UK: Government halts ‘hostile environment’ immigration policy after Windrush scandal

2018/07/14 1 Comment

Undoing one of the legacies of the previous conservative home secretaries:

The government has halted its “hostile environment” policy for anyone over 30 to prevent more people being “wrongly and erroneously impacted” by the measures, following the Windrushscandal, the home secretary has said.

Sajid Javid said data sharing between the Home Office and other government departments, such as HMRC and the Department for Work and Pensions – as well as banks and building societies – has been suspended for three months for people of all nationalities aged over 30.

In a letter to the Home Affairs Select Committee, Mr Javid​ said the department was also looking at the best ways of evaluating the effectiveness of the policy – which he has renamed the “compliant” environment – to ensure there is “no adverse impact on individuals who have a right to be here and to access those services”.

The Home Office has so far issued documentation confirming a right to live in the UK to 2,125 people who contacted the Windrush hotline. Of these, 1,014 were born in Jamaica, 207 in Barbados, 93 in India, 88 in Grenada, 85 in Trinidad and Tobago and 638 were from other countries.

Some 584 people have so far been granted citizenship through the Windrush scheme.

The department is only in touch with 14 people who were wrongly deported, and no details have been given about their nationalities or whether any of them had been allowed to return to the UK. Contact has not been made with the majority of those wrongly deported or removed, the Home Office has said.

Labour MP Yvette Cooper, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said she was disappointed there was still no clarity about the number of people wrongly detained, and that the Home Office had “still not managed to make contact with the majority of those who were wrongfully deported or removed”.

“The committee is awaiting more information from the Home Office, which is expected by the end of this week, and will be asking further questions to follow up the information in the Home Secretary’s letter,” she said.

Mr Javid said officials were also reviewing cases where the Home Office has ordered other departments to deny or revoke services, or taken action to penalise a third party for employing or housing an unlawful migrant.

A final figure of those affected will not be available until the review is complete, he said.

The news comes after a damning report by the Home Affairs Select Committee said unless the Home Office was overhauled, the scandal “will happen again, for another group of people”.

The committee expressed concern for the children of EU citizens, saying the government should ensure they are not “locked out of living a lawful life, as we have seen happen to members of the Windrush generation”.

The MPs also said recent attempts by the government to rebrand its “hostile environment” policy the “compliant environment”, were “meaningless”.

Source: Government halts ‘hostile environment’ immigration policy after Windrush scandal

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Brits are changing their tune on immigrant workers – CNN

2018/07/13 Leave a comment

Interesting shift:

The number of people in the United Kingdom who say that migrants are good for the economy has risen sharply to 47%, according to the British Social Attitudes survey. Just over a third of Brits said the same in 2015, and only 21% in 2013.

The results suggest that attitudes toward immigrants have softened since the 2016 Brexit vote, which the official Vote Leave campaign framed as an opportunity to reduce the number of migrants coming to Britain from the European Union.

According to a survey published last year by YouGov, a desire to limit migration was the top reason Brits voted for Brexit.

A report that accompanied the British Social Attitudes survey, which was conducted by the independent social researcher NatCen, argued that the political debate may have changed some minds.

“There is little sign here that the EU referendum campaign served to make Britain less tolerant towards migrants; rather they have apparently come to be valued to a degree that was not in evidence before the referendum campaign,” researchers said.

Heather Rolfe, a researcher at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, said that the debate “has tended to emphasize the economic contribution of migrants in a way it wasn’t before.”

Economists have long argued that migrants tend to contribute more to the British economy than they take out. With unemployment at its lowest level in decades, and companies struggling to find workers, they’re now needed urgently.

“There is a growing realization that sectors such as health and social care need skilled migrants and that low-skilled migrants are needed in sectors like agriculture and hospitality,” Rolfe said. “It also reflects a small increase in concern that Brexit is bad for the economy.”

Attitudes toward immigration also shifted on another front: The survey showed that 44% of Brits think immigration has a positive impact on cultural life, up from from 31% in 2015.

Data from the UK Office for National Statistics show that more Europeans are coming to the United Kingdom than leaving, but the gap has narrowed.

Net migration from the European Union dropped to 90,000 in the year to September 2017, according to the latest available data. Net migration was 189,000 in the year leading up to the Brexit vote.

via Brits are changing their tune on immigrant workers – CNN

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Home Office separating scores of children from parents as part of immigration detention regime

2018/07/06 Leave a comment

The bad stories keep on coming:

The Home Office is separating scores of children from their parents as part of its immigration detention regime – in some cases forcing them into care in breach of government policy.

