THE Nationality and Borders Bill adds to a substantial body of explicitly racist legislation which builds into British law a distinct anti-refugee bias.
It is certain to breach our international obligations. It would put people arriving by boat in jail as “illegal.” It will make it more difficult for refugees to prove that they have fled persecution, appeals against deportation will be vastly more difficult, reuniting refugees families will face new obstacles.
It aims to make more hostile an already very “hostile environment.”
The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants says the Bill will not achieve its aims and will add costs for the government’s machinery for processing arrivals.
This is part of a massive assault on liberty. The Runnymede Trust describes a “triple-whammy of the Policing Bill, the Elections Bill and the Borders Bill which risk deepening social disparities suffered by minority groups.”
“These jeopardise the rights of ethnic minority voters to cast their ballots, to engage in public protest, and condemn every dual-nationality Briton to the threat of being stripped of their citizenship without due process or prior warning.”
What, then, can we make of the news that organisations and trade unions engaged with thousands of employers and businesses have called on the government to give people seeking asylum the right to work.
The reactionary Tory narrative that immigration, whether by work-seeking migrants or persecution-fleeing refugees, essentially constitutes a threat to our way of life falls apart under investigation.
When businesses desire the entry of various categories of labour, skilled or unskilled, to meet demands that our sclerotic, class-ridden, underfunded education and vocational training systems cannot meet, it shows just how dysfunctional modern capitalism is.
It turns out that stripping out employer-funded skills training, limiting entry into professions and a lopsided investment regime means key sectors of the economy are in want of people with the necessary qualifications.
Meanwhile, capital finds a parasitic financialised City of London more attractive than regional investment, industrial development, advanced technical and scientific research or even the provision of sustainable and low-cost housing.
According to the Office for National Statistics, with a record 1.2 million job vacancies in the three months to November 2021, more than half of businesses that reported a worker shortage stated they were unable to meet demands.
The constraints on refugees finding work do not make sense. Possessed by the people arriving on our shores are a whole range of skill sets that both our economy and our people desire and need.
Only a blinkered Tory with a racist mindset would think it sensible to put refugees into rubbish accommodation and make them live on a tiny taxpayer-funded stipend when they could be making a real contribution to life and society, enhancing their skills and earning money which will enter the domestic economy and stimulate consumption. A boost to tax revenues is a bonus.
To the lousy politics and foolish economics that underlie the government’s approach we can now add a large dollop of plain hypocrisy.
Contrast the government rhetoric around the Ukrainian refugee crisis with the way in which refugees fleeing climate change in Africa or Nato’s wars in north Africa and the Middle East are talked about and treated, and we have an example of perfect double-think.
But even the highly performative welcome the government proclaims to Ukrainian refugees is conditional.
It has not gone unnoticed in the global South, in Latin America, the Eurasian land mass and Africa that that borders which are closed to people with a darker skin are miraculously more open to Europeans.
