Don Flynn Archives - Page 4 of 4

Migrants’ Rights Network: What is driving the ‘hostile environment’ idea (in the UK)?

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Migrant Tales

By Don Flynn*

The announcement of yet more changes to the immigration rules will cause anxiety to run down the spine of many a legal migrant as they struggle to understand whether it has implications for them.

The government has declared that the intention behind the new Immigration Bill currently being considered by Parliament is to create a ‘hostile environment’ for the people it describes as ‘illegal’.

There is a tendency to think of this group of people as being entirely distinct from the larger body of legal migrants, who live their lives in accordance with the rules and regulations and never come into contact with the ‘illegals’.

It was this thought which encouraged the view set out by the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) a few weeks back in its ruling as to whether the wording of the posters on the ‘Go Home or Face Arrest Vans’ used by the Home Office Border Force as a part of its Operation Vaken exercise in the summer was likely to give rise to anxiety or offence to settled people of recent immigrant origin.

The ASA expressed the view that it would not, since the legal migrant knows that she lives an existence that is vastly removed from that of those who have chosen to break the law. The sight of one of these vans trundling down her local high street was not something that she ought to worry about at all.

But the truth is that many so-called legal migrants spend a great deal of time worrying that they might end up as illegal migrants, or at least (and this would be just as bad) that other people will think that they might be illegal migrants.

This happens precisely because the worlds of the ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ are not hermetically sealed off from one another but instead separated by a porous membrane of regulations which reach out and touch many aspects of everyday life, as well the big issues relating to border crossings and controls.

The truth is that migrants can become illegal for many reasons, including losing their jobs, or a row in the family that causes them to be excluded from the home. The precarious tightrope existence faced by many migrants means that their status often depends not just on their good behaviour, but on the conduct of family members, employers or college authorities.

The announcement of yet more changes to the immigration rules causes anxiety to run down the spine of many a legal migrant as they struggle to understand whether it has implications for them and if they ought to consider consulting a lawyer to double-check that they are still ‘legal’. Many will recall the HSMP Forum court case a few years ago, when a group of highly skilled migrants found themselves involved in expensive litigation with the Home Office after changes to the points-based system suddenly plunged them into an undesirable category.

Migrants can be denounced, traduced and trashed before the authorities for reasons that run from petty spite to outright racism. The Home Affairs Select Committee only last week expressed its concern that the Border Force didn’t seem to be doing enough to follow up tip-offs from members of the public who had phoned in to report a unwanted migrant in their neighbourhood. For all of these reasons and more, migrants will tell you that they often feel like they live in a suspicious society, with assessments made at every turn to establish whether they are the illegal immigrants we keep hearing about…

This is the reality of the ‘hostile environment’ that currently exists for migrants. It is a terrain of hidden crevices where one foot put wrong can send the individual into a world of uncertainty which can only be challenged by further rounds of legal representation, form-filling, evidence gathering, the payment of extortionately expensive fees and, if you are lucky, the opportunity to state your case before an independent immigration tribunal.

The Immigration Bill going through Parliament has to be condemned for the precise reason that it will make things worse, not just for the ‘illegals’, but for the much larger group of legal migrants who are already anxious that they might make an inadvertent slip and find themselves in a whole new world of insecurity.

The opportunity to ramp up the pressures on migrants will come from the increased involvement of yet more third parties – private landlords, bank staff, people issuing driving licences – in the business of checking immigration status. The facts that there will be many mistakes is an absolute certainty: the immigration officials now charged with this job make mistakes which run into the tens of thousands each year, so how can we expect a better standard of performance from other authorities even less well-equipped to properly interpret the immigration rules as they apply to individuals?

Perhaps the worst aspect of the Bill is the proposal to drastically reduce appeal rights against Home Office decisions on immigration applications. Poor decision-making is widespread amongst the immigration authorities, but at least those who can afford a decent solicitor to make their case against incompetence know that they currently have good chances of success. The latest figures show that up to 50% of appeals against Home Office decisions are supported by judges of the independent appeal authorities.

