Day Without Us

Across large parts of Europe today migrant workers are taking part in a 24 hour strike to protest against racist murders and attacks; police harassment; immigration controls; severe exploitation and inhumane conditions in agriculture and other work, such as immigrant women sex workers. In France, Spain, Greece and Italy migrant workers and their supporters are holding a series of protests and actions in support of the day of action, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the date that the Code of Entry and Residence of Foreigners and Asylum Law (CESEDA) came into force, 1 March 2005, and is inspired by a similar initiative in the US in 2006.

In Italy, the protests have been spurred on not only by the increasingly repressive and openly racist anti-immigration legislation but also by recent racist attacks on migrants. One such incident we highlighted recently and the workers that fled the racist violence in Rosano have been at the forefront of helping organise the campaign (see the “Tangerines and olives don't fall from the sky” statement by the Assembly of African workers of Rosarno in Rome below).

Amongst the events in more than 60 towns and cities across Italy will be prison officers in varese being offered an 'ethnic' lunch; in Trieste migrants will spend the day removing racist graffiti from public buildings; Bologna is hosting an exhibition of photos of the faces of migrants; and in the squares of Milan the public will be able to have foreign language lessons.

Italian call-out: "What would happen if the 4.5 million immigrants now living in Italy DECIDED to go on strike for one day? And what if also millions of Italians tired of racism will support them? And what if millions of Australians also tired of racism will support them? The 'Primo marzo 2010′ committee is organizing a major non-violent protest to let the public opinion understand the decisive role of migrants to help our society good functioning. The 'First in March 2010' Committee is organizing a major non-violent protest to let the public opinion understand the decisive role of migrants to help our society good functioning. This movement was born of mixed race and is proud to bring together Italians, foreigners, second generations, and whoever shares the rejection of racism and discrimination against less lucky people. This movement was born of mixed race and is proud to bring together Italians, foreigners, second generations, and whoever shares the rejection of racism and discrimination against people less lucky. We chose yellow as our march colour, because it is considered the colour of change and for its political neutrality: in fact, yellow doesn't refer to any political line-up. We chose as our march yellow colour, Because it is considered the colour of change and for its political neutrality: in fact, yellow does not refer to any political line-up."

In France, where the European initiative originated last year, more than 70,000 people have joined a Facebook group supporting the day of action. Demonstrations and pickets are planned outside town halls between 12.00 and 14.00 across the country and people are being invited to buy nothing for the next 24 hours in solidarity with the migrants. Five French unions, including the CFDT, FSU et Unsa, are supporting the protest.

One of the event's organisers in France, Reims deputy mayor Ali Aissaoui told TF1 News: "The current government does not seem to be aware of the positive impact of immigration. Sometimes I wonder what people will think of my children in 15 years' time. If they are given contemptuous looks and made to prove that they belong here, I'd rather raise them elsewhere."

French call-out: "On 1 March 2010: Take Action by ceasing to eat and/or work. For 24 hours, not to participate in economic activity in the enterprises, associations in the public service, in schools and colleges, in universities, in the hospitals, in shops, in industry, in construction, in agriculture, services, media, in politics ... For the first time in France, we decide to do not participate in the life of the city. In this absence, we need to mark our presence."

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“Tangerines and olives don't fall from the sky”

from the Assembly of African workers of Rosarno in Rome (Italy, January 2010)


On 31 January 2010 we met to form the Assembly of African workers of Rosarno in Rome. We are the workers who were forced to leave Rosarno after we demanded our rights. We were working in inhumane conditions. We lived in abandoned factories, without water or electricity. Our work was underpaid. We used to leave the places where we slept every morning at 6, only to go back at night at 8 for 25 euros [about £22], not all of them ending into our pockets. Sometimes we could not managed to get paid after a day of hard work. We were going back empty-handed and our body bending with tiredness. For many years we have been discriminated, exploited and threatened in all sort of ways. We were exploited during the day and chased around at night by the sons of our exploiters. They beat us up, threatened us, pursued like beasts, kidnapped, some of us disappeared for ever.

