Immigration Bill — House of Lords, 2016-02-03
Topic: Immigration
Margot Aline (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 231, to which I have added my name, but I would be more than happy if Amendment 234 were to be accepted because I acknowledge that we need to act as quickly as possible to enable family reunion. My noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws talked about the experience of her husband’s family in the 1930s. It was very similar in my own family. My father came as a young man to this country from Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and his parents, my grandparents, were allowed to join him in the late 1930s having escaped to Palestine and then coming to this country, so the question of family reunion has great personal significance for me ILPA has provided us with extracts from parliamentary debates in the 1930s and 1940s, and I was particularly struck by a speech by the then Earl of Listowel, who said in 1939: "There is a common assumption underlying this debate … that these refugees are a common responsibility of every civilised nation, and that each country has to play its part, according to its economic resources and according to its opportunities for offering temporary asylum or permanent refuge, in providing the means of life for these helpless and persecuted people. The question surely that is before our minds first and foremost this afternoon"— they probably did not go quite as late in those days— "and is naturally one that confronts every member of the British Legislature is: Is this country really making its rightful contribution?".—[Official Report, 5/7/1939; col. 1026.] The answer today has to be no. We are not playing our part according to our economic resources when compared with poorer countries in the region on the one hand and richer countries such as Canada and Germany on the other While I very much welcome recent government concessions, I fear that they do not go nearly far enough. This is the message of, for example, a statement made by more than 300 eminent lawyers last autumn who, among other things, called for the establishment of safe and legal routes to the UK from both within and outside Europe. One element of that, they argued, would be humane family reunion policies such as allowing child refugees in the UK to be joined by adult family members. This would help avoid the tragedies that continue to occur in the Mediterranean where already this year 149 people have died trying to cross, according to Save the Children. Just this week over 120 leading economists have sent a similar message in an open letter to the Prime Minister The British Red Cross writes of heart-breaking cases it encounters of separated families not covered by the existing rules, such as the two Syrian brothers who wanted to be reunited with their mother stuck in a camp in Iraq, having been recently imprisoned in Syria. She was alone with no family and in a second country but did not qualify for family reunion. I know that the Government’s argument is that if refugee children were entitled to bring their parents into the country, it would act as an incentive to send children on ahead to secure leave. But as ILPA points out, these children are given leave to remain not because they are children but because they are recognised to have a claim as refugees. While parents understandably prioritise getting their children to safety, surely it is cynical to believe that they would deliberately put their children in the hands of smugglers to make such a dangerous journey alone as a ploy to get entry themselves. As Save the Children put it, we are talking about: "A terrifying push, not an enticing pull" It reminds us of children’s rights under the UNCRC to remain with or be reunited with their family The Government claim to be the party of the family. In the guidance on the family test, the list of, "relationships at the heart of family life", as it puts it, includes a wide range of family relationships, including extended families. Yet the Government take the most narrow and exclusionary approach to family relationships when it comes to the reunion of a particularly vulnerable group of families. I believe that if the Government were to accept one or other of these amendments, or bring forward their own amendment on Report, this would be widely welcomed.