Will the Bill provide the government with the means to deter the types of immigrants who live outside the rules? We doubt it. The deterrence of illegal migration depends heavily on there being a common belief that the rules as they stand embody basic principles of justice, and that it is in the interests of the vast majority, including those subject to the rules, to uphold them.

The danger is that, with changes such as those in the Bill, the connections with fairness and justice are severed so that ever more migrants come to believe that the rules, rather than providing them with security, are intended to withhold precisely this from them and in its place offer a ‘hostile environment’. In this case we can be confident that more and more immigrants will steel themselves against such laws and their unfair effects, and learn instead how they might build resilience and survivability into the business of living and getting by in Britain.

If politicians are careless enough to allow that to happen, then rather than achieving better immigration management, we can expect instead to find ourselves living in an era of escalating loss of any semblance of control.

Read original story 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: How society manufactured ‘them’ and ‘us’, and spread the myth that it couldn’t be anything different

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Migrant Tales

By Don Flynn

Here’s a book which challenges the idea that the division between citizens and migrants is fundamental and couldn’t be any other way. Bridget Anderson argues that ‘them’ and ‘us’ are constituted out of different groups in different ways at all points in history. Progress has always meant overcoming these divisions, and building new forms of solidarity.

Read full story here.

Bridget Anderson’s work on immigration (Oxford University Press) is something you turn to if you are looking for approaches which challenge all the conventional prejudices which see it as a business in which those on the outside come across to grab stuff that belongs to those of us who live on the inside.

There is no real ‘outside’ anymore according to Anderson. The global processes of trade, commerce, financial markets, production supply chains, and the exploitation of labour resources wherever they are available has made everything into one vast ‘inside’. The real issue at stake is whether you are a relatively privileged insider who operates with the notion that you have a superior claim to all the good things that are lying around, or one of those who can be safely told to stand a long way back and keep their hands off.

Liberal lefties and outright conservatives are inclined to go along with notional divisions into ‘them’ and ‘us’ on the grounds that it supports a competitive economic system which facilitates rapid growth. There might be some injustice involved in telling Bangladeshi clothing workers that they can’t expect to fully participate in the enjoyment of the wealth they have helped create with their labour, but we can at least encourage them with the hope that some of it might trickle down to their children or grandchildren.

Bangladeshis working at the end of the long subcontracted chains that extend outwards from the high streets and the shopping malls of the developed world are probably going to be sceptical about the terms of this deal, but from the standpoint of the politicians who govern the lands of mature capitalism, they don’t really figure (or at least short of the mishap of watching their broken and twisted bodies dragged out from the rubble of the collapsed buildings they were condemned to work).

Social justice

From the standpoint of the national political elites, the genie that really has to be kept bottled up is the concern about the sense of social justice that exists amongst the citizen-consumers of their own lands, who might be troubled if they ever grasped to its fullest and truest extent the fact that their wealth and security has depended on cruel exploitation of those further down the line.

Anderson’s new book, Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control, is a polemic that aims to upset the ideological applecart that supports the notion that we owe greater duties of solidarity to those who have gone through all the bureaucratic procedures of modern, mass society and duly certified as being part of ‘us’ and thereupon relegating what is due to ‘them’ to the sort of activity associated with wearing red noses and singing along with Bono once a year.

Her very substantial contribution is to lay bare the social and economic processes which made us into ‘us’ in the first place. “The history of the world is unavoidably a history of mobility” she tells us. Peasant farmers are ‘liberated’ from the social relations which bound them to the land today just as they were 600 years ago in Britain when the Tudor magnates fashioned capitalism from out of their landed assets. In doing so they opened up vagrancy, marginality, criminality and insecurity as the routes which led, over time, to the production of a vast population of property-less wageearners who would service the profit-hunting needs of business. Out of these fires the first ‘us’ was forged.