They shot us as a sport or in someone’s interest. We continued to work. In time we became easy targets. We couldn’t take it any more. Those of us who had not been wounded by bullets, were wounded in their human dignity, in their pride as human beings.

We could not wait any more for some help which would never arrive, because we are invisible, we don’t exist for this country’s authorities. We made ourselves visible, we went into the street to shout that we exist.

The people didn’t want to see us. How can anyone demonstrate if he doesn’t exist?

The authorities and the police arrived and they deported us from the town because we were not safe any more. The people of Rosarno were hunting us, lynching us, organised now in real chasing squads.

We were put in detention centres for immigrants. Many of us are still there, others went back to Africa, others are scattered around in the towns of Southern Italy.

We are in Rome. Today we have no job, no place to sleep, no belongings and no wages, which have not been paid by our exploiters.

We say we are part of the economic life of this country, but the authorities don’t want to see or listen to us. Tangerines, olives, oranges don’t fall from the sky. They are in the hands of those who pick them.

We had managed to get a job which we lost simply because we demanded to be treated as human beings. We did not come to Italy as tourists. Our work and our sweat are useful to Italy as they are to our families, who have placed many hopes on us.

We demand from the authorities of this country to meet us and listen to our demands:

We demand that the residence permit which was given to the 11 African men wounded in Rosarno for humanitarian reasons, be given to all of us, victims of exploitation and of our irregular situation which left us without a job, abandoned and left behind in the streets. We want the government of this country to face its responsibilities and guarantee us the possibility of working with dignity.

- Assembly of African workers of Rosarno in Rome.

Quote Of The Week / Loosing The PR Attack Dogs

(or the Year because it really is a doozy!)

"I think we are well on to the way to becoming a world class asylum system." - Lin Homer, Chief Executive UKBA on Radio 4's Today programme this morning.

The immigration system apologists certainly have been on the offensive over the past few days following both the coverage of the Yarl's Wood hunger strike; MP's calls for an inquiry into it; Al Aynsley-Green's report on Yarl's Wood, the chief inspector of the UKBA John Vine's claims today that government targets of dealing with 90 per cent of asylum cases within six months, plans to clear the 450,000 "legacy" historic files by 2011 were "unachievable" with current resources and that a new backlog of unresolved cases was building up; [1] and yesterday's release of the latest Office of National Statistics migration figures. All this on top of the right-wing press' sustained immigration-related assault orchestrated by the Tories and Alan Green's vanity project MigrationBotch.

Tough times for Woolas and his cronies. So much so that he appears to be cracking, letting his mask slip on Newsnight after being challenged about so-called 'large-scale migration' into an area, claimed that "My own family, my children, have suffered from that and we recognise that point ..." Further compounding his faux pas by adding "Well, if you get, as the gentleman says, if you get a big influx of people coming into an area, Slough Council, Peterborough Council, have raised this point, that is the price you pay." Needless to say the yellow press were swift to jump on his comments, with the Mail taking the opportunity to trot out the same old tired arguments about migration. He has since been notably ascent from the airwaves, thus avoiding an embarrassing explanation of his bizarre claim.

Pride of place in these massed PR responses surely goes to the letter to MPs from Home Office Minister Meg Hiller in response to press, and in particular the Guardian's, coverage of the Yarl's Wood hunger strike. Her basic argument is that 'you are all liars'. "The current misreporting, based on inaccurate and fabricated statements by those who campaign against our policy, is irresponsible as it causes unnecessary distress to the women at Yarl’s Wood, their family and friends and those who work at the Centre to ensure the detainees are treated with respect." [2]

She then goes on to repeat her own chosen set of 'untruths' such as "detention is only used when people have refused to leave the country voluntarily, despite support being offered for them to do so, and we have to enforce that removal", that the women are not in fact on hunger strike, that Yarl's Wood staff have never displayed any form of racist behaviour and that "detainees are treated with dignity and respect". Then as final icing on the top of this confection, we get: "The current misreporting, based on inaccurate and fabricated statements by those who campaign against our policy, is irresponsible as it causes unnecessary distress to the women at Yarl’s Wood, their family and friends and those who work at the Centre to ensure the detainees are treated with respect." [3]


