(Migrants’ Rights Network) The Calais Jungle – a beacon for the fight against refugee injustice

Posted on October 25, 2016 by Migrant Tales

Don Flynn

The Jungle camp in Calais has challenged the indifference of official Europe to the plight of refugees for close on two decades. It has survived previous attempts at demolition. As long as the grievances that gave rise to remain it will come back to haunt the conscience of the continent.

As you read this CRS police squads, acting on French government orders, will once again be destroying the make-shift homes and personal property of the 9000 people who are trying to survive in the Calais refugee camp.

They have returned to this task sporadically over the years. In April 2009 a determined effort to close the camp led to the arrest of 109, with bulldozers destroying the tents of around 800 refugees.

Regrouped after assault

Within weeks the victims of this assault had regrouped and the Jungle was up-and-running again. Another dawn raid in September the same year saw 276 refugees arrested, but the camp survived and even flourished as the wretched home for thousands of people who could find nowhere else to live.

Heedless of past failures to vanquish the refugees, the French government ordered another clearance in January. This one displaced around 1000 people. The forcible eviction was accompanied by efforts to get the refugees to accept alternative accommodation in 125 metal shipping containers. Take-up has been patchy.

Instead French NGOs report there are at least eleven other camps in the region. The biggest is in Grande-Synthe, near Dunkirk. Others are in Boulogne, Dieppe and Le Havre. Smaller ‘jungles’ pop up across the Pay du Nord and Normandy at road junctions and petrol stations – almost anywhere where port-bound traffic slows and there is a chance to jump in the back of a lorry that might possibly be en route to England.

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Migrants’ Rights Network: [UK]Government agenda – Roll back the rights of all migrants

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Migrant Tales

Don Flynn*

The policy pronouncements at the Conservative conference show how far the government is prepared to go to turn migration into a rights-free zone. Both EU and the third country migrants will lose out under these plans. We need a campaign that unites them all if rights are to be preserved.

The immigration policies which Theresa ay and her home secretary, Amber Rudd, revealed at the Conservative party conference last week seem to have got short shrift from just about everyone.

Business interests weighed in with heavyweight warnings of conflict if the government pushes ahead with plans to make firms account for every foreign worker they take on. Seamus Nevin, head of employment and skills policy at the Institute of Directors, said: “It is clear that immigration will continue to be a major bone of contention between companies and this government. Businesses know that the EU referendum result means change to free movement of workers from the EU, but people were not voting to make the economy weaker. The evidence is clear that migrants are a benefit to the economy.”

Condemnation

The passage in home secretary Rudd’s speech in which she threatened policies that would end the right of large numbers of universities to enrol international students brought strong condemnation. Eyebrows were raised when she said claimed that the current system “… treats every student and university as equal… “ She promised a consultation “…that will ask what more can we do to support our best universities – and those that stick to the rules – to attract the best talent … while looking at tougher rules for students on lower quality courses.”

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Migrants’ Rights Network: Byron Hamburgers: When employers fail to do right by migrant employees

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Migrant Tales

Don Flynn*

What else could Byron’s have done? The social media world was awash with attempted defences of the hamburger chain after it collaborated in the arrest of 35 of its migrant workers earlier in July. Our answer is they didn’t have to go along with the shabby act of entrapment of its staff, and they could have done so much more to push back against punitive, anti-worker rules.

The operation directed against migrant employees of the fast food chain, Byron Hamburgers by Home Office Border enforcement officials on the evening of 4^th July has sparked a lively discussion about the extent to which employers should be held to any sort of standard why it comes to a duty of care towards its workers.

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Migrant’s Rights Network: The referendum vote – what will happen to the rights of migrants?

Posted on June 28, 2016 by Migrant Tales

Don Flynn*

We respond to the outcome of the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union.

The vote to leave the European Union has thrown politics into a massive period of uncertainty.

Read full story here.

It is clear that deep public concern about immigration has been one of the most important factors encouraging 52% of voters to take the drastic action of the probable severing of the connection with the largest economic market in the world.