However, emerging capitalism society presented 17^th century England with a startling new crisis when it was discovered that the cultural mores of feudalism were no longer sufficient to secure the class solidarity needed between the greater and lesser castes of property owners who now existed. Power had to be shared, and that meant an expanded role for the Parliament which kings and queens had once suffered to exist only to obtain a degree of consensus over the extortion of taxation from the population. Parliament, rather than the monarch, was judged to be sovereign, and that meant that the few percent which was entitled to participate in elections now needed to adopt new frames of thinking to support the developing sense of obligation and duty they had to one another. That frame was called ‘nationalism’ – the idea that membership of the same nation was the precondition for the trust and fellowship needed to order and secure society.

Rise of national solidarity

Anderson weaves the story of immigration into these historical segments, explaining that the genesis of our modern system of passports lay in the control the Tudor state wished to assert over the movement of its own subjects, rather than in dealings with foreigners. Under Parliament, as the Atlantic world was forged out of empire-building and the displacement of rival powers, the space for being one of ‘us’ was extended to those who were still two centuries away from having the vote, but whose loyalty and identification with the imperial mission needed to be obtained to provided the manpower for the ships of the Royal Navy and the foot soldiers of the chartered companies.

As modern stated became more bureaucratic to the notion of ‘us’ became embedded in the paperwork and filing systems which were needed to govern growing, potentially unruly populations. Anderson explores this in the context of the development of nationality law and, more recently, points-based systems of immigration control. To legitimise the complexity of the emerging system, with all its costs and infringements of personal liberty, a sense if the threat posed by the hoards of uncivilised others had to be ramped up. With the constant fear of having to deal with ‘them’, it seems that citizens have been made willing to carry the increasingly heavy burden of a security state which is less capable of providing welfare to its people, but which, at a minimum, can still be relied upon to keep ‘us’ safe.

Anyone reading this book should be prepared to encounter a tumult of ideas and insights which can be overwhelming at times, as Anderson is carried forward by the floodtide of her own logic. It is a long way from being a finished work. Its 180-odd pages are the sketch of a theory and approach to immigration which moves us far beyond the idea that this has to have the story that ‘them’ and ‘us’ are fixed categories that arise from the fundamental nature of things. But much more is there to be said about, for example, the logic of the welfare state, with its need to determine who merits the benefit of the services it provides, further structures and conditions our sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’.

This book challenges us to follow up by filling in and deepening the record of our own experiences of how modernity has fated us to live our lives as ‘us’ and ‘them’. What a gain it will be as we move to fill in all the blank spaces in this story, offering the hope that we can act and build on other principles of human solidarity as we understand more, and strengthen the hope that we will move beyond the confines of the divisive template that history has imposed on us all.

Read original story here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

Migrants’ Rights Network: EU Free Movement Under Threat

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Migrant Tales

Stewart Jackson’s Ten Minute Rule motion to curb EU free movement rights passed the first hurdle on its way to becoming law. Let’s hope no one in government seriously considers it as official policy.

Conservative MP Stewart Jackson continues his campaign against “barking mad” European Union law which supports the free movement of people across EU borders.

The motion put forward today in parliament states that EU citizens are to be allowed to enter and live in the UK only if they have a prior job offer, no criminal record, are in good health and remain barred from claiming social benefits. While Private Members’ Bills usually don’t get far in parliament, this should be seen as a bellwether for moods in government circles which are determined to place greater impediments in the way of exercising rights available to citizens under EU law.

Read the full article on the Huffington Post.

Read original story here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

Migrants’ Rights Network: Border controls against Greece? Be afraid – be very afraid……

Posted on May 28, 2012 by Migrant Tales

By Don Flynn

The sun has been brilliant over (most) of the UK for four whole days in a row and we are all extraordinarily happy. But if there’s an inkling of truth in the weekend’s news that emergency border control plans are being prepared against the arrival of Greek citizens, abandon hope for the balmy days of summer for years to come…..

The news, circulated over the last few days, that the Home Office is preparing contingency plans to control borders in the event of Greek exit from the euro can be read as evidence of just how bad the government thinks the crisis has the potential to become.

