Category: From Our Network Members

East Anglia Bylines: Migrants organise to beat ‘hostile environment’

The ‘hostile environment’ immigration policy has empowered one woman to volunteer for 15 years to promote justice and foster inclusion

I’ve been involved with a number of charities and grassroots community groups since 2009 – all of them working to soften the impact of the ‘hostile environment’ immigration policy. And to put a fairer system in place.

I’m also working for initiatives to educate asylum seekers on their human rights and provide them the platform to speak out. With women’s groups in particular, this is about creating communities where compassion, respect, inclusion and empowerment will enable women to reach their potential and have a say in what happens to them.

Supporting asylum seekers means amplifying their voices and campaigning on the issues that affect people seeking protection. We all work in solidarity to end the hostile environment. It is important to help asylum seekers to access advice and support, and develop their skills and confidence.

24 October 2023: Joseph Rowntree Foundation: Destitution in the UK 2023 report

This study, the fourth in the Destitution in the UK series, reveals approximately 3.8 million people experienced destitution in 2022, including around one million children. This is
almost two-and-a-half times the number of people in 2017, and nearly triple the number of children. There is an urgent need for action to tackle destitution in the UK.

There has been a shameful increase in the level of destitution in the UK, with a growing number of people struggling to afford to meet their most basic physical needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed. This has deep and profound impacts on health, mental health and people’s prospects; it also puts strain on already overstretched services.

27 August 2023: Thanks to Maddie Harris and Humans for Rights Network – StatusNow signatories – for exposing this terrible situation:

Guardian: Children reaching UK in small boats sent to jail for adult sex offenders

Human rights group finds growing number of cases of minors held among prisoners

Vulnerable children who arrive in Britain by small boat are being placed in an adult prison that holds significant numbers of sex offenders.

A growing number of cases have been identified where unaccompanied children, many of whom appear to be trafficked, have been sent to HMP Elmley, Kent, and placed among foreign adult prisoners.

According to the most recent inspection of Elmley, the block where foreign nationals are held also houses sex offenders.

Of 14 unaccompanied children so far identified by staff at Humans For Rights Network as being sent to an adult prison, one is believed to have been 14 when they spent seven months in Elmley.

7 August 2023: Intro: This opinion piece by some SNN members has been written quickly, soon after the British Refugee Council published its vision at the end of July 2023.  We wanted to respond as immediately and impactfully  as we could, to encourage further discussion within  the sector as a whole.  Hopefully,  alongside the British Refugee Council itself, more Network members and other groups and organisations in the sector will become engaged in the discussion going forward.

A contemporary and preliminary response from some Status Now Network members to the British Refugee Council’s Vision, published in July 2023, published here with an invitation to the Refugee Council to respond.  Thank you.  

Summary

To some of us in the  Status Now Network this British Refugee Council vision appears to abandon the principle of everyone’s basic right to claim asylum, preferring to pick and choose particular people that suits recent Government agendas. It was in the devastating wake of ‘picking and choosing’ that the 1951 convention came into existence.  Now is not the time to turn away from its principles – on any level.

15 June 2023: Left East: Fighting Structural Invisibility and Precarity: Interview with Julius-Cezar MacQuarie on the Nightworker Charter

By Julius-Cezar MacQuarie

[Extract] You have this wonderful insight  – namely you talk about the structural invisibility of migrant nightshift workers. It is clear that there is strong anti-migrant propaganda, and a significant portion of the local population is hostile to workers both in the UK and much of Central and Eastern Europe. In the UK, how does this invisibility appear from the perspective of migrant workers? I understand that such invisibility is a conscious choice also of migrant workers. What are the concrete experiences and your insights?

Transforming Society: It’s called scapegoating and it’s as old as divide and rule

The UK government is actively compounding the human suffering that intrinsically racist immigration laws inflict on people seeking asylum.

In fact, our participatory action research over the last 15 months about what is happening to the displaced people who have been placed in ‘contingency hotels’ simply reinforces our certainty that, from the government’s perspective, the more demonising and suffering inflicted on people seeking refuge here, the more the public hears about that suffering, and the more that government’s contractual cronies, such as Migrant Help, get away with not only doing nothing to stop it but actually heaping injury on top, the better.

It is essential, in fact, that the demonising – and coverage of it – continues.

Read more: https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2023/05/19/its-called-scapegoating-and-its-as-old-as-divide-and-rule/

Where does the buck stop? UK Home Office and other statutory body responses to allegations of human rights violations in two Serco-run hotels housing people seeking asylum by Rhetta Ann Moran and Gráinne McMahon for the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice is available on the Bristol University Press website here.