How the UK immigration system hurts people: January 2021
This year I will be writing a monthly recap of news stories showing the latest cruelty of the UK immigration system.
Why I’m writing this post: fundraising and raising awareness in 2021
I’m spending 2021 doing a monthly running challenge to fundraise for the Join Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI).
Read my blog post about why I’m fundraising for JCWI
As part of the fundraiser, I will be writing a monthly blog post on:
- how the monthly running challenge went (on my running blog)
- what happened in the world of UK immigration in the past month (here on Medium)
I don’t want to just fundraise for an immigration charity. I don’t want to just talk about my running. I want people to understand the horrors I read about on a daily (not exaggerating) basis about how this country’s immigration system hurts people.
This follows on from my Twitter thread/Medium post I published in October that described the abuses of the system and ended with a call to action to end the hostile environment.
Since publishing that post, I have only continued to read about further abuses. And they will keep happening because this system was designed to hurt people.
So I will keep a monthly log to highlight just how much terribleness happens in 28 to 31 days. Maybe at some point enough will be enough?
On that note, here’s how the UK immigration (and asylum) system has hurt people over January 2021.
Planning to shorten jail time needed for deportation from 12 to 6 months
We only made it to day 2 of 2021 before it was announced the Home Secretary was considering plans to make it even easier to deport people who:
- commit a crime in the UK
- serve their sentence in the UK
- but just happen to be born somewhere else
Priti Patel looks to cut jail term needed for deportation (The Times)
The Government likes to make it look like they are deporting a bunch of murderers and rapists, but as pointed out in this must-read thread, 6-month sentences include things like “petty theft, cannabis, minor offences like fraud”.
As also mentioned in the thread, this is double punishment for immigrants. British citizens who commit crimes serve their time. Immigrants who commit crimes serve their time and then may be exiled from their home.
Pushing ahead with deportations during lockdown
Despite the fact January has brought in new lockdown measures in the UK, the Home Office went ahead with deportation flights.
Not fast-tracking payments to Windrush victims despite promise
The Home Secretary promised an overhaul to the Windrush compensation scheme 14 December 2020. This included fast-tracked payments of £10,000 for all eligible claimants.
On New Year’s Day, 31 Windrush victims signed a letter to the Home Secretary addressing the fact that this has not taken place:
None of us has received this fast-tracked payment, despite having some of the furthest advanced cases, nor are we aware of any other victims having received it. More alarmingly, not one of the caseworkers to whom we have spoken knows about this policy; in all cases, we were told to wait to be contacted by email at some indeterminate point in the future.
Making immigrants and asylum seekers attend unnecessary in-person appointments in lockdown
This includes making an asylum seeker and lawyer physically travel to appointment that would be conducted over video call.
It also includes making immigrants whose biometrics (fingerprints) are already stored by the Home Office travel many miles to give them again.
Closing a detention centre due to a Covid-19 outbreak, but then moving detainees to another centre 40 miles away
The Home Office transferred detainees:
- after an outbreak,
- during a national lockdown,
and they also would not confirm whether those detainees were tested for Covid-19 before moving them.
Closing another detention centre due to a Covid-19 outbreak
This was a week after the previous story.
A reminder that in a time of international travel bans, the Government is making an active choice to continue deporting people.
Blaming asylum seekers for a Covid-19 outbreak after housing them in 20+ people dorms
The Home Office has decided to house asylum seekers in incredibly dangerous conditions in the middle of a pandemic.
Lawyers have said the conditions at the barracks, which see residents sleeping metres apart and around 15 to a room with sheets hanging between them, may breach the law, and have accused the Home Office of trying to “avoid scrutiny” of the situation.
There have also been suicide attempts at the barracks.
Unsurprisingly, with some rooms housing more than 20 people, people started catching Covid-19.
This quote from one of the asylum seekers in Napier Barracks is particularly jarring:
I’m scared. Yesterday and this morning I didn’t go to get my food because I was too scared and I feel unwell. One guy in this dorm has been coughing a lot in recent days and has fever. The conditions here risk the spread of coronavirus.
I just fled the war from Yemen and I came to the UK to seek safety, but in the end I might end up dying from coronavirus in a barracks.
The Government decided to take no responsibility for these conditions and instead blame the asylum seekers for getting sick.