[1] On the issue of the government's claims to be keeping up with its government-set targets, a Welsh whistle-blower has revealled just how the UKBA have massaged the figures to conjure up a 75% success rate for processing asylum claims within the target 6 month limit.
[2] Thereby repeating the same points that the UKBA had made about the Aynsley-Green report the week before, namely that it contained "factual inaccuracies" and that in some areas, it was "misguided and wrong." There is an interesting follow-up article in the Guardian about this very point.
[3] She is definitely at pains to point out the level and degree of 'respect' that the detainees are shown by the employees and sub-contractors of the UKBA. Possibly in the same way that the government are at pains to point out that MI5 are never complicit in torture?

Daily Mail's Slack Grasp Of The Facts & Figures

The Daily Mail's (or at least it's journalist* and editorial staff's) grasp of simple arithmetic has been starkly shown up again. And of course the errors relate to an immigration story.

'Two passports a minute are given to foreigners as 1.5m issued since Labour elected' bellows the headline**, except this is patently not true. For a start, roughly 6,619,680 minutes have elapsed since the Labour government were elected on 1 May 1997 (counting up to 1 January 2010, as the ONS statistics that the article is based upon relate to figures for last year). So, 2 passports a minute would mean 13,239,360 passports in total?!? Something wrong there?

Maybe he means 'since the last election'? In which case that would be 2,404,800 minutes between 5 May 2005 and the beginning of this year. Which is 4,809,600 passports. Except that it is not, because if you actually read the article it says, "Passports were given to foreigners at the rate of two a minute last year." So, in fact he means that there were 1,051,200 or so passports issues last year (525,600 minutes x 2). So what evidence is there for this startling figure.

Well none actually.

What the paper does say is that "Officials approved a record 203,865 citizenship applications, 58 per cent more than in 2008. Another 190,000 immigrants were given the right to settle in the UK in 2009 – a rise of 30 per cent on the year before." So maybe Slack means a passport issued every TWO minutes? But then again, 203,865 x 2 = 407,730, so it can't be that either.

Frankly, we are a total loss to understand what this idiot actually means by this bizarre attempt at rudimentary schoolboy calculation. Unless of course one tries to calculate the whole thing on the basis of a civil servant's 40 hour working week in a year with 4 weeks holiday allowance. In that case it comes out at 115,200 minutes in the passport office, which could equate to roughly 203,865 passports being issued (allowing for the odd lunch and tea break).


* Our old mate James Slack 'by name, slack by nature' again (he really could not have a more appropriate name).
** Interestingly, the online version's tag is 'Number of asylum seekers arriving in Britain falls by 30%', which is a very different take on the ONS figures, something that the article itself doesn't explain in as plain terms as that. Instead it allows you to do the maths for yourself - "In the year to June 2009, 146,000 British nationals emigrated and 87,000 came back to the UK. This meant that net emigration was 59,000, down from 89,000 in the year to June 2008 – and a peak of well over 100,000 in 2004. In the same time period, net immigration by non-British nationals was 206,000, down from 257,000 in the year to June 2008." Probably just as well really!

Addition:

Five Chinese Crackers have also covered this story at greater length and they too share our contempt for Slack and his ilk.

""We are weak and tired but we are still going to continue...

...because people need to know what is happening here."

The women in Yarl's Wood are well into the third week of their hunger strike and doctors have warned that the core of the women who have been refusing food for what is now 19 days now risk doing themselves long-term damage to their health. As many as 30 are still refusing food and taking only a little sugar water to stave off the dizzy spells they are all suffering.

At the beginning of this campaign, the mainstream media were all to a certain degree (usually based on the degree of 'sympathy' their editorial line would allow them to display), yet most seem to have dropped the story (with the honourable exception of the Guardian) following the UKBA briefing that the 4 'ring leaders' had been removed and the 'incident resolved' on Monday 8 February. This fiction was repeated in the House of Lords yesterday (see below).

