Comment

When they came in the morning

An asylum seeker from Tanzania (who has asked to remain anonymous) delivered this speech in Manchester in October 2000, as part of the Civil Rights Caravan tour. On Wednesday 2 February 2000, I was arrested in my house in Salford, Manchester, and detained. I was deemed to have contravened the laws of the land and

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Press Release

The dispersal of xenophobia – a new report from the IRR

According to research by the Institute of Race Relations’ European Race Audit the policy of dispersing asylum seekers, now being introduced into the UK and Ireland, but already practised in other European countries for some years, effectively means the dispersal of xenophobia. The outcry by residents of Over Stowey, Somerset, against a proposed asylum hostel

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Comment

Refugees from globalism

Do anti-racists need new perspectives in the present fight for asylum rights? Writer and activist A. Sivanandan presents an overview and analysis. The distinction between political refugees and economic migrants is a bogus one – susceptible to different interpretations by different interests at different times. The West is quite happy to take in economic migrants

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Behind closed doors: racism in prisons and detention centres

While the existence of institutional racism may have been accepted theoretically by the authorities in the criminal justice system, those individuals who choose to stand up to daily racism, in either prisons, detention centres or asylum hostels do so at the risk of even more serious maltreatment. That was the picture which emerged at a

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Asylum, popular racism and the local elections

Anti-racism has been largely an urban tradition, associated with towns and cities with settled black communities. But as William Hague, backed by the Tory press, targets seasides and shires, the need to address racism there is more urgent than ever. It was on 15 March that the editor of the Sun gave ‘timid’ William a

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Comment

Lessons in resistance

Whereas during the 1970s and 1980s the British black and anti-racist movements provided perspectives which were emulated in the rest of Europe, today the roles are reversed. Now that the most pressing anti-racist issues involve asylum refusal, deportation, incarceration, dispersal and social exclusion, we in the UK have everything to learn from Europe. Not only

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Comment

Europe’s asylum-prison complex

It’s the beginning of March and 100 people have gathered in Cambridge’s central marketplace to oppose the opening of Britain’s latest detention centre at a former military barracks in Oakington, north-west of Cambridge. On 20 March, activists from Cambridgeshire Against Refugee Detention gather again, this time outside the detention centre itself as the first disoriented

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Comment

Stop this bogus tabloid nationalism

Over the last two years, tabloid attacks on asylum-seekers have grown in frequency and ferocity, spreading from the open hatred of local newspapers in Dover to national press ‘exposés’ of spurious refugee crime waves. In March this year, with the government’s asylum-seeker dispersal plans set to take effect and with this year’s round of council

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Comment

Dispersal and the new racism

When the UK government proposed to institutionalise forced dispersal and no-choice accommodation for asylum-seekers, CARF predicted that asylum-seekers would be dumped in slum areas and would become sitting targets for racist campaigns and attacks. Up and down the country, that’s what’s happening. Reports indicate that as predicted asylum-seekers are being dumped in the worst run-down

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Comment

Learning the lessons of Dover

The Dover Express calls it ‘Shanty Town’ or ‘Asylum Alley’. The busy main Folkestone Road is not one of Dover’s pretty affluent tourist streets. In this traditional working-class part of Dover, asylum-seekers are cramped in bed and breakfast hotels, the line of which is only broken by the presence of several high-rise housing estates. If

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