%), and MEDU has calculated the average length of detention in the first three quarters of 2010 at 42 days. The prefect of Rome [the government envoy in charge for security] has argued that it is a structure in which human dignity is not fully respected. MEDU concludes that CIEs seem to be the “bad story of an institution that.. [it] is inhumane, unjust, inefficient and useless”. http://www.mediciperidirittiumani.org/una%20storia%20sbagliata.pdf