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Migrants’ Right Network: Saving the gains of the Schengen agreement requires European solidarity on protection for refugees

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Migrant Tales

Don Flynn*

Much of the news commentary on Europe seems to assume that the Schengen open borders arrangement will vanish in the next few months. That would be a disaster. Saving it will require a reversal of the current refusal of solidarity with countries at the frontline of the refugee flows.

The interior and home affairs ministers of the EU countries are gathering in Amsterdam today and tomorrow in in what is being described as an informal meeting to discuss the latest phase of the region’s migration crisis.

The current Dutch presidency of the EU has set the context for their discussion with the dire warning that the Schengen agreement will fail within two months if a way is not fund to contain the movement of refugees now spilling out across the continent.

Though the UK is not a member of the 26 country agreement it is expected to suffer the negative consequences if it collapses. Schengen allows for the management of migration across 8,000 kilometres of external land borders as well as a sea frontier that extend for 40,000 kilometres.

It is usually reported as a measure which provides for free movement across the internal borders of the area it encompasses, but equally important is the role it plays in standardising checks on the admission of people moving across external borders. Critics of the system have claimed that it is failing on this account, and the admission of over one million people seeking asylum in Europe during the course of 2015 has exposed its fundamental flaws.

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Migrants’ Rights Network: 2015 – The year when immigration became an indissolubly European issue

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Don Flynn*

Halfway through December seems like a good time to sketch out some ideas on what 2015 might come to mean in a history of immigration which has yet to be written.

My provisional take is that it will come to be seen as the year in which the movement of people into and out of the country became finally and indissolubly Europeanised. There are circumstances in which we could easily imagine this to be a good thing, with progressive, forward-thinking governments working together to see how the movement of people is going to play its role in promoting sustainable growth and the welfare of populations, while at the same time cementing human rights and fairness right the way across the system.

Sadly this isn’t the way in which immigration has been considered by governments for a long time. The resulting dysfunction has meant that Europe has become associated in the minds of many with turmoil and threat. The image of desperate refugees landing on the Greek islands; the bodies of children washed up on holiday beaches; people pushed back by thuggish police action on the borders of Hungary; or the migrants living in the squalor of the ‘jungle’ camps in Calais will probably be the abiding memories of the past year for many.

Failure to anticipate the inevitable chaos

The truth is that these chaotic scenes have arisen for reasons which have less to do with the sheer press of numbers than with the utter failure of the European authorities to anticipate the inevitable flow of people away from the war zones which now stretch in great conjoined arcs across the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and into North Africa.

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Migrants’ Rights Network: Why do migrants suffer exploitation? – Some thoughts on vulnerability and globalised labour markets

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Don Flynn*

Migrants are bad news because they worsen wages and working conditions for the rest of us we are so often told. A new book says we have to pay far more attention to the conditions we impose on those who arrive looking for jobs if we really want to tackle the scourge of modern slavery.

Critics of immigration strive to make the case that low pay and exploitation are increasingly rife because newcomers apparently degrade the wages and work conditions secured by home-grown workers.

But their case stumbles over the fact that the point at which wages as a proportion of gross national income began to sharply decline was way back in the mid-1970s. Net migration was at a historically low point back then.

According to the TUC figures, the high point in terms of the share of income that went to wage earners was 1975, when over 64% of the nation’s annual wealth went into the pay packets of workers. By 1996 this had declined to 52%.

Since then the wage share went up to 56% in the months just before the credit crunch plunged the country into deep recession in 2007-08. No one should miss the irony that this brief period of improvement coincided with the return of years of substantial net migration.

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Migrants’ Rights Network: Lessons of Paris – Borders won’t protect us: Solidarity with refugees remains the best hope

Posted on November 23, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Don Flynn*

The Friday 13^th attacks in Paris are being interpreted by many commentators as politicians as a watershed moment in public attitudes towards refugee policies in Europe.

But as recently as August and September this year hundreds and thousands of European citizens took a remarkable stand of declaring a welcome for refugees coming from the war-torn Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa.

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Read full opinion piece here.

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Attempts have been made to argue that this support has vanished in the wake of the terrorist attacks on people enjoying Friday night at music concerts and restaurants in the otherwise peaceful city of Paris. One example of this effort to declare an end to the moods which proclaimed support for the right of refugees to find a safe haven in Europe came in the form of an article in the London Evening Standard on 18 November. Prominent Conservative MP David Davis declared the need for an outright end to the freedom of movement in Europe which has been made possible by the Schengen Agreement.

