Harmondsworth detention centre stands as a monument to UK Plc’s attitude to human rights. At any one time 550 people are incarcerated behind razor wire awaiting deportation. Handily situated right next to Heathrow, it serves as a prison for those awaiting deportation. Run by Sodexho, it is part of a network of privatised prisons dedicated to reinforcing the borders of Fortress Europe. Together with the other detention centres, Harmondsworth is the last stop for those who have failed to make successful asylum claims a key tool in the British and EU government’s attempts to ‘manage migration’. The British government locks up 25,000 immigrants a year.

Of the UK’s 10 such detention centres (called “immigration reception and removal centres” by the government) seven are run by private companies. They hold failed asylum seekers and “illegal” immigrants due for deportation, as well as new asylum seekers whom the authorities believe may disappear from the system. Up to 2,600 people can now be held in the centres, and the Home Office announced last week that it plans to add another 480 places by building a second centre at Gatwick.

The proposed site is actually within the airport boundaries, making it nice and easy to bundle people on to airplanes with one-way tickets, conveniently far from public view. As Home Office Minister Tony McNulty explained, “Removing those who have no right to remain in the UK is an integral part of our balanced approach to asylum and immigration, helping us to cut abuse of the system and ensure an efficient end-to-end process.” - A process which may be ‘efficient’ but can be a despairing and indeed deadly experience. Twelve people have so far killed themselves while incarcerated and, according to the Home Office itself, in the last ten months of 2005, 185 persons attempted self-harm, requiring medical treatment with another 1,467 considered a danger to themselves and put on self-harm watch. Annually, the UK government detains more than 2,000 children, including babies, in these pleasant surroundings. Well, as long as no one ‘illegal’ is allowed to slip through…

Much of the debate around migration to the UK focuses on the legitimacy of asylum claims. In fact, right across the mainstream political spectrum the debate over immigration has become a debate over the nature of ‘refugee status’. In order for campaigns aiming to prevent the deportation of specific individuals (see SchNEWS 523 for example) to stand any chance of victory, they have to focus on that person’s legitimate claim to ‘refugee’ status. Campaigns like this can be effective for securing a future for individuals and families and raising public questions about the draconian nature of immigration policy. However they run the risk of suggesting that everyone who migrates to this country ‘outside’ the rules is invariably fleeing persecution, effectively conceding the point that ‘economic’ migration is something undesirable. Challenging the tabloid hysteria over ‘bogus’ asylum seekers with counter claims of genuine persecution is worthwhile but runs the risk of undermining the rights of those who simply want to come here for a better life.

GATES OF THE WEST

What motivates someone to leave the security of their homeland and language and attempt to break through the borders of Fortress Europe? International economic migrancy is the inevitable flip side of globalisation and neo-liberal economics. Migrant workers are the shadow of the wealth looted from the global south to feather the western nest. While western corporations are free to move capital and infrastructure around globally with little restriction, the population of the Third World is forced to remain behind barbed wire. Beyond Europe, many countries have been forced to open their markets to European capital and to low-wage, European-owned factories.

Corporations want to use the EU as a common front to force these harsh neo-liberal policies on the third world. Yet the people of these countries face fences and walls if they try to come here. Many are forced to make desperate journeys around these barriers. Faced by economic collapse and political instability, usually caused by IMF restructuring and protectionist measures such as the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, people are literally dying in the hope of getting into our protected enclaves. Latin Americans are being shot on the US Mexican border, Sub-Saharan Africans are drowning in the Mediterranean, Chinese choking to death in lorries. Africans attempting to cross the razor wire fences into Spain’s North African outposts Mellila and Ceuta in October last year were gunned down by riot police, and yet the squatter camps outside the borders grow larger.

The few who do make it through this formidable obstacle course are subjected to a brutal bureaucracy of application for asylum, forced to live below the poverty line on humiliating ‘food voucher’ schemes, denied the right to work (while being slammed as ‘scroungers’ by the right wing tabloids) and are the most marginalised and victimised people in our societies. For those deemed by immigration officials to have arrived for economic reasons there is a stark choice between disappearing into the twilight world of black market labour or imprisonment in a detention centre. In the years since the incarceration of ‘illegal’ economic migrants became policy, the UK’s detention centres have seen riots, suicides, hunger strikes and endless evidence of maltreatment by security guards.

Currently, one out of every 35 persons worldwide is an international migrant. According to UN estimates, some 175 million people are now living permanently or temporarily outside their country of origin. This vast number includes migrant workers and their families, refugees, and permanent immigrants.

The bitter irony is that beyond the populist anti-immigrant stances of politicians, both the US and the EU depend on migrant labour to maintain our class-stratified economies. The NHS for example is virtually propped up by immigrant labour. This two-faced approach is encapsulated in the phrase ‘managed migration’. Give us your best and brightest, your educated and skilled - and receive little in return. ‘Managed migration’ is yet another way of expropriating Third World wealth. So those who possess the skills can, at a price, join the global elites, whereas undocumented migrant workers play the vital role of an underclass willing to do dangerous and monotonous work for a pittance. Immigration policy works to keep such workers de-unionised and unrepresented. When your very existence is illegal how can you fight for employment rights? This two-tier system of labour is highly advantageous to Western business.

This atttitude to migration is quite new, the Victorians didn’t even have passports and until 1962 there were no controls over immigration into the UK. The argument that unregulated immigration would affect the western culture rings hollow when you consider that it is our cultural values and economic imperatives which have been used to ruthlessly reshape the world in which the majority of the planet’s population is forced to live. The construction of private prisons for economic migrants has passed through without a great deal of public debate. The current controversy over asylum is caused because all other doors for legitimate migration became impossible.

However movements in the first world are beginning to fight on behalf of all migrants. A recent attempt by the US government to further intensify its already harsh system of control on the Mexican border saw nearly a million demonstrate on the streets in California. As the EU prepares to totally integrate its immigration policy in order to more effectively clamp down on economic migration, grassroots networks such as No Borders have begun to demand total global freedom of movement. It is time to recognise that the global system of population control creates and maintains injustice and inequality.

* More info at… www.noborder.org www.barbedwirebritain.org.uk www.ncadc.org.uk

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DAY OF ACTION at HARMONDSWORTH
DETENTION CENTRE
April 8th 11am. To get there: 2 miles off Junction 4A off the M4 near Heathrow.

** Coaches from London £6 call 07944 135617 or email  noborderslondon@riseup.net

** Transport from Brighton call 01273 540717

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See  http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news538.htm for the rest of this weeks issue covering ID cards, the US calling the kettle black, French protests update and more.