Apologies, sticky work keyboard. Cheapskates

Hoping they come across someone like me who would take them in to safety, give them food and shelter for as long as they needed it. Unlike that shit last year who couldn't shop a poor guy fast enough.

Oh you mean that scumbag ex-prison officer Bill Smith, 50, who shopped a desperate and barefooted aslum seeker who knocked on his door during the last escape?

 http://archive.oxfordmail.net/2007/8/5/177734.html

It's the same Bill Smith, 50, of Evenlode Crescent who's been mouthing off about the latest rioting...

 http://www.oxfordmail.net/news/headlines/display.var.2342796.0.rioting_hits_campsfield_again.php?act=login

That scumbag wants deporting.

Immediately I think of Harriet Tubman and the "Underground Railroad" who helped bring human beings from the states of the USA where human beings were "property" (or slaves if you're dim) through the states where they were not "slaves" but still "property" to Canada where they could be "free", without a vote, to work at what they could. Harriet Tubman escaped her owner on the 17th of September 1849 at 27 or 29 years of age. Nobody had ever properly recorded her birth. A baby was not property worth an inventory before it could work. Whichever age she was, her fertility must have almost passed. She found the "underground railroad" and once in Canada chose not to work at what she could but dedicate her life to that which she could. "From 1850 to 1860, Tubman organised eleven to thirteen escape missions for approximately seventy individuals, including her brothers, parents, and other family and friends, and gave instructions to approximately fifty more who found their way to freedom independently". She made contact with John Brown the American abolitionist who advocated and practiced armed insurrection as a means to abolish all slavery and whose "body lied mouldering in the grave" in the lyrics of the "battle hymn of the Republic" sung during the US civil war. And such is the history of emancipation.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Tubman
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad
Full online text of "Harriet, the Moses of Her People" by Sarah H. Bradford for free download :-
 http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/9999

Then I think closer to the our times, and MI9 and the networks of the anarchist Maquis and communist French who brought writers like Samuel Beckett and Spanish republicans who fired the last shots against Franco in the forests together with Oxbridge classic scholars to solve simple problems.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MI9

What do you have in your place of detention which will be useful to your escape?
What can those outside do to ease your escape?
How can you find the way outside once you are outside?

Lastly, I think how those who can not really do anything useful for the escaped humans of yesterday or tomorrow in terms of finding a way... There is always something for everyone. We can't forget to stop the historical pikes thrust into hiding places in hope of a reward for returning a human to captivity. So we stop any hint of that. We can not allow the places of detention to be unknown to the detainees. It is harder to find a way if you don't know where you are.

We think in short words.........

"these escaped humans in the article above are not the first nor will be the last"

In Nazi Germany, some pepole risked their lives to shelter Jews. Here, people only risk a caution - and even that is unusual - if they shelter an 'illegal' human being. Yet, some people are reluctant to commit their spare rooms ( not wanting to have 'a stranger' in the house, even in the case of people whose lives are in danger if they get deported and their children. Others would go to any lenght to help the victims of this new persecution. Scotland is giving a wonderful example of resistance and community solidarity, but there are good examples in England too... can we have more?
What often people do NOT understand, for some reason that I can't quite grasp, is that people are forced into 'illegality' by fear of being detained and deported. They can NOT go to Social Services or to the Immigration housing department (aka NASS) if they have no cases pending. In many quarters, the very idea of undergruond resistance is a totally unheard of concept. I wonder, as it can happen to any of us to be persecuted by the State any time, and especially now with the erosion of our civil liberties we are all en route to become illegals and terror suspects...

The recent death of Irene Sandler (May 12th) offered us a chance to consider an inspiring example of how people helped shelter humanity from the Holocaust which the last comment by "under attack" mentions. She saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto by providing them with false documents. By her time the inventories of human property which I mentioned in my last comment as not including babies had of course expanded to include the most sought after human experimental material for Mengele and his associates (Aribert Heim in particular c/f  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/sheffield/2008/05/397973.html and its comments) Of course her story and those she worked with, an extraordinary network of almost paradoxical friends was mostly unknown during her life. The Gestapo broke her legs and the Soviets hid her from public recognition.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler

Complex problems and difficult issues are obfuscated by the mediocre language of our 21st century globalisation. As we are reduced to "human resources" those with the wit, luck or at times misfortune to leave the poorest or most unstable parts of our planet are termed "illegals". We are taught to see them as a terrorist threat if they come from muslim societies and thus learn to excuse the suspensions of civil or human rights and the denegation of justice. But complex problems can if tackled by complex minds be reduced to very simple solutions. (Such as the extraordinary and mostly unknown 20th century escape network I referred to in the comment above which to British readers will probably only be noticed for its MI9 component)

No human is illegal.
Papers for everyone.
You must know where you are.
Everyone can look different.

We could all do lots of useful work by updating the last really comprehensive map of detention and holding and processing centres for non-regularised migrants in Europe
 http://www.transitmigration.org/migmap/ Here is a graphic version from 2005  http://www.indymedia.ie/article/69199#comment104056 there's a key in the following comment at that link.

Of course we can't go forgetting that we also need pay attention to dark prison sites. Just because they're not in the news much anymore doesn't mean they've gone away - you know.

If as we know migrants are not terrorists - then... not every terrorist is a migrant. Indeed as I touched on very briefly and obliquely in a piss-taking "Q&A article", Mr Sarkozy and Berlusconi not only want to make it easier to find humans and track them - they seem happy to forget that some people, be they migrants or terrorists or better off left out of jail.  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/05/399870.html

It seems from one of the comments above that this Oxford story has a "nasty public spirited screw" angle. You can push that. But you could also do well to remember that Irene Sendler the saviour of 2,500 babies, of whom quite a few were twins destined for Mengele - escaped execution through a well placed bribe.

less waffle. more simple phrases.

No human is illegal.
Papers for everyone.
You must know where you are.
Everyone can look different.

= learn how that works.

"Sixty-seven-year-old Jean Donnachie flashes a mischievous smile as she describes the tactics she and her neighbours used every day to thwart immigration officers trying to arrest asylum seekers on her estate in Glasgow. A grandmother and former cashier who has lived on the Kingsway for 20 years, she makes an unlikely resistance fighter. But when she talks about how the estate took on the Home Office, there is a gleam of defiance in her eyes"

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jun/13/immigration.immigrationpolicy

This story at least details some of the amazing people working in solidarity with other people needing a safe place to live. That some people see through the bullshit spouted by the State (see the prison officers comment highlighted in the addition above) and act as humans that recognise other human beings in need distress. I thought this story from the mainstream media was great, inspiring and totally cuts to the quick of what should be obvious to everyone.