Schools, the NHS and social services have written letters to the department begging them to release parents from detention because of the damaging impact it is having on their children.

Bail for Immigration Detainees (Bid), a charity that supports people in detention, said they have seen 170 children separated from their parents by the Home Office in the past year – and believes there are likely to be many more.

While usually the youngsters remain in the care of their other parent, the charity has seen a number of cases where children are taken into local authority care as a result of the detention.

Case workers highlight that this is in breach of Home Office guidelines, which state that a child “must not be separated from both adults if the consequence of that decision is that the child is taken into care”.

In one case, three young children were taken into care for several days after their dad was detained earlier this year – an experience that left them traumatised and fearful that he will be “taken away” again.

Kenneth Oranyendu, 46, was detained in March while his wife was abroad for her father’s funeral. Despite the Home Office being aware of this, they kept him in detention and his four young children were forced to go into care.

The Independent has seen letters to the Home Office from public bodies in which teachers, social workers and medical workers inform officials of the detrimental impact the detention of parents is having on their children.

One letter to the Home Office from a head teacher states that the detention of the father of two of the “most delightful and brightest” pupils in the school would impact “significantly” on their emotional wellbeing.

“It is incredibly upsetting for the girls to suddenly have their father removed from their life. This distress, to what was a happy life for these girls, will no doubt impact significantly on their emotional wellbeing,” the letter states.

“It is deeply saddening that a member of our school community who is very much liked and respected by both staff and parents has been treated in this manner, and whilst he may just be a number to you he is a friend to all of us.”

Another letter to the Home Office, from a social worker in Southwark, warns that if a man in detention is not released in time for the birth of his unborn child in three weeks’ time then the baby would have to go into care.

“If [name of detainee] is not released in time for the baby’s birth, the child will be accommodated in local authority care and care proceedings will be initiated to secure the long-term care planning arrangements for the child,” it states.

“This is understandably a situation Southwark Children’s Services wish to avoid to prevent family breakdown.”

A third letter, from an NHS trust in London, urges the Home Office to release the father of a one-year-old girl who is suffering a bleed in her brain, saying: “He has accompanied [her] to all health and therapy appointments.

“He has received training and has undertaken daily therapy activities with [her] which have been key to her development. Being deported would place the immediate family in a vulnerable situation.”

Nick Beales, a legal case worker at Bid, told The Independent he had seen three cases in the past 18 months where children were placed in care because their parent was detained.

“The Home Office knew how much damage is going to be done. We get letters from schools, and social services are pleading with them to release people,” he said.

“We regularly get reports from schools of children’s behaviour deteriorating, their school work suffering. We get reports from parents of children wetting the bed, letters from social services raising concerns about children’s conduct.

“The initial decision to detain someone is usually made with very little assessment of what’s actually going on. It’s ‘detain first, ask questions later’. Any new evidence submitted falls on deaf ears. All rationality goes out of the window.”

Maddy Evans of SOAS Detainee Support, a campaign group supporting immigration detainees, told The Independent the Home Office had been “tearing parents away from their children for years”.

“These families do not know if they will be reunited or separated forever. Needless to say, this causes unbearable distress to many detainees and their families,” she said.

“This punitive and heartless policy of family separation not only has a devastating impact on parents who are separated from their children, or left to parent alone, it has lifelong ramifications for the children involved.

“It is absolutely unconscionable to put political point scoring on immigration above a child’s right to the care and love of their parents.”

The Home Office did not provide a formal comment but said it did not separate children from both adults for immigration purposes if it means the child would be taken into care, unless there are “exceptional circumstances”.

Source: Home Office separating scores of children from parents as part of immigration detention regime

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The Guardian view on attitudes to immigration: focus on people, not numbers

2018/06/30 Leave a comment

Sensible suggestion:

Given what is already known about the Home Office’s “hostile environment” policy, the discovery that hundreds of people, legally in the UK, were wrongly detained between 2010 and 2017 is not surprising. That makes it no less shocking.

Figures released to parliament’s home affairs select committee show that the government has paid tens of millions of pounds in compensation to victims of these egregious errors. But perhaps most illuminating is the revelation of staff bonuses for meeting “personal objectives” linked to enforced removals.

