The assault on the family life of migrants inevitably leads to the creation of ‘immigration offenders’, to detention and deportation. The month-long detention and deportation to Singapore of a grandmother with a 27-year marriage to a British husband, British children and a British grandchild rightly caused outrage. Yet it is no aberration, but an inevitable
News Service
Brave and inspirational: the story of Grunwick
With only a few weeks left to view the exhibition on the ‘70s Grunwick strike, ‘We are the lions’ you are advised to hightail it down to the Library at Willesden Green and see it while you still can. (It closes on 26 March) I visited the exhibition one Saturday afternoon (my second visit after
IRR News (10-24 February 2017)
Dear IRR News subscriber, On 20 February thousands of people across the UK took part in the ‘One Day Without Us’ national day of action. Over 120 events were held, many migrant-led. They celebrated the contribution of migrants in the workplace and countered the relentless scapegoating of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees in the media.
Calendar of racism and resistance (10-23 February 2017)
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration 8 February: New research by Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID) finds that hundreds of foreign nationals being held in prison are being denied access to immigration advice. Download the report: Mind the Gap: Immigration Advice
The shame of asylum housing of child refugees in the UK
John Grayson, a campaigner from South Yorkshire, examines the market in asylum housing in the UK. The early months of the lives of hundreds of babies, toddlers and young child refugees have been blighted by life in privatised accommodation provided by G4S, Serco and Clearsprings[1] and funded by taxpayers, since 2012. Now the government has
IRR News (27 January – 9 February 2017)
Dear IRR News subscriber, The IRR and Last Rights are today calling for the EU, the Greek authorities and UNHCR to stop shifting the blame, and to take responsibility for the deaths of migrants and refugees that have occurred in Greece. The thirteen deaths in Greece since April 2016, highlighted by the IRR – seven of
Calendar of racism and resistance (26 January – 9 February 2017)
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and immigration January 2016: The Migration Observatory publishes a report: Young People and Migration in the UK: An Overview. View and download it here. 27 January: The Belgian interior minister announces that Belgium, France and the Netherlands
‘No one accepts responsibility’: thirteen refugees dead in Greece
As refugees and migrants die in Greece’s ‘hotspots’, military camps and in transit, the EU, the UNHCR and Greek institutions must be held to account. When the European Commission announced, in September 2015, a plan to create hotspots to fingerprint, screen and register refugees arriving in Greece and Italy, many of the larger humanitarian agencies
‘Hearts tired of all talk’*
The Last Rights project, set up in 2016, aims to ‘create a new framework of respect for the rights of missing and dead refugees and migrants and bereaved family members’. The project’s co-convenors, Catriona Jarvis and Syd Bolton, have since the summer of 2015 been frequent visitors to Lesbos, doing volunteer work. They spent winter
An appreciation of Barbara Harlow
Professor Timothy Brennan writes an appreciation of Barbara Harlow. To appreciate Barbara Harlow, who left her mark on our collective intellectual lives in so many ways, one has to take a deep breath and imagine the momentous and painful intellectual rebirth she experienced while teaching in Cairo. It is there, under the white hot pressures