Here is the response from Chris Philips, Minister for Immigration Compliance and the Courts, blaming the asylum seekers:
Despite our best efforts a number of those accommodated at the site have tested positive for coronavirus and are self-isolating.
It is incredibly disappointing that prior to this a number of individuals refused tests and have been either refusing to self-isolate or follow social distancing rules, despite repeated requests to do so and these being national guidelines to protect the NHS and save lives.
These individuals could face enforcement action and are not only risking their own health but the health of staff looking after them and the communities who are accommodating them.
After all this bad press, the Home Office did apparently move some Napier Barracks asylum seekers with a negative Covid-19 test to hotels to make it easier to social distance.
But then again, this tweet came two days after that article showing that 14 people (with a mix of positive and negative Covid tests) were still having to sleep in the same dorm.
Threatening asylum seekers’ claims if they complain about conditions
The contractors working at the refugee camps are telling asylum seekers their claims could be negatively affected if they speak out about the conditions they are living in, or even go on hunger strike.
Arresting a journalist for photographing a protest of the camp conditions
There was a protest at the Napier Barrack asylum camp involving buckets of fake blood.
A journalist took a photo of it. He was later arrested on suspicion of criminal damage of a dwelling.
Caring more about taxpayer money than human lives after a fire at Napier Barracks
A fire broke out at Napier Barracks which has been housing hundreds of asylum seekers.
The Home Secretary responded to the event by saying it was “deeply offensive to the taxpayers of this country who are providing this accommodation while asylum claims are being processed”.
No concern for any potential injury or loss of life for the people there. Just concern for a taxpayer-funded building they’re shoving a bunch of people into during a pandemic and wondering why people are getting sick.
Leaving asylum seekers without electricity or heating after the Napier Barracks fire
A reminder that this is in January.
Putting asylum seekers in unsafe living conditions so the public didn’t think they were being treated too well
As it turns out, the reason the Home Office housed asylum seekers in old military barracks was to appease the racists of this country who would think housing them in a hotel was too generous.
It has now emerged that the Home Office, in its equality impact assessment of the plans to use [Ministry of Defence] MoD sites to house asylum seekers, justified the move by stating that housing these individuals in more “generous” accommodation would “undermine public confidence in the asylum system”.
Sign the petition to close the camps
Disgusted with everything you just read? Sign this petition calling for the camps to be closed.
Preventing medical staff from working because of delayed documentation
In the middle of a pandemic, the Home Office is placing further burden on the NHS by failing to issue foreign-born medical professionals evidence of their right to work.
This includes:
- immigrants who have received their work visa but are waiting on the biometrics residence permits (BRPs) which prove their right to work
- asylum seekers who are allowed to work in shortage occupations if they have been waiting for a decisions on their asylum claim for over a year
Being so abusive that Conservative party members are calling the Home Office out on it
While not a story about a specific incident, it’s worth drawing attention to these two interviews with Conservative members who gave damning indictments of Home Office practices.
Caroline Nokes calls the system “inhuman”
Caroline Nokes, former Minister of State for Immigration (2018 to 2019), described the current approach to UK immigration and asylum as “inhuman”.
Some stand-out quotes from her interview with The Independent include calling out plans to move asylum seekers into camps with no electricity or running water:
The Home Office went through so much pain over Windrush; the home secretary herself has described it as a stain on the Home Office. And yet it appears that we don’t care that putting asylum seekers in a camp with no water might also be regarded as a shameful stain on the Home Office.
Acknowledging how costly these policies are:
It will cost more — that’s my analysis. My fear is that this new system is actually going to just add time, add complication, and therefore all that does is add cost. So I don’t think that this is any solution.
Questioning the UK Borders Act 2007, which states the current rule to deport non-British citizens who are sentenced to jail for at least a year:
If you have somebody that serves their sentence and then has an unblemished record, should we still be relying on a piece of legislation that’s 13 years old and doesn’t allow discretion? Do we believe in rehabilitation of offenders? I think we probably do.
Iain Duncan Smith calls out Home Office for not helping modern slavery victims
A day after that interview was published, former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith called out the Home Office for using immigration control as an excuse for not helping modern slavery victims.
This had to do with opposition from a Home Office minister to the Modern Slavery (Victim Support) Bill. The bill would give a minimum of 12 months’ leave to remain in the UK for modern slavery victims.