Confusion and obfuscation over deportation targets led ultimately to Amber Rudd’s resignation as home secretary. The use of financial incentives to meet targets adds another layer of perversion to a bureaucracy that plainly lost sight of the fact that it was dealing not with numbers but with human beings.

A lesson of the Windrush scandal is that public opinion towards real-life immigrants is more nuanced than public debate over the abstract thing called immigration. Harrowing individual stories elicited compassion and outrage. It was not a turning of the political tide, but it felt like a significant current.

Government policy is still skewed by the presumption that voters demand strict immigration regimes. That imperative is paramount in Theresa May’s conspicuously unsuccessful Brexit strategy. It comes as little consolation that the rest of the EU is struggling with the same issue. The difficulty in finding a common position on border control, and the potentially destabilising consequences of failing to do so, dominate the agenda at the European summit that began today.

There is no diplomatic bandwidth for discussing Brexit, and the UK is judged to have removed itself from any other top-table conversation among continental leaders. Yet even Brexit will not neutralise anti-immigration feeling in the UK, which pre-dates the leave campaign and was co-opted by it to foment hostility to the EU. Brexit was mis-sold as the antidote to deeper economic and cultural anxieties. Now it is a distraction from the task of addressing those concerns.

Liberal opinion has for years been divided on how to acknowledge concern about rapid demographic change without indulging prejudice. Not everyone who is worried about immigration is racist, but every racist resents immigration. Political rhetoric does not always permit nuanced distinction between the two positions. Trumpeting the economic benefits of immigration doesn’t persuade those who suspect such benefits are enjoyed by elites, elsewhere. But colluding in the narrative that immigration is a drain on prosperity does nothing to shift opinion towards greater tolerance.

There is no guaranteed method for spreading positive attitudes, but endorsing negative views in the hope of mollifying hostility hasn’t served the liberal cause well. A more effective device, as the Windrush scandal proved, is the telling of individual stories, tracing the contours of the real migrant experience as distinct from faceless abstraction.

Politicians who trade on fear of migrants achieve their goal by dehumanisation – conjuring sinister floods and hordes. The antidote is re-humanisation – bringing the conversation back to real people with real hopes and real contributions to make to society. The xenophobes are winning an argument framed around abstract numbers and targets. They can be disoriented, and ultimately defeated, when those numbers are shown to be human beings.

Source: The Guardian view on attitudes to immigration: focus on people, not numbers

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UK: Wrongful detention cost £21m as immigration staff chased bonuses

2018/06/30 Leave a comment

Yet more evidence of the rot within the Home Office’s approach to immigration:

The Home Office mistakenly detained more than 850 people between 2012 and 2017, some of whom were living in the UK legally, and the government was forced to pay out more than £21m in compensation as a result, officials have revealed.

Figures released to the home affairs select committee this week show there were 171 cases of wrongful immigration detention in 2015-16, triggering compensation payments totalling £4.1m, and 143 cases in 2016–17, triggering a further £3.3m in compensation.

Between 2012 and 2015 a total of £13.8m was paid out to more than 550 people after a period of unlawful immigration detention.

The document also reveals that bonuses were paid to both senior and junior Home Office staff according to whether targets for enforced removals from the country had been met. Some staff were set “personal objectives” on which bonus payments were made “linked to targets to achieve enforced removals”.

The detention figures give no detail about who was mistakenly held, although it is likely that these numbers contain some Windrush individuals who were wrongly sent to immigration removal centres or prisons ahead of deportation.

Cases are known of Windrush individuals who were nearly deported, such as Anthony Bryan, who was sent to an immigration detention centre last December and booked by Home Office staff on a flight back to Jamaica, a country he had not visited since he was eight. A last-minute intervention by an immigration lawyer meant his seat on the flight was cancelled and he was released from detention.

The home secretary, Sajid Javid, has promised to provide figures next month for how many Windrush people were wrongly put in immigration detention; he has already acknowledged that 63 Windrush people were deported in error.

At least 10 people were paid about £120,000 each in compensation in the past two years although the majority of payouts were £20,000 or less, the permanent secretary to the home office, Philip Rutnam, explained in a letter to the home affairs select committee chair, Labour’s Yvette Cooper.

A small number of individuals who were wrongly detained received just a nominal payment of £1. Compensation is determined in part on an assessment of the “initial shock” experienced by those detained and is based also on whether the individual had any criminal convictions.

Some of those who received compensation payments were living in the UK legally. Other compensation payments were made to people who had no leave to remain in the UK but who had been detained for too long.

