The UK government should heed the lessons from a recent report criticising the Netherlands for discriminatory pre-immigration tests for migrants. Lessons from the Netherlands In the UK, ‘active citizenship’ is one of the shibboleths in the government’s green paper The Path to Citizenship: next steps in reforming the immigration system. According to a new report
Issue: Books, pamphlets & multimedia
Anti-Zionist Jews fight anti-Semitism charge
An action against the accusation of anti-Semitism brought by a prominent Jewish anti-Zionist in the UK has been settled out of court, but in Germany, the appeal court in Frankfurt recently upheld an accusation that an anti-Zionist holocaust survivor was in fact anti-Semitic and suffering from self-hatred. In the UK, in July 2007, Michael Ezra
New publication criticises the detention of migrant families
A new publication from the charity Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID) criticises the UK government’s policy of detaining migrant families and examines the negative impacts it has on children. ‘Obstacles to accountability: challenging the immigration detention of families’ is based on BID’s experience of providing free advice and assistance to families with children in detention
Court of Appeal rules against Home Office ‘sham’ marriage rules
The Court of Appeal has ruled against the Home Secretary by upholding the right of non-European nationals, who are in genuine relationships, to marry in the UK irrespective of their immigration status. Under rules introduced in 2005, non-European nationals with limited leave to remain had to show they had a fiancé visa, or Home Office
Roll call of deaths of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, 1989-2010
IRR has, since 1989, been recording the deaths of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants – two of the most vulnerable sections of our society – as a result of attempting to enter the UK, self-harm, denial of medical treatment, destitution, hazardous working conditions or racist attacks. Forced by circumstances beyond their control to seek a
Enforcing the language barrier
Recent cuts to English language classes suggest that the government fears the integration of migrants more than it supports it. On 18 October the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) announced that it would no longer fund basic ‘English for Speakers of Other Languages’ (ESOL) classes. The essential free classes were massively oversubscribed. Namely, they were
Asylum: from deterrence to criminalisation
Below we reproduce Liz Fekete’s introduction to Asylum: from deterrence to criminalisation, a new report written by leading human rights lawyer Frances Webber. The EU’s spin about its harmonisation of asylum policy to create a supposedly fairer, more easily navigable system, masks the grim reality of life in Europe for would-be refugees. For European asylum
Following them home
David Corlett’s Following them home: the fate of the returned asylum seekers is an invaluable addition to the, as yet, scant body of literature that tracks the fate of failed asylum seekers under reckless western deportation programmes. It is particularly important that a UK readership notes this Australian book, as so much of Europe’s asylum
UK laws fail to ‘manage’ migration and to protect migrant workers’ rights
The Institute of Employment Rights’ (IER)’s recent publication Labour Migration and Employment Rights examines present immigration and employment law and policy affecting migrant labour and concludes they are failing to protect the most vulnerable workers in the UK. The report asserts an employment rights approach to the examination of immigration law and policy on the
Immigration, integration and the politics of fear
The EU needs migrant labour, particularly skilled labour, and this is reflected at a member state level in the increasingly public debate over ‘managed migration’. Politicians of all political persuasions are advocating that legal routes for migrants be opened up for the highly-skilled. The same politicians, however, promise the electorate a package of reform to