Refugee report: July

Refugee report with an update on the current state of play with legislation

July 2023

The Illegal Migration Bill continues its dizzying route to completion, despite 20 defeats in the House of Lords. The Commons has rejected all the amendments, and the Bill will return one more time to the Lords and, presumably, back to the Commons next week before the recess in a process called ‘ping pong’. Despite the enormous interest in this subject and its high political salience, it was reported that fewer than 40 MPs turned up for the debate and only 20 or so stayed to the end.

We are grateful for group member Andrew for this report.

The latest situation update:

All of the Lords’ amendments were overturned by the Commons, but several had some support from the Conservative benches (Tim Lough-ton complained that they had not had enough time to mull over the government’s changes). The Home Office offered several concessions on Monday evening, The bill’s provisions will no longer apply retrospectively to anyone deemed to have arrived illegally from March 7 (10,000 people will escape the legislation’s measures, according to the Daily Mail) … the detention of unaccompanied children will be limited to eight days (significantly longer than the 24 hours backed by peers) … and the detention of pregnant women will be limited to 72 hours (extendable to seven days by ministers). Other issues still in play from the Lords debates include:

• Removing unaccompanied children from within the scope of the Bill
• Allowing anyone not removed within 6 months to re-enter our asylum system and have their claims heard
• Ensuring Local Authorities maintain care of unaccompanied children and that children are protected during the age assessment process
• Ensuring LGBT+ people are not removed to countries where they risk persecution, and that victims of trafficking are not included within scope of the Bill (as sought by Theresa May). These will presumably come up again in the next Lords session.

Elsewhere

The highest number of small boat arrivals on a single day this year occurred last week at 686. The total for the year to last weekend was 12,119, slightly down on last year.

UNHCR report says the worldwide figure for refugees is now 29.4 million excluding Palestine. 76% in low/middle income countries 70% in a neighbouring country. 339,300 refugees returned home and only 114,300 refugees were resettled out of camps last year. UNHCR estimates that 1.5 million people globally are in need of resettlement because they are in a protracted refugee situation, meaning they had been refugees for longer than five years. For each refugee that was returned or resettled in 2022, there were 16 new refugees.

Free Movement have picked up on a story that the Home Office is planning to reintroduce the concept of “reasonable force” to remove families with children. Watch this space.

Small boats

The government does not know how much its new small boats bill will cost or if it will achieve its core aim of deterring Channel crossings, an official assessment has found. Documents published over three months after the Illegal Migration Bill was presented to parliament estimated that it will cost £169,000 to deport each asylum seeker – but it is unclear how many will be removed and what “third countries” will receive them. The only existing deal is with Rwanda and the Home Office refused to publish the actual payments agreed, citing “commercial sensitivities” as a Court of Appeal ruling on the scheme looms.
A report from the Migrant and Refugee Children’s Unit argues that Albania is not a “safe country”, as the Government maintains.

Controversial plans to house asylum seekers on a barge to reduce reliance on expensive hotels will save less than £10 a person a day, according to a report. The report, Bibby Stockholm – At What Cost? from the NGOs Reclaim The Seas and One Life To Live, provides the first detailed estimated costings of the Bibby Stockholm, the barge the Home Of-fice is planning to use in Dorset to accommodate asylum seekers.

On statistics, in correspondence between the head of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir Robert Chote and Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, Chote commented: “concerns have been raised with us about your statement in the House of Commons on 20 March that :“Today, a majority of the cases being considered for modern slavery are people who are coming into the country – for example, on small boats. We are seeing flagrant abuse, which is making it impossible for us to deal appropriately with the genuine victims, to the point that 71% of foreign national offenders in the detained estate, whom we are trying to remove from the country, are claiming to be modern slaves.”