Rutnam, the most senior Home Office official, tried to minimise the significance of the numbers detained mistakenly, noting that this represented a small proportion of the total detained under immigration enforcement measures.

“By way of scale comparison, to support enforcement of the UK’s immigration law over 27,000 people are detained each year under immigration powers, with up to 3,000 people detained in either the detention estate or prisons at any one time,” he wrote. “Ninety-five per cent of people who are liable to removal are managed in the community, rather than in detention.”

But Labour’s Stephen Doughty, who sits on the home affairs committee, said: “These figures expose what many of us have warned for months: that the government has been wrongfully locking up individuals as well as wrongfully deporting others.

“The immigration system needs root and branch reform. How are millions of EU nationals to have any confidence in a system that wrongly deports and locks up people?”

The letter also gives details of performance targets in place for enforced removals from the UK, noting that these were in operation as early as 2000 (under Labour) and continued after 2010 (referred to in a variety of different ways – sometimes as “objectives”, or “business goals” or sometimes simply as “levels of ambition”).

Rutnam acknowledges that civil servants working within immigration enforcement received performance bonuses for good work, some of which is related to removals. In 2016-17, 23% of people working in immigration enforcement received an end-of-year bonus.

Confusion over whether removals targets were in place led to the previous home secretary Amber Rudd’s resignation in April, when she said “that’s not how we operate” in response to questions from Cooper over removals targets. Rudd said later: “I wasn’t aware of specific removal targets. I accept I should have been and I’m sorry that I wasn’t.”

Rutnam indicates that targets will no longer be in operation for deportation, noting that Javid has said he wants to “take stock on targets overall” and “specifically that he does not believe in quantified targets for removals and this, of course, is the basis on which we will be proceeding in the future”.

Source: Wrongful detention cost £21m as immigration staff chased bonuses

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Will Sajid Javid force Theresa May’s hand on immigration? | Coffee House

2018/06/05 Leave a comment

Long overdue for a shake-up and undoing some of PM May’s legacy as Home Secretary:

Sajid Javid is losing no time establishing his personal authority as Home Secretary and making the case for change. I wrote in my Daily Telegraphcolumn two weeks ago that the test of his independence would be whether he’d pick a fight with Theresa May on Tier 2 visas: doctors, engineers and other skilled workers coming from outside the EU. That fight has now begun. Andrew Marr asked him why thousands of tier-2 skilled workers had been rejected recently, usually because they’re not earning £50k. Marr quoted one NHS manager saying it was “completely barmy”. It seems that the new Home Secretary agrees

“When that policy was put in place, there was a cap that was established: 20,700 a year of these highly-skilled immigrants. For years and years that cap wasn’t hit. It’s only in recent months that the cap has been hit. The doctor you refer to is probably referring to the fact that this includes a number of doctors who are qualified, that our NHS needs, who are being turned away.
I see the problem with that. It is something that I’m taking a fresh look at. I know a number of my colleagues certainly want me to take a look at this and that’s exactly what I’m doing. And I hope to think about this more carefully and see what can be done.”
His predecessor, Amber Rudd, tried to think “more carefully” about Tier 2 immigration – and, as Tony Blair might say, she still has scars on her back to prove it. The fights with No10 were vicious and she got nowhere. Theresa May is strongly against any relaxation of any immigration rules, remaining committed to her immigration target of 100,000 a year. Which shows no sign of being met.

Net migration

Mrs May has long loathed what she regards as the whining of her colleagues about immigration – she even moved Jo Johnson from his role as Universities Minister due to his campaign to have foreign students excluded from the net figure.

But Javid is showing defiance on students, too. “There is a perception problem around this,” he said. He admitted that he has “long considered” whether students should be taken out of the target.  And yes, he’ll review it. “It is something that I would like to look at again.” It’s not something the Prime Minister wants to look at again, but that doesn’t seem to concern him unduly.

So what about the “tens of thousands” target for net immigration, blurted out one day by Damian Green on a television sofa when the Tories were in opposition? “That’s a manifesto commitment of ours,” Javid said, glumly. When asked repeatedly if he is personally committed to that target, he would say only that he’s bound by the manifesto.