Davis wrote: “… it is becoming evident that controlling Europe’s external borders, especially the porous borders of southern Europe, is virtually impossible. There are too many physical, legal, political and moral problems inherent in policing that vast frontier effectively.”

He appears to applaud the decisions of the Austrian, French, Dutch and Swedish governments to reintroduce border checks, and even the actions of the Hungarian and Slovak authorities in reinforcing these with kilometres of fencing and razor wire. Perhaps he believes that these actions will solve the “physical, legal, political and moral problems” that get in the way of managing the flow of people across the southern frontiers of the EU.

The proffered solution is a return to a Europe in which national states are responsible for admitting or refusing people entry into their territories and then dealing with the consequences. But, strangely enough, for the countries at the EU’s southern and eastern frontiers, that is exactly the system that has always operated. Greece operates primarily within a framework of Greek immigration policies when it comes to deciding who is permitted to cross its borders; as does Italy; France; Spain; and both Cyprus and Malta.

The claim that we are in today’s predicament because of the overbearing effects of bureaucratically-imposed European policies is clearly fallacious. We are where we are because Europe, acting in concert with other powers in the Eastern Mediterranean, has failed over the course of many years to overcome the crisis which spreads in a great arc from Turkey and across the North African Maghreb, with a tributary branch feeding in from the Horn of Africa. This failure has been allowed to create a great confluence of refugee movements that brings people to its own doorstep.

Declaring a formal end to the Schengen Agreement and reintroducing controls at all the internal borders of the EU will not deal with the situations which led to 218,000 refugees entering Europe in October alone. The driving forces behind these movements, as a recent commentary paper by the European Policy Centre points out, are the continuing upheaval in countries which have put 4.3 million Syrians, 2.6 million Afghans, 1 million Somalis and 600,000 Sudanese onto the road as refugees during the past few years.

‘Fortress Europe’ was never going to hold back the volume of people pressing against its gates indefinitely. The radical measures taken to impoverish the Greek state through austerity might have been the tipping point from struggling efforts to manage to outright crisis but the genie is now out the bottle and won’t easily be persuaded to go back in.

The anti-free movement lobby hopes that if one border can’t do the trick then maybe six, ten or twenty will succeed in holding back the refugee masses in someplace far away. Mr Davis rejoices in the fact that the UK is an island and the convenience of having a surrounding sea ought to buy the country a bit more scope for keeping the refugees out.

It is difficult to be happy with this as a solution to the business of managing refugee movements in the 21^st century. The hope that all our neighbours will do the heavy lifting whilst we sit back to reap the benefits will not endear us European countries that want to see more solidarity as they face up to the challenges of processing the claims of those who seek a safe haven.

The attacks in Paris were agonisingly brutal for those who caught up in them. If it is possible for such an appalling situation to be made worse by any subsequent action it has come from the renewed clamour to roll back on refugee and migrant rights. Advocating this response looks too much like the very outcome that fanatics of Daesh have sought to engineer.

The security of ordinary people across Europe will not be enhanced by any measure that reduces the commitment of this region to human rights and the rights of refugees. The re-imposition of border checks on the myriad frontiers of the European states will check, for a time, the flow of desperate people. It will cause more hardship and suffering on top of what they have already had to endure. And it will be a step away from the countries of this region addressing the real root causes of the refugee crisis and will postpone the day when tens of thousands no longer feel that they have to embark on dangerous journeys to get to these shores.

Read original posting here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

*Don Flynn, the MRN Director, leads the organisation’s strategic development and coordinates MRN’s policy and project work. He is a regular and sought-after speaker at conferences, seminars and lectures on behalf of MRN.

Migrants’ Rights Network: Frontier anxiety: Living with the stress of the everyday border

Posted on November 16, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Don Flynn*

What happens when we bring the anxieties of life at the border into the heart of our all our communities? How can we contend with life in a space where identity is constantly checked and people subjected to the question: Why are you really here? MRN director Don Flynn asks this in an article published this month in Soundings, a journal of cultural politics and simultaneously on the website of Eurozine. The full article can be accessed here.