However, the women inside and their supporters outside know this to be a lie and have tried to help maintain a public profile for the hunger strike as the mainstream media attention has waned. There have been demonstrations outside the Serco offices in Holburn, solidarity 'hunger strikes', an unannounced visit to Yarl's Wood itself last Sunday and another public meeting and picket organised for later this week.

More on the women's health conditions and a link to audio recording of the Guardian's Matthew Taylor talking to a former Yarl's Wood detainee describing the beatings and racist abuse he suffered at the hands of the detention centre staff. See also Yarl's Wood: a disgrace.

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London NoBorders has called for a public meeting and demo this week in solidarity with the women at Yarl's Wood immigration prison on hunger strike since 5th February.

Thursday 25th, 7pm - PUBLIC MEETING on the hunger strike: infoshare and discussion on future solidarity and protest. At LARC, 62 Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel, E1 1ES.

Friday 26th, 2.30pm - DEMO outside Serco offices, 22 Hand Court, Holborn, WC1V 6JF. Serco run Yarl's Wood on behalf of the UK Border Agency. Please bring banners and instruments.

"Why I Am On Hunger Strike At Yarl's Wood"

Below we reprint the words off one of the Yarl's Wood hunger strikers, Denise McNeil, courtesy of the Guardian and post a short video transcription of a phone call with an unnamed hunger striker.

"I have been on hunger strike for more than a fortnight. I feel weak and get terrible headaches. A ­doctor says I should eat, but I am still refusing food. I can't sleep because I am woken every hour of the night when the light goes on and somebody here checks on me.

The women have been through terrible experiences – some are survivors of rape and torture – but we are treated like criminals. When we staged a protest two weeks ago, we were locked in a corridor, with no water or toilet facilities. After two hours, some women felt sick. One had an asthma attack and we begged the officers to let her out, but they refused. Since then, I have been detained in isolation.

I came to the UK from Jamaica in April 2000. My brother had been murdered by a gang, and my sister was going to be a witness at the trial – then she was killed too. I realised I would be murdered if I stayed, so I came to Britain. My son, then seven, joined me a few months later.

I didn't know that I could claim asylum. Instead, I started a computer course and applied for a student visa. This was refused. Around the same time, I started a relationship with a British man and we were married and had a son, so I applied for a marital visa. This was also refused.

I was brought to Yarl's Wood in March last year and told I would be deported. My other brother came to the UK in 2000, but he was ­deported to Jamaica within five years. Last month, he was murdered. I am still trying to ­convince the immigration officials that my life is in danger too. All I want is to live a safe, normal life with my children in Britain."

Video of a phone interview with one of the Yarl's Wood hunger strikers.

Ignorance Is Politically Expedient

The following question was asked by Lord Hylton in the House of Lords yesterday:

"To ask HM Government what assessment they have made of the cause of the recent hunger strike at Yarl's Wood Detention Centre; how many people were arrested; how many suffered injuries; and how many were locked down within the Centre."

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord West of Spithead) replied:

"A passive protest was undertaken by some of the residents of Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre over the weekend of 6 to 7 February which was resolved on Monday 8 February. No arrests were made although four women were detained by Bedford Police under immigration administrative powers. The incident was resolved without any use of force. One woman sustained a minor cut to her finger for which medical treatment was given. In total, 47 women were involved in the disturbance, in three different parts of the centre. The incident is subject to a management review."

Clearly Alan West's* response was woefully inaccurate, either because he was badly briefed or because he was knowingly telling a series of porkies.


* An ex-First Sea Lord and hence probably not an expert on these things (as if a politician would ever use that as an excuse).

Protest At Yarl's Wood Yesterday

As part of a series of on-going protests in recent weeks in support of the women on hunger strike in Yarl's Wood and those singled out for punishment through transfer to prison there was a noisy demonstration at Yarl's Wood itself yesterday. The protesters caught both Serco and the police unawares and managed to get into the grounds of the immigration centre and made their presence known to the people detained inside.

Photographs of the action and a related article can be found at Indymedia. Other actions have included a series of protests outside the Serco offices in Holborn and a picket on 17 February with 60 people of HMP Holloway where the four women singled out by the authorities as 'ringleaders' are currently being held.