Marr asked him why Ruth Davidson is attacking the ‘tens of thousands’ target: the answer is that she has never stood as an MP and is, ergo, not bound by any Westminster manifesto. Javid is bound to the manifesto but evidently does not feel bound to Mrs May’s Home Office policies. As he said, his Cabinet colleagues are with him on this – and he’s listening to them, not to her. The question is whether she will, as a result, now listen to him and change the Tier-2 visa policy. Watch this space.

via Will Sajid Javid force Theresa May’s hand on immigration? | Coffee House

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ICYMI: UK Government U-turn over anti-terror law used to deport migrants

2018/06/01 1 Comment

Yet another example of apparent mismanagement by the Home Office:

The government has agreed to stop deporting people under an immigration rule designed to tackle terrorism and those judged to be a threat to national security pending a review, after the Guardian highlighted numerous cases in which the power was being misused.

The news came as the home secretary, Sajid Javid, admitted on Tuesday that at least 19 highly skilled migrants had been forced to leave the country under the rule.

A review of the controversial section 322(5) of the Immigration Act was announced in a letter to the home affairs select committee.

Javid said one person had been issued with a visa to return to the UK as a result of ongoing inquiries. He also said that all applications for leave to remain that could potentially be refused under the section have been put on hold pending the findings of the review, which is due to be completed by the end the month.

Javid’s letter to the home affairs select committee also admitted that the Home Office’s use of the clause – condemned as “truly wicked” and “an abuse of power” by MPs and experts – could have spread to other applications, including that of any migrant applying for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) who might have been asked to submit evidence of earnings.

At least 1,000 highly skilled migrants seeking indefinite leave to remain in the UK are facing deportation under the section of the act.

The high-tax paying applicants – including teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers and IT professionals – have been refused ILR after being accused of lying in their applications for making minor and legal amendments to their tax records.

The controversial paragraph comes with devastating conditions. Migrants, some who have lived here for a decade or more and have British-born children, immediately become ineligible for any other UK visa. Many are given just 14 days to leave the UK while others are allowed to stay and fight their cases but not to work.

In addition, those deported under the terrorism-associated paragraph will have that permanently marked on their passports, making it highly unlikely they will ever get a visa to visit or work anywhere else in the world.

In one case exposed by the Guardian the applicant’s tax returns were scrutinised by three different appeal courts who had found no evidence of any irregularities.

Other cases included a former Ministry of Defence mechanical engineer who is now destitute, a former NHS manager currently £30,000 in debt, thanks to Home Office costs and legal fees, who spends her nights fully dressed, sitting in her front room with a suitcase in case enforcement teams arrive to deport her, and a scientist working on the development of anti-cancer drugs who is now unable to work, rent or access the NHS.

The same figures were nevertheless used as the basis for a refusal because of basic tax errors allegedly made by the Home Office itself.

Commenting on the home secretary’s letter, the Labour MP Yvette Cooper, chair of the committee, said: “We’ve heard of a series of cases of highly skilled workers, employed in our -public services and senior jobs legally for many years, now being told to leave apparently due to minor tax errors.

“So it is welcome that the home secretary is now reviewing all those cases and putting decisions on hold.”

A group of about 20 MPs and a member of the House of Lords have establish separate pressure groups to persuade the Home Office to stop deporting highly skilled migrants under the terms of the section.

The home affairs select committee highlighted the issue after questioning Caroline Nokes, the immigration minister, about it in early May.

A few days later, they publicly accused the Home Office of being unfit for purpose and guilty of “shambolic incompetence” after the Guardian found letters written by Nokes that appeared to contradict her claim that she had only recently learned of the Home Office’s use of the section.

via Government U-turn over anti-terror law used to deport migrants | UK news | The Guardian

And one more:

A wave of devastating incidents of vital personal papers being lost in immigration cases has led to renewed calls for the Home Office to overhaul the way it handles documents.

The problem has been so severe that at its peak the department routinely mislaid thousands of files, a former senior immigration official said.

In the wake of the coverage of the Windrush scandal, the Guardian has spoken to people whose immigration status has been left in limbo after documents submitted to the Home Office have vanished.

Despite this the Home Office has never made a voluntarily self-referral to the data protection watchdog over lost papers.

Yvette Cooper, the chair of the influential home affairs select committee, said: “This is a question of basic competence. Too often we have heard about lost documents and simple errors by the Home Office that can have deeply damaging consequences for people’s lives.

“The Home Affairs committee and the independent inspectorate have warned the Home Office repeatedly to improve the competency and accuracy of the immigration system.

“It’s crucial they get the basics right. We’ve even recommended digitising and changing the system so people don’t have to submit so many original documents in the first place, given the risk of loss and delay.