Minister accused of using the wrong statistics

“The Home Office advised us that the quoted figure comes from a recent report about modern slavery referrals for people detained for return after arriving in the UK in small boats and that your statement was intended to refer to the proportion of foreign national offenders (FNOs) that are referred to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) as potential victims of modern slavery. The report explains that while an increasing proportion of all those in detention after arriving by small boat are referred to the NRM up from 52% in 2020 to 73% in 2021 (and subsequently falling to 65% between January and September 2022), the proportion among foreign national offenders is much lower (at around 20% between January and September 2022)”. This argument came up again in the Commons when Theresa May claimed Jenrick was using the wrong statistics.

Beyond Europe, it seems that the UN estimates that more than 31 mil-lion Africans live outside the country of their birth, mostly within the continent (only a quarter head for Europe). AlJazeera is running a se-ries of articles on this subject.

The BBC’s More or Less programme presented a special episode on immigration, featuring Colin Yeo as well as several other experts, which is recommended.

Migrant Help runs a guidance and advice helpline to assist asylum seekers in the UK as they move through the process. The charity is not part of the Home Office but is the advice by The Independent, a Migrant Help adviser said: “I am afraid Migrant Help are not contracted to respond to MPs correspondence and have forwarded the attached to the MP correspondence team. Our call handlers will reach out to the service user to see if there is any further support they can provide.
I would like to clarify that not responding to MP enquiries is not a Migrant Help policy but a directive given to us by the Home Office as part of our work under the advice, issue reporting and eligibility (AIRE) contract. I have expressed con-cerns regarding this process

July 13, 2023 0

Group minutes – June

June 2023

We are pleased to attach the minutes of the group meeting which took place on 8 June 2023 thanks to group member Lesley for compiling them. They contain reports on the refugee situation and on the death penalty as well as details of forthcoming events.

June minutes (Word)Download

June 11, 2023 0

Playhouse presence

Group members present at the Playhouse this week

This week, the Playhouse is performing the Beekeeper of Aleppo and members of the Salisbury group will be present before the performance and during the interval. It will be a good opportunity for anyone interested in the group’s activities to make themselves known.

Refugee factsheet March 2023 Download

March 21, 2023 0

Salisbury refugee

UPDATE: 26 January

There is now a Change.org petition highly critical of the government and the lack of any response from the Home office minister Caroline Nokes, The comments are worth reading and mostly supportive of his case.

UPDATE: January 25: 15:30

Reza now in Afghanistan Salisbury Journal 25th

UPDATE: January 23, 18:00

Reza is reported to be in Kabul see https://www.change.org/p/home-office-stop-deportation-of-reza-to-afghanistan

UPDATE: January 22, 18:00

Latest news is the Reza is due to be deported at any moment.

Further developments with Reza Maghsoudi

Readers may recall an earlier post about a refugee from Afghanistan who has been living in this country for some years and Salisbury for 2, who went to Melksham police station for a routine appointment, whereupon he was arrested and sent to a Detention Centre prior to a planned deportation. Reza Maghsoudi gained some local publicity and there was a follow-up item on BBC Wiltshire last month.

In today’s Salisbury Journal (4 January 2018), the Salisbury MP Mr Glen, in his View from the Commons piece, devotes some space to Reza’s case:

I was in my office at 9am on January 2nd to plan my latest intervention on behalf of Reza Maghsoudi, the young Afghan national who is facing deportation. His many allies in Salisbury have been fighting compassionately and tirelessly to help him regularize his immigration status so that he can continue with his life he has built here – the dear friends he has made and the skills he has learned.

A decision is due and I have been keen to once again to ensure that the case in on the personal radar of the minister so that the significant new evidence that has come to light in recent week can be taken into account.

This is of course encouraging and we hope that the combination of publicity and political pressure bear fruit.

Why are we here?