Smith said:
Immigration control is nothing to do with this. If the Home Office officials want to blur the lines, then they are the guilty parties. They will find it much more difficult to prosecute those who are guilty of manipulating lives and abusing people.
Untrained Home Office staff dealing with deportation appeals
A report from the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration had this to say about presenting officers, the civil servants who represent the government in appeals:
PO [Presenting Officer] training was one area where stakeholders expressed serious concerns…inspectors found that some deportation cases had been assigned in error to POs who had not received the training.
Here’s a summary of the report on Free Movement:
Holding firm on the cruel minimum income requirement for family visas
Background: you cannot sponsor a non-British spouse to live with you in the UK if you don’t earn the minimum income requirement of £18,600. This is a figure over 40% of Brits don’t earn.
Eight years after this policy was implemented, the December 2020 annual report from the Migration Advisory Committee said the impact of the minimum income requirement should be reviewed.
In a nutshell, they basically said they previously had focused too much on the fiscal benefits of family migrants, and not enough attention to the fact that maybe people are happier if they get to live in the same country as their spouse and children.
Stuart McDonald MP asked for a follow-up response, and the Government replied:
Our overall assessment is…the minimum income requirement [is] having the right impact and [is] helping to ensure public confidence in the immigration system by ensuring family migration is not based on access to the welfare system paid for by taxpayers.
A reminder that immigrants do not have access to public funds, so this statement is a lie.
Also a reminder that immigrants form part of the public.
Continuing to not measure whether the hostile environment works
There have been many reports showing that the Home Office does not actually measure whether hostile environment policies achieve their goal — to get unauthorised immigrants to leave the UK.
This latest report is specifically about not measuring the effectiveness of sanctions and penalties. For example, companies can be fined if they hire someone who does not have the right to work in the UK.
From the report:
The inspection found that current measures [for the use of sanction and penalties] have been introduced piecemeal, with little evidence of consistency or coherence in their design or in their application, and no evidence of an overall strategy or underpinning rationale, beyond a broad understanding that their primary purpose is to encourage compliance rather than simply to punish breaches of the Rules.
This isn’t the most captivating of headlines, but my takeaway from this (and other reports) is that there’s no strategy behind the policy decisions that ruin people’s lives.
Because it’s not about strategy or measuring outcomes. It’s for show. It’s to appease a vocal minority of anti-immigrant (read: racist) voters.
Continuing to not suspend No Recourse to Public Funds (and lying about who this rules applies to)
Once again, the Government has chosen not to suspend immigrants’ inability to access public funds during the pandemic.
Except this time, the PM made it sound like this stipulation — called No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF)— is something applied to people who are here “illegally and unlawfully”.
To be clear, that is a lie. ‘Legal’ immigrants also cannot access public funds until they get permanent residency.
So in a pandemic, when staying home helps saves lives, NRPF forces immigrants to go into work because they have no access to the social safety net. Even though by working they are paying into it.
I wrote a delightful little Twitter thread about the PM’s journey of learning what NRPF is for the first time, to this latest news story:
Planning to build an immigration detention centre instead of affordable housing
A former detention centre in the North-East was set to turn into 127 affordable new homes.
Then the Government stepped in and said no, let’s build another detention centre instead.
Not giving migrant healthcare workers permanent residency
There’s a bill calling for migrant healthcare workers to receive indefinite leave to remain. This would mean they are no longer subject to immigration controls.
There was meant to be a second reading of the bill on 15 January, but this was then cancelled.
So these healthcare workers, who continue to risk their lives to save British citizens, will have to live with the continued risk that their right to live here could be taken away.
Making a refugee suicidal by refusing to accept his date of birth
A refugee lost his appeal in a legal battle with the Home Office over an incorrect age assessment.
The refugee says he is 26, born in 1994. The Home Office claims he is 31, and have put a 1989 date of birth on his residence permit. They will not accept the 1994 DOB because there is no ‘hard evidence’ to establish this.
This whole ordeal has left him suicidal and made him go on hunger strike.
This tweet sums up what needs to be said about this case:
Refusing to help a pregnant asylum seeker who then lost her baby
Just read the tweet.
Denying immigrant healthcare workers in England the Covid-19 vaccine if they haven’t registered with a GP yet
Let’s break this down:
- There’s a system for recording details of healthcare workers who have received a vaccine.