“But ultimately this is linked to weaknesses in the Home Office casework system that urgently need to be sorted out. The immigration system is far too important a public service for these kinds of mistakes to be acceptable, or for repeated warnings from the inspectorate and the select committee to be ignored.”

The Guardian has heard cases ranging from lost birth certificates, children’s passports going missing, education certificates disappearing and appeal bundles misplaced.

Vital immigration papers lost by UK Home Office | UK news | The Guardian

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Black Britons and belonging: Meghan Markle versus the Windrush generation: Balkissoon

2018/05/19 2 Comments

Appropriate and sharp contrast:

There are two big stories right now about black migrants in Britain, but only one is fun to pay attention to.

That would be that Meghan Markle, an American with a black mother and white father, is marrying Prince Harry. A beautiful, biracial commoner starring in a royal wedding is a fairy tale about race and Britishness the Crown can get behind. It’s a much better image than half a million black and brown citizens facing possible deportation.

But that, too, is currently happening: In fact, the Windrush scandal, as it’s known, became public around the same time as the Royal engagement, last November. That’s when The Guardian began publishing stories about people losing their health benefits, being put into immigration detention or being deported even though they had been citizens since birth.

These Britons were born in pre-independence Commonwealth countries, once considered far-flung parts of Britain itself. After the Second World War, when the U.K. was hit with a serious labour shortage, it appealed to the Queen’s global subjects to fill the void. Among the thousands that answered the call were the passengers of the MV Empire Windrush, which landed in June 1948 full of British citizens from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean islands.

That ship’s name has become a rallying cry for a generation: West Indians, South Asians and others who were told that arriving before the early 1970s gave them “the right to remain” in their supposed mother country. The problem is that now, decades later, much of the Windrush generation don’t have the paperwork to prove when they got there.

Many were children when they arrived, travelling on their parents’ passports. Few knew that the government was in possession of ship landing cards that could prove their arrival date – or that in 2010, the U.K. Border Agency began destroying them.

Two years after legal proof that thousands of mostly non-white people had a right to be in the U.K. disappeared, then-Home Secretary (or immigration minister) Theresa May introduced “hostile environment” policies meant to deter unwanted migrants. At least 50,000 of the over 500,000 Commonwealth citizens who moved to the U.K. in the Windrush period don’t have British passports: thousands of lives have been disrupted.

Sylvester Marshall, for example, learned he was an “illegal immigrant” when he went to replace a lost driver’s license. Mr. Marshall, who has worked and paid taxes in the U.K. for 44 years, had his cancer treatment delayed when he suddenly became ineligible for health-care.

Most of these people are senior citizens now, and many have lost their jobs or their rental homes or been put into immigration detention. At least 63 people seem to have been wrongfully deported, dark-skinned collateral damage in Ms. May’s anti-immigration offensive.

Meanwhile, Kensington Palace has bravely embraced its first openly non-white family member (rumours swirl about the possible African ancestry of Queen Charlotte, born in 1744). Prince Harry told the tabloids to stop being mean to his girlfriend, Princess Michael of Kent was made to apologize for wearing racist jewellery and the rest of us are supposed to be impressed.

Many are accepting these crumbs from the royal table, such as young Tshego Lengolo, who lives in working-class southeast London. The 11-year-old told the New York Times that she knows what it’s like to move to a new country, and that she’s ready to be Ms. Markle’s friend. My heart hurts for children fooled by such sad scraps of belonging, but I have no time for adult women penning paeans to the first “black princess.”

First of all, Ms. Markle will likely be given the title of duchess, which is a yawn. More importantly, like Kate Middleton and Diana Spencer before her, she’ll be giving up her career to be a wife. None of the bridesmaids in her wedding party will be little black girls like Tshego, and any children she bears will never reach the throne.

As far as updating the monarchy as a symbol for the modern world, these nuptials are fairly surface level − especially in a country coping with a scandal like Windrush.

Ms. Markle isn’t jumping the citizenship queue: becoming officially British will take her about three years. Perhaps that’s enough time for the Windrush generation to achieve fairness. There’s been a flurry of apologies and resignations, and talk of compensation is growing louder.