But why do we have a situation like this in the first place? Why do we have a series of policies whereby someone like Reza is held in a detention centre and is under constant threat of deportation? The answer of course is because for some years now the government has pursued aggressive policies in an attempt to reduce immigration. These have included:

plans to reduce immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’
tightening of work visa eligibility
greater scrutiny of students concerning their eligibility to stay and study
reducing benefits to the lowest level in Europe
provision of sub-standard housing and is what the home affairs sub-committee described as ‘disgraceful’.
introducing bureaucratic delays which regularly force people into destitution according to the Refugee Council.

The benefit reductions came about because it was claimed by David Cameron, when he was the prime minister, that our benefits were a ‘magic pull’ to people wishing to come here. There was no evidence for this. This led to cuts trumpeted to save £500m. These attitudes have been stirred up by some of the media who have great influence on government policy. One media commentator called refugees ‘cockroaches’ in the Daily Mail for example. Despite research evidence to show that immigrants are of net benefit to the UK economy, politicians and some media editors constantly refer to them as a ‘problem’ and a drain on the economy. They are seen as another form of scrounger. People seeking asylum – like Reza – have been conflated with immigration as a deliberate policy (Migration Policy).

So Reza is a small part of a concerted programme of demonizing immigrants and asylum seekers by legal restrictions, benefit reductions and detaining them in detention centres. It is interesting to contrast the plans being prepared by Mr Glen in the Salisbury Journal piece with a rather different speech he made in the House Of Commons:

One aspect of that reform, referred to in the Queen’s Speech, is access to benefits for immigrants. It is right that the Government are considering limiting access to housing benefit and health care for people who have not earned the right to it. It is not enough to keep ignoring that uncomfortable truth because we are frightened of being too right wing, too nasty or too unpleasant. The routine experience of people up and down this country is that on the front line, at the point of delivery and at the point of receiving public services, they are too often displaced by people who, apparently, should not have the right to access those services. I am pleased that the Government will address that in legislation. (Source: Theyworkforyou.com, May 2013 Queen’s Speech debate (our highlight)

Mr Reza’s case is not about benefits but it is about the attitudes of a government who have adopted an aggressive approach based upon misinformation and media attacks. We wish Reza every success.

Sources: BBC; fullfacts.org; Refugee Council; Migration Policy; UCL; Guardian; Independent

January 4, 2018 1

Salisbury refugee arrested

UPDATE: 22 February

Reported in the Salisbury Journal that Reza in ‘in a really bad place’ physically and mentally. See the Journal article.

A Salisbury refugee has been arrested and is under threat of deportation

A refugee who has been living in Salisbury for 2 years was back in the news this week following his arrest in Melksham. He was scheduled to be deported back to Afghanistan, the second most dangerous country in the world according to the FCO.

Reza Magsoudi fled Afghanistan in 2004 when he was 13 and travelled alone to the UK. Early in November 2017 he was summoned to Melksham police station for the routine procedure of declaring his whereabouts in the UK, whereupon he was arrested. He was taken to Tinsley House in Gatwick from where he was due to be deported.

He was granted leave to remain in 2008 and has applied for asylum but for the most part without legal assistance. His English is said to be poor. There is now to be a judicial review. A Change.org petition has achieved 73,000 signatures.

He has been supported during his stay in Salisbury by Derri Southwood who has had considerable difficulty in making contact since his incarceration in Gatwick. BBC Wiltshire had several pieces on this topic on their morning show this week and a reporter has gained access to Tinsley House but was unable to tape an interview with him.

Issues

The case raises a number of issues concerning asylum policy in the UK and highlights the country’s poor record in offering a home to those fleeing war-torn countries. The UK does however contribute a great deal of aid to those countries who have high levels of refugees but is reluctant to help those who come here.

Part of the reason is the myth that large numbers of people are ‘flooding’ into the country. The facts do not support this myth. Countries such as Turkey, Pakistan and Jordan have a much, much higher numbers in their countries out of a world wide population of around 14 million refugees. By contrast, in quarter 2 of this year for example, there were 6,172 applications for asylum of which 65% were refused. This sort of statistic is fairly constant quarter by quarter (Source: Refugee Council). This is a tiny number of people in view of the world wide figure yet the impression created by some sections of the media is that we are somehow the principal port of call for refugees.