State borders hold a place in the collective imagination of our times in which anxiety plays a central part. It is at borders that the mundane certainties of life dissolve and the simple business of existing becomes a matter of uncertainty. This is the place where a person is forced to confront with the sharpest of intensity the fact that the rights which usually seem as securely available as an intimate personal possession are in fact a by-product of their relationship with the authorities of a state. It is at the border that this relationship can be called into most fundamental question. “I see you are in possession of a British passport madam”, says the immigration officer. “But can you explain to me how you came by this document and why you feel you are entitled to benefit from it?”

Photo: Martin Deutsch. Source: Flickr

This is a disconcerting question that few of us would feel confident of answering (certainly without detailed knowledge of the provisions of the British Nationality Act 1981). Most of us are in the happy position of being unlikely to be pushed too far on the matter. But some are not. For example, one young man I assisted with legal advice told me of his anxious hours at Heathrow airport when his claim that he was British-born, if not raised, was treated with deep scepticism. He had been born in Britain, but when he was six years old his Guyanese parents had taken him to their home country after a decade of life in London. Now returning to study at university, his case was only resolved after his lawyer intervened with additional evidence of his personal circumstances.

But if a British citizen can be subjected to this level of stress, how much greater are the anxiety levels for a Filipina nurse questioned about a visa that is probably incomprehensible to her – supplied by an agent back in Manila, who has assured her that it entitles her to come to the UK to accept the offer of a job as a nurse. It is entirely possible that all the deals that have been done – the form-filling, the gathering of supporting documents, the photographing, the English testing, the finger-print taking, and the payment of often very considerable fees, will be picked apart by an assiduous official who routinely finds grounds for doubting that a young woman from northern Santa Teresita could ever have been awarded a degree in health care from the country’s prestigious De La Salle University.

Beyond Fortress Europe

This article is part of the Eurozine focal pointBeyond Fortress Europe.

The scale of the human tragedy afflicting migrants who seek entry to Fortress Europe has increased dramatically of late, triggering a new European debate on laws, borders and human rights. A debate riddled with the complex, often epic, narratives that underlie immediate crisis situations. [more]

At a border you can be mentally stripped naked through rigorous interrogation, before being taken to a small room where you are physically stripped. Diaries will be read and hard drives on laptops scrutinized; while the letter from your cousin offering you a sofa to doss on until you sort out your own place will be the subject of excited interest, in case it reveals a snippet or two about why you are “really” here. When things go wrong for you at a border you lose the right to tell your own story of your life. You see another you being assembled before your very eyes, through which you are presented as a monster of conniving malevolence, capable of any deceit in your efforts to lay your hands on something to which you have no entitlement. The worst thing is that you are invited at each stage to follow the logic of this deconstruction of yourself. By the end you may find yourself morbidly agreeing that, “yes, I can see how you would believe that of me …”.

In short, a border is a place where most of us don’t want to be for any longer than the time it takes to clear the queues at immigration control, pick up your luggage and board the bus to the centre of town. As the border gets further behind you with each passing minute, you return to a world which may have its everyday worries and concerns, but in which there is at least the assurance that, in normal, mundane intercourse, the default presumption is that you are who you say you are.

But nowadays, for increasing numbers of people, this is not what happens. The border is no longer something to be negotiated on the relatively few occasions in life when we make a conscious decision to approach it and hazard all its dangers. Those disconcerting immigration officials are now being given leave to absent themselves from passport checking duties: they are being sent off in minibuses to ply their trade in many of the places where ordinary folk need to go as part of their daily lives. People may now be asked to verify their immigration status when they apply for a tenancy, or to university, or for child support, or even at the tube station.

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Migrants’ Right Network – Mrs May’s speech: An ugly intervention that at least clarifies for campaigners what needs to be done to defend the rights of all migrants

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Don Flynn*

Mrs May set out her stall on immigration during her speech to the Conservative conference. Its dismissal themes have already been challenged, often from surprising quarters. But we need a campaigning perspective to defeat her plans to roll back the rights of refugees and migrants.

Read full opinion piece here.

Home Secretary Theresa May’s speech to the Conservative Party conference yesterday has been condemned even in the pages of the truest and bluest of Tory journals.

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