Will those who lost their jobs be given back pay? Will Mr. Marshall survive his cancer? By 2021, Ms. Markle will officially be a black Briton and, maybe, the Windrushers who were sent away will have made it back home.

via Black Britons and belonging: Meghan Markle versus the Windrush generation – The Globe and Mail

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Immigration has been good for Britain. It’s time to bust the myths

2018/05/18 Leave a comment

Revealing media and other analysis underlying the opinions:

Cut the niceties. Skip the jargon. Let us speak the plain truth, however ugly. What is driving this country headlong into a chaotic and punishing Brexit is a blind desire to cut immigration. That’s why people voted to leave the EU, politicians and pundits tell us. That’s what makes a Norway-style deal impossible, since it would almost certainly allow freedom of movement with mainland Europe – and any prime minister accepting that would be strung up by the press for treachery.

As long as Brexit is a synonym for keeping out foreigners, there can be no hope for meaningful compromise with the rest of the EU. The Lords can inflict endless defeats on Theresa May. An entire dinosaur gallery of has-been politicians can clamber on rice sacks to issue grave warnings. All will be drowned out by this one guttural roar.

Yet the anti-migrant arguments are a toxic alloy of barefaced lies and naked bigotry. None are new. But they were feverishly circulated in the days before the 2016 referendum. This time, crucially, migrants were made scapegoats for the misery caused by the government’s own drastic spending cuts – for a buckling NHS, a cash-starved school system and falling wages.

The definitive guide to how that happened is a study from King’s College London, which analyses almost 15,000 articles published online during the Brexit campaign by 20 news outlets, including the BBC and all the national papers. Despite its thoroughness, the media has barely covered it – perhaps unsurprisingly given what it implies about the state of our press.

Researchers found immigration to be the most prominent issue in the 10 weeks running up to the vote, leading 99 front pages. Of those, more than three-quarters were from the four most virulently leave newspapers: the Sun, the Mail, the Express and the Telegraph. Brexiteers fed their papers’ scare stories about immigration – no matter how scurrilous. Recall how Penny Mordaunt and the Vote Leave campaign claimed that Turkish murderers and terrorists were queueing up to come to the UK. Never mind that David Cameron immediately decried the lie. Never mind that this is the same country for whose tyrant leader Mordaunt, Theresa May and the rest rolled out the red carpet this week. Anything to fling some mud and get a headline.

“When not associated with rape, murder or violence, migrants were often characterised as job stealers or benefit tourists,” observes the academics’ report. So grab-handedly abhorrent were these newcomers that they were simultaneously taking our jobs and stealing our dole money. Or else they were jostling British mothers out of maternity wards and cramming their kids into British classrooms.

Such poisonous stories were happily ventriloquised by Boris Johnson, Liam Fox, Chris Grayling and Michael Gove. Their reward for helping to generate the hatred that will scar this country for years was, naturally, a big job in government. Their targets, on the other hand, have to live in a society in which racial prejudice is not just normalised but tacitly encouraged by cabinet ministers.

Yet time and time again, the politicians’ claims were false. The men and women who have come here from Budapest or Prague are like previous generations of arrivals: young, educated at someone else’s expense and here to work. They aren’t low-skilled labour but what former government economist Jonathan Portes describes as “ordinary, productive, middle income, middle-skilled – the sort of people our economy actually needs”. Study after study has failed to find any evidence of significant undercutting of wages. Far from jumping the queue, analysis published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows they are much less likely to be on benefits or in social housing than their UK-born counterparts.

Migrants from eastern Europe pay billions more in taxes to Britain than they take out in public spending. Far from squeezing hospitals and schools, they subsidise and even staff them. Rather than take jobs, they help create them. What has drained money from our public services and held down our wages is the banking crash, and the Tories’ spending cuts. As former Bank of England rate-setter David Blanchflower concludes in a forthcoming book on Brexit and Trump: “Government-imposed austerity has meant their money [migrants’ taxes] has not been used to finance the services they are entitled to, hence the overcrowding.” In one of the most breathtakingly cynical moves of our time, the very same ministers making the cuts looked at the fallout they created – and blamed migrants.

The Tories haven’t created this climate alone, of course. From Tony Blair to Ed Miliband, Labour leaders have marched alongside, muttering about “legitimate concerns” and handing out anti-immigration mugs. Forget about the evidence or leadership or having a backbone. Never mind the surveys showing that however much people dislike immigration in the abstract, they appreciate migrants.

Imagine Labour repealing gay marriage to placate misguided voters, or restricting women from working in order to boost wages for men. You cannot. But torching non-British workers in order to score political points is still deemed acceptable.