The UK no longer has a welcoming attitude to refugees and successive policies have sought to make it tougher and tougher to achieve leave to remain. An analysis of statistics and policy by four newspapers (Guardian; Le monde; Der Spiegel and El Pais) found that:

The analysis found that Britain takes fewer refugees, offers less generous financial support, provides housing that is often substandard, does not give asylum seekers the right to work, has been known to punish those who volunteer and routinely forces people into destitution and even homelessness when they are granted refugee status due to bureaucratic delays.

This was worse than any other country except Italy.

What is often overlooked in these debates is that the reason why there is conflict and a country riven by war is partly the result of our colonial and imperial activities in the past. Most obviously the Israeli and Palestinian conflict; the division of lands in the middle east after the fall of the Ottoman Empire following the Great War; the Yemen conflict today where we continue to sell arms to the Saudis causing enormous hardship to the people there, and our invasion of Libya which has led to instability, violence and also allowed people smugglers to prosper. So we had a major historical impact and continue to do so by supplying arms which increases the level of conflict.

Looking at the below the line comments in the Salisbury Journal article, one gets a taste of the vitriol that the whole question of refugees generates. Someone who calls him or herself ‘art91e’ says:

He has no right to be here, he serves no useful purpose, he’s illiterate after 13 years here, so he certainly did not do an apprenticeship … that is a lie! Send him home asap.

The great majority of comments were sympathetic however.

Mr Glen, the Salisbury MP, has become involved and has promised to make contact with the minister’s office and to do what he can. The problem – not unique to MPs like Mr Glen – is that the Home Office is carrying out government policy which has been supported by him. It illustrates the problem of myths in the media being left unchallenged but which have a huge influence on how people think. This drives policy and has created a harsh environment for asylum seekers. They have become a problem best solved by keeping them out in the first place and then throwing them out if at all possible if they do make it here.

We await developments.

Don’t forget to visit our refugee photo exhibition in the Library which is running until the end of December. Please sign or comment in the visitor’s book if you do go. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, Salisburyai.

We shall be card signing in the Library passage on Saturday morning 16th between 10 and noon.

December 15, 2017 1

Library Exhibition

Exhibition on refugees in the Library – 2nd to 29th December

November 2017

Throughout December we will be hosting an exhibition in the Library with a display of 30 evocative panels entitled I Welcome. There are 30 panels and they represent the experience of millions of refugees, people of all ages, faiths and walks of life. The exhibition was first shown on the South Bank a year ago and attracted considerable media attention. Refugees get a bad press in the UK and there is considerable hostility to them coming here. Some of this hostility is whipped up by the media.

It will be on display upstairs (a lift is available) and is free. All the photographs are by Magnum photographers.

The Library is open:

Monday: 10 – 7pm

Tuesday/Friday: 9 – 7pm

Wednesday/Thursday/Saturday: 9 – 5pm

The exhibition is FREE

November 23, 2017 1

North Korean talk

Talk by someone who escaped from the hermit state of North Korea

This Thursday 16th March Jihyun Park who managed to escape the closed country of North Korea will be giving a talk at the Five Rivers Leisure Centre, Hulse Road starting at 7:30 pm. Ji has led an incredible life having managed to escape the prison state of North Korea to China. In China she was trafficked and entered into a forced marriage. She worked more or less as a slave in China and was subsequently arrested and returned to North Korea where she was sent to a labour camp. She escaped again and now lives near Manchester.

North Korea is seldom out of the news these days with missile launches into the Sea of Japan and the murder of Kim Jong-un’s half brother in Malaysia. But the human rights situation in that country is dire and people live in situations of great adversity.

The event is free and there is a departing collection to help with our expenses.

See our video on North Korea

Flyer for the talk

March 13, 2017 0