- The system needs a person to have an NHS number to be uploaded to the system.
- Immigrant staff might not have this number if they haven’t registered with a GP yet.
- The response to this has been: don’t vaccinate people without an NHS number.
What this all means: constraining ourselves to a design flaw wins out over protecting people’s lives.
Keeping EU citizens in limbo by not giving out quick decisions on settled status applications
There’s a massive backlog of settlement scheme applications, with some people waiting six months or more for a decision.
This has very serious implications now that the Brexit transition period has ended. Even though you can apply to the scheme until the end of June, employers, landlords, and banks are still checking documentation.
If you don’t yet have the documentation to say you can legally live in the UK, you could very easily be denied opportunities or services.
Asking EU citizens at the UK border for physical proof of status which the Home Office won’t give them
This is very bad for two reasons:
- Border officials are asking for proof of status when they are not meant to. The EU Settlement Scheme deadline is 30 June 2021.
- They are also asking for physical documentation when the Home Office is only providing EU citizens with digital status.
If border agents don’t understand how proof of status works for EU citizens, how are we expecting employers and landlords to?
Two Maltese citizens sought support from the Maltese Embassy in London, after they were asked for proof of their residence in Britain when they tried to reenter the country at Heathrow airport earlier this month. “In both cases the Maltese Citizens held pre-settled status as granted under the EU Settlement Scheme and in both cases there seems to have been a misunderstanding at the U.K. border concerning the lack of physical proof of the said status,” a Maltese diplomat said.
Letting EU citizens become criminalised overnight by not lifting the EU Settlement Scheme deadline
A report from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants has shown that 1 in 7 EU citizen care sector workers were unaware they had to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme.
Not applying means they, along with every other EU citizen who doesn’t realise they need to apply, become unauthorised immigrants as of 1 July 2021.
The UK Government didn’t have to set a deadline, and more importantly, they didn’t have to stipulate that if you don’t meet the deadline, your stay becomes unlawful. They chose this.
On a Sunday night at 11:18pm soon after this story came out, the Home Office Twitter accounted decided to defend itself by saying that millions of people had applied to the scheme and therefore the story was misleading.
Just so we’re all clear: the majority of people will apply to the scheme and be granted status. What we should all be concerned about is the people who don’t apply because they don’t know about it, or they don’t know they need to.
It’s an issue if even 1 person doesn’t apply who needs to. But we’re likely talking about thousands or tens of thousands of people ending up in this situation.
The Government doesn’t know how many EU citizens are in the UK. It has no way to contact all those citizens. It’s punishing people for something no one actively told them they need to do.
Sending longterm immigrants to their death
Exactly how many decades do you have to live here before you’re considered a human being part of the community and not a drain on resources?
Denying sanctuary to child refugees
The Government took away the safe route for lone children to reach the UK.
Campaigners warned that the decision meant hundreds of vulnerable children would instead turn to people smuggling gangs to assist them with travelling to Britain, placing them at greater risk of trafficking.
Driving immigrants into destitution by illegally refusing visa applications and then doing nothing about it for 2 years
The Home Office refused some visa applications from people who made legal amendments to their tax records. The Court of Appeal ruled those decisions to be ‘legally flawed’ in April 2019.
But they haven’t given those applicants the opportunity to appeal, leaving them in limbo and forcing them into destitution while they cannot legally work or access public services.
This quote breaks me:
Another [affected migrant], Hasmukh Panchal, said he “wished that the Home Office execute him instead of carrying on with its delays and mental harassment techniques”.
Detaining someone for a week because he tried to visit his girlfriend in the UK
He was detained on suspicion that he was coming to look for a job. This thread translates the Greek text pictured in the original tweet.
I’m sure this happens all the time, but we’ll only start to hear more stories like this now because it will be happening to EU citizens.
It hasn’t been an outrage while it’s been happening to non-EU citizens.
Can we please use this post-Brexit reality to create a better immigration system (and border control system) for everyone? Please.
Angry? Disgusted? Ashamed? Then donate
If you are in any way appalled at what you just read happens in a single month in the world of UK immigration, please consider donating to my fundraiser for the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.
They’re doing the important work to both help those affected by the system, and help end the abuses of the system.