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London NoBorders Press Release:
Successful Protest at Yarl's Wood today in solidarity with detainee hunger strikers

Sunday 21 February 2010
From: "London NoBorders"

Anti-detention campaigners today held a protest at Yarl's Wood immigration prison in Bedfordshire in solidarity with women detainees who have been on hunger strike since 5th February.
Activists from No Borders London, Campaign Against Immigration Controls and Feminist Fightback managed to get past the prison's security barriers and walk around the barbed-wire fence with banners, shouting solidarity slogans via loudspeakers and making noise with pots and whistles for well over an hour.
The protesters were repeatedly cheered by detainees inside, who waved their hands through half-open windows. Some also displayed hand-written placards summarizing their suffering and shouted 'freedom' and 'shame on Serco', the private security company that runs Yarl's Wood on behalf of the UK Border Agency.

During the demonstration, protesters spoke to some of the detainees on the phone. One woman, who has been on hunger strike for nine days, said detainees were being "punished" by being offered "disgusting food" that many are refusing to eat. She said they were being treated "very aggressively" by the security guards and not provided with any medical care. The woman, who is originally from Jamaica and has been in detention for eight months, added that detainees were being subjected to racist abuse. This morning, she said, she was called "a monkey" by one of the guards.

Another woman, who had just stopped her hunger strike as she "couldn't take it any more", described the "physical and psychological torture" that detainees suffered. Having spent several months in detention, the woman felt "devastated" being away from her 7-year-old son and British husband.

A third woman, who has been in the UK for 11 years, of which the last 6 months have been in Yarl's Wood, described the events of February 8th, when Serco security guards tried to break up the hunger strike by force. "We were locked out between 6:00 pm and 2:00 am," she said. "Some women who tried to climb out of the windows were beaten up really bad. I eventually fainted, as did many others. They're still treating us aggressively and offering us repugnant food, which many are refusing to eat."

The protesters also learned that one of the hunger strikers, who had been in isolation for the past 14 days, had just been 'removed' from Yarl's Wood, in what appears to be a strike-busting tactic by the prison management. She had apparently been dragged by five security guards, handcuffed and taken to Colnbrook immigration prison near Heathrow airport.

One of the demonstrators, who preferred to keep anonymous, said: "As if it weren't enough to lock up innocent people for such lengthy periods in such horrible conditions, thereby destroying their lives and families, those who dare to protest against their inhumane treatment are punished with even more brutality. Companies like Serco are not only allowed to profit from people's suffering, they also often get away with this kind of medieval and clearly unlawful acts. What will happen next? The Home Office will claim they take all allegations of mistreatment very seriously and promise another investigation that will never materialise."

-ends-

For any further information, please contact
noborderslondon@riseup.net
Photos available on request.


Notes:
1. The mass hunger strike, which involved some 84 women at the start, was started on 5th February, sparked by detainees demanding that "the frustration and humiliation of all foreign nationals [in detention] ends now." More than two weeks on, at least 36 women are still on hunger strike, while others have stopped but are refusing to eat the food provided by the prison management. A list of the hunger strikers' demands can be found at
http://www.ncadc.org.uk/Newszine115/HungerStrike.html.

2. On 8th February, Serco security guards tried to break up the protest by force. Some 70 women were locked in a corridor for up to 8 hours without access to food, water, toilet or medical care. Many collapsed and about 20, who tried to climbed out of the windows, were beaten up and taken into isolation cells. Four of the women, singled out as 'ringleaders', were taken to Bedford police station and subsequently transferred to HMP Holloway and Bronzefield in London, without being charged with any offence or brought before a judge.

3. A number of protests in solidarity with the hunger strikers have taken place, including pickets of Serco's offices in Holborn, London, and one-day solidarity hunger strikes by students and campaigners. For more details, see
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/02/446439.html.

4. A similar mass hunger strike in Yarl's Wood in June last year was met
with violent assaults on detainees by Serco security guards. For more
details, see http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/06/432625.html.