As shadow home secretary Diane Abbott observed , the point about pandering to racism – or whatever euphemistic camouflage you want to stick on it – is that it’s a beast whose appetite is never satisfied. One day the target is immigrants without documents; the next it’s a “swarm” of Poles and 100 Indian doctors blocked from taking up their hospital jobs; and by the end of the week it’s 63 of the Windrush generation deported, and countless more plunged into poverty and homelessness.

Having spoken up for migrants during the referendum, Jeremy Corbynthankfully does not share this same soft racism. But neither is he doing enough to challenge it. Among the six tests Labour’s Keir Starmer has set for Brexit is the familiar dog-whistle about “fair management of migration”.

Labour frontbenchers evidently believe they have to promise a Brexit that is sufficiently racist for the press and the hard right. In the old Blairite days, we’d have called this triangulation – take minority-ethnic support for granted, while wooing leave voters. Whatever it’s called, it’s a tawdry tactic that soon gets rumbled.

The point about opinions is that they can be shifted. Just see what Corbyn’s team has achieved on austerity in two years. What was once an economic orthodoxy is now recognised as a failure – because Labour stood up for both the evidence and its own better instincts. There are plenty of parallels here: a policy dreamed up by the Tory right, to which the left shamefacedly paid lip service; a mounting body of evidence that it was wrong; and at ground level a lasting legacy of stunted and broken lives. Austerity was urgent in 2010, essential in 2015 and is a relic in 2018. Much of the credit for that should go to Corbyn’s party. Now it should do the same with immigration.

Or else, as one Corbynite frontbencher admits: “You can’t keep telling West Yorkshire one thing, and Islington another.” And you won’t avert a hard Brexit until you face down the intolerance that is driving it.

Source: Immigration has been good for Britain. It’s time to bust the myths

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Sadiq Khan: UK citizenship fees leave children in limbo

2018/05/15 1 Comment

In Canada, issue is adult fees of $530 (plus $100 right of citizenship). Previous government did not change fees for children ($100 plus $100 for the same right of citizenship):

Children and teenagers born in Britain are being left in limbo without access to education or employment because of £1,000 fees to gain citizenship, Sadiq Khanhas said, saying the government may face another Windrush-style scandal.

The mayor of London said the fees many young people were forced to pay were unacceptably high, given that most had lived most or all of their lives in the UK, but did not officially have British citizenship.

Most of the young people involved came to the UK with their parents as babies or small children, or were born in the UK to parents who migrated here.

Most teenagers do not realise they do not have secure status until they apply for post-18 education and are rejected because they cannot access funding or student loans. Instead, universities will class them as international students, charging them tens of thousands of pounds.

Without settled status, young adults may find themselves unable to rent a home, access healthcare, open bank accounts or start a job, under “hostile environment” restrictions introduced by the government, once they leave full-time education.

More than 159,000 Londoners aged 24 and under were found to be in this position by research from 2007. Khan said he was commissioning research to understand whether the problem had risen since new immigration restrictions came into force over the past decade.

“The recent Windrush scandal has shone a light on an immigration system that is simply unfit for purpose,” Khan said. “These young Londoners have lived most, if not all, of their lives in this country.”

Khan said it was shameful that young people, many born in Britain, found themselves barred from working or learning.

The mayor said the government “profit on their circumstances, despite the amazing contribution they make to our city and our country”.

The government needed to both streamline the application process and waive the “astronomically high” fees to affirm their citizenship, he added.

In April 2018, the cost for a child to register as a British citizen was £1,012 and £1,330 for an adult to naturalise their citizenship. The charity Citizens UK has calculated that much of the fee is profit – about £640 – compared with the £372 administration cost.

Those who were not born in the UK, but were brought to London as young children, face additional immigration fees of £8,521 over a 10-year period.

The executive director of Citizens UK, Neil Jameson, said it was “a huge own goal to deprive young people with bright futures of education when now more than ever Britain needs to extend a hand of welcome”.

The sums can put huge pressures on families who wish to register their children as British citizens, which is possible after a child has been in the country for 10 years. Some parents may still have uncertain immigration status, with no right to work and no recourse to public funds, meaning they can be effectively destitute.

…A Home Office spokeswoman said the fees took into account the wider costs of running the immigration system, saying it was “funded by those who benefit from it” in order to reduce taxpayer expense.

“There are exceptions to visa application fees to protect the most vulnerable, such as for young people who are in the care of a local authority,” she added.

Source: Sadiq Khan: UK citizenship fees leave children in limbo

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , ,

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