AYS Daily Digest 27/04/2021 — More Details on Cruelty of Home Office’s New Plan for Immigration
By: Are You Syrious
Tags: Home Office, Britain, Digest, Migrants, Refugees

AYS Daily Digest 27/04/2021 — More Details on Cruelty of Home Office’s New Plan for Immigration

Photos of some of the people who died last week in a shipwreck that killed 130 people. Collection via Avvenire

FEATURE

New Plan for Immigration, Brexit & Old Cruelties

Last month, the Home Office revealed its New Plan for Immigration, which would make a system that has already been characterized by the impossibility of its “hostile environment” even crueller. Now, more details have trickled out about the unsuitability of the New Plan as well as other ways that the British immigration system has become more hostile to people on the move since Brexit.

One of the ways in which the UK has failed people on the move has been in its abandonment of family reunification laws. Its previous family reunion law was implemented by the EU, and the government has not drawn up a new one since Brexit. It has also stopped responding completely to requests from lawyers about renewing permissions and arranging travel. This has stranded many people, including those who already had legal permission to settle in the UK but whose arrivals were delayed due to COVID-19 disrupting travel.

Some lawyers think that the Home Office is deliberately ignoring them, because there is a six-month deadline for arrivals after a family reunification case has been accepted. There is a strong possibility that the Home Office is hoping that it can reject people once its initial acceptance expires due to its own failures to provide people with a route to the UK.

Specifically in the New Plan, the Home Office is looking to make a difference between people’s methods of arrivals when deciding their asylum cases. However, legal routes for applying to asylum before reaching the UK are almost nonexistent, and people have a right to request asylum once they reach a country’s borders no matter how they get there. Learn more, including how you can take action, from Care4Calais.

The new agreement would also deteriorate the already terrible condition of accommodation for asylum seekers. The New Plan for Immigration would house more people in reception centres, even though existing ones have been widely criticized for terrible conditions. A new report published by the Red Cross analyzed the failures of current and planned accommodation and recommended that people live in community-based accommodation that could actually meet their needs.

In one aspect, some of Priti Patel’s plans have been stopped. The new immigration plan would punish people seeking asylum that arrived by traveling through “safe third countries” such as EU member states by deporting them. However, several European countries have already said they will not sign returns agreements with the UK. Now that it is no longer part of the EU, the UK cannot rely on the Dublin Regulation to legally justify deporting people.

While this seems like a satisfying sticking point in the Home Office’s plans, unfortunately it will probably result in people languishing in indefinite detention, as we have seen happen elsewhere when people cannot be deported but governments refuse to grant them residency. Already the Home Office is attempting to use the possibility of deportation to Europe to scare asylum seekers by sending threatening letters, even though it knows it cannot carry out deportations at the moment.

The Home Office is using the political confusion, particularly when it comes to migration laws, caused by Brexit as an opportunity to curtail the already fragile rights of people on the move in the United Kingdom. The plan is in consultation until May 6th. Once (if) it passes, the Home Office will have given itself even more impunity to ignore basic human rights.