Britain’s immigration system has been exposed as inhuman, deeply cynical and thoroughly racist. What all those who’ve had to fight through the system have known for decades is now exposed for the whole country to see. The Home Office is driven by racist removal targets and an anti-immigrant agenda. Every applicant is treated as a liar, no amount of evidence is good enough, decisions are arbitrary cut/paste jobs, outrageous profit is made out of peoples misery through fees, people are left unable to work for years while bad decisions are made, people are locked up like criminals and those seeking sanctuary are subject to further torture here in the UK.
For years, immigrants, asylum seekers, detainees, international students have been resisting the brutal and unjust immigration system by any means necessary. From fighting their way off planes, exposing the brutality in immigration detention, organising together to resist raids, deportations & charter flights or fighting through the courts, time and time again the government has been exposed and defeated.
Now the entire country has been shaken by the exposure of cruel injustice towards people of the ‘Windrush generation’, who arrived from the Caribbean in the ‘50s & ‘60s, fought the racist anti-immigrant hostility of the time, only to be told in retirement ‘you don’t belong here’. The Home Office saw these mainly Caribbean elders as ‘low hanging fruit’ in their racist drive to reduce net migration targets and picked them off for deportation accordingly. This was a massive overreach on the part of the Home Office. It’s exposure means that Theresa May’s ‘Hostile Environment’ anti-immigrant policy is now vulnerable; they’ve already started rolling back on key aspects of the policy; we can win more, we can tear it down.
The government wants to limit the Windrush scandal to a small group of people, treat it as an isolated accident or ‘mistake’ by overworked caseworkers. They want to keep a lid on it, limit it and hope it goes away. This injustice was not a ‘mistake’, it is systemic, it is policy and those same policies destroy the lives of people across all BAME and immigrant communities in the UK who come in contact with the Home Office – its called racism.
The Home Office cannot put right the injustice done to any of the people whose lives have been torn apart in their Racist Hostile Environment dragnet. There is no ‘case by case’ solution for the hundreds of thousands of human beings affected. The only immediate and practical solution to years of racist decision-making and incompetence is a full amnesty for ALL those who are living, working, studying here without secure immigration status. It’s time to wipe the slate clean, give lives back to hundreds of thousands in our communities, neighbourhoods, workplaces, schools and universities. The people are not ‘illegal’, the laws and the policies are racist and unjust, people have been turned into criminals for nothing more than living their lives, seeking safety, opportunity, work, love and education.
We demand, as a matter of justice & humanity, an immediate, full and unconditional AMNESTY for everyone living in the UK who does not currently have secure and permanent status to live, work and study in this country.