The only circumstances in which such a measure would be permissible under the terms of EU law are if a situation threatening basic public security arises. This has been permitted on limited occasions in the past, for example with the threat of public disorder instigated by travelling football hooligans, as during the European football championship in Germany in 2000, or the actions against anti-globalisation protestors intending to visit Genoa, Italy, in 2001 during the time of a G8 summit in the city.

More recent attempts to limit movement rights across EU frontiers have been intensely controversial. In April 2011 complaints were made against the French government’s alleged violation of rules of the Schengen Agreementwhen it reintroduced visa checks at its border with Italy with the intention of preventing the entry of North African nationals. The accusation here was that France had acted against its duty of solidarity with the Italian authorities by failing to undertake any assessment of the situation in Italy as a consequence of refugee movements induced by the ‘Arab Spring’ in Tunisia, and by not working in collaboration with its partners to deal with any issues arising.

Pity the poor middle classes

Schengen issues don’t arise in the context of what the Home Office is reporting to be considering in relation to Greece. Furthermore, the matter here is reported as being pressures arising from the movement of Greek citizens, rather than third country nationals, as in the French-Italian affair.

What can be expected if Greece does exit from the eurozone at any time in the near future, or even in the less dramatic case of continued super-austerity in the country? It can be expected that any person with euro-denominated assets to protect will want to ensure they are safely out the country if a ‘Grexit’ becomes inevitable. The UK’s readiness to convert crisis-hit euros into sterling will justify the cost of a trip to London for those who can still afford it. But the prospect of even longer queues to clear passport control at Heathrow seems feeble enough justification for not helping out the Greek middle classes in their hour of need, particularly when it is likely to be on terms of exchange considerably to the advantage of UK financial services.

The prospect of waves of currency transfers on the part of the Hellenic petty bourgeoisie doesn’t seem to be the scenario Mrs May is most in fear of during these next few months however. More likely she has in mind the flight of workers seeking opportunities to earn a wage given that this will not be possible for very many in their own country. The UK will doubtless be attractive to some of these refugees from economic disaster as they contemplate life outside their Mediterranean homeland.

Us, or Germany?

There are an estimated 300,000 Greek citizens already in Britain, and with 10.7 million left in Greece there’s some scope for growing that part of the UK’s population. Don’t raise your hopes too high though – a similar sized community is also established in Germany and with the economy of that country now enjoying growth and sucking in migrants at 16-year record levels, we can expect a fair bit of competition in terms of getting ‘the brightest and the best’.

Let’s get back to the fundamental question is whether EU law will even allow the Brits to put up the shutters against the arrival of Greek nationals. As explained above, in the absence of a plausible argument that they are coming here to consume large quantities of lager and riot over either the fortunes of their football team or the iniquities of global capitalism, the answer has to be no.

EU Directives make it absolutely clear however that restrictions on the right of free movement across frontiers “shall not be invoked to service economic ends.” This means that it will be a non-starter for the Home Office to argue that any exceptional measures are need to limited the rights of Greek citizens to come to the UK grounds in order to protect the jobs market for people already here.

End of the world as we know it?

But then again we are talking about circumstances that will arise from a disaster of such proportions – a Greek exit – that contamination will rip right the way across the southern European countries and savage the viability of every national economy on the continent for a decade to come. All bets are off on just about any issue in these circumstances. Whole chunks of European integration are likely to be thrown into reverse as borders are reinvented and nations begin to argue with one another about the proper way to divide up the assets which have accrued in a now-failed European single market. Nothing can be ruled out if this happens, including, for anyone who knows anything about the history of this region of the world, the re-emergence of national rivalry, rising political and economic tension, and even war between states.

It is dangers of this order which make the business of getting a united Europeto work again of absolutely critical importance to us all. Maintaining the right of free movement across national frontiers for citizens (and indeed, extending this to the entire region’s non-citizen residents) is a big part of what has to be preserved if things are not to take further turns for the worse. Because of this the UK government should be told to stop its irresponsible talk of curtailing free movement rights and get us back on track to escape austerity and return to growth.

Read original story here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.