'There are no safe, legal routes enabling people to exercise their right under international law to seek asylum in the UK.' Photo: by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash.
‘News and leaks from the Home Office have reached new levels of dystopian fantasy.’
Don’t be a stranger: Catherine Henderson reports from QARN
It’s not hard to see why so many people attended the Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network’s (QARN’s) meeting last month. News and leaks from the Home Office have reached new levels of dystopian fantasy. Asylum seekers could be sent to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic; they could be held on old ferries or oil rigs while their claims are processed. Boats could be stopped in the Channel by nets or wave machines. Prison inspectors recently found people in Dover being held for more than two days in windowless containers, with no means of social distancing, no showers and nowhere to sleep.
We rarely hear the personal stories of those who have made their way to the UK. Instead we hear about the ‘threat to security’. ‘What is the Government doing to secure our borders?’ asked one journalist on TV, as if Nigel Farage’s depiction of a ‘migrant invasion’ were now an accepted fact.
There are no safe, legal routes enabling people to exercise their right under international law to seek asylum in the UK. Now that resettlement has been ‘paused’ there is no way to come at all. Calls for family reunion have been ignored in the Commons, where a majority of MPs voted to stop accepting unaccompanied children with family in the UK, once the Brexit transition period ends.
So what are people to do? Far fewer people claim asylum in the UK than do so in countries such as France or Germany. Andrew Lane of Quaker Council for European Affairs recently spoke of how he had noticed displaced people arriving in Brussels months after traumatic world events. He also spoke of racism and colonial-style policing as factors that led people to attempt to reach the UK.
I recently received a letter from Chris Philp, the minister for Immigration Compliance. I had asked why Foreign National Offenders (FNOs), some of whom have been living in the UK for most of their lives, can be summarily deported after serving a sentence of more than one year. He replied that ‘The Government puts the rights of the British public before those of criminals’. No redemption, no sense that FNOs too can pay their debt to society.
Many Quakers know people affected by policies such as ‘no recourse to public funds’, ‘indefinite detention’ and the requirement for people to pay thousands of pounds to the Home Office every two and a half years. These issues rarely appear in the press: a ‘migrant invasion’ is more newsworthy. But the glimpses we see of people’s desperate journeys and the punitive environment they face in the UK are all part of the same story.
Individual Friends campaign with many networks and faith groups to challenge this system. QARN works with a number of organisations. As members of the network we also support each other, and this came out strongly in our meeting. We need to stay connected, especially in these physically distanced times. The Sanctuary Meetings programme has helped connect Friends seeking both to challenge a racist and inhumane system and to stand with those caught up in it. It is difficult to think of an area where more of our Quaker testimonies intersect.
Catherine is a member of QARN (http://qarn.org.uk).
