The right to work for asylum seekers

Argus title : Let asylum seekers work

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has been in Brighton this week. Most of its deliberations have focussed upon ways of defending workers’ rights, wages and conditions in the face of recession – and on influencing the Brown government to change direction.

However, the TUC has never confined its interest solely to UK workers’ rights. It is also concerned about the rights of those who are unable to work – and is committed to international solidarity with trade unionists abroad.

The trade unions’ record in this regard has not always been heroic. At times, in the past, they seemed less concerned about workers’ rights than about protecting the limited work-place privileges of white male workers against the incursions of women and immigrants. However, those days are long gone. The TUC is at its best when it flexes its muscle to defend those who are unable to protect themselves from injustice. It has done so this week.

On Wednesday, at a meeting in Brighton’s Friends’ Meeting House, Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC joined with individual leaders of many of the UK’s major trade unions to support the Refugee Council’s national campaign to allow asylum seekers in the UK to work.

Currently, the vast majority of asylum seekers are forbidden to work – despite the fact that many have no immediate prospect of returning home. Those whose applications for asylum are still in progress are forced to live on benefits which are set at just 70% of the level of Income Support. Those who have been refused it, receive nothing even though in many cases the government accepts their countries are too dangerous for them to return. Individuals are left in a state of limbo, with no recourse to benefits or services provided through public funds.

At Wednesday’s meeting – which was jointly organised by the Refugee Council and Brighton Voices in Exile – trade unionists pledged themselves and their unions to campaign against this injustice.

A spokesperson from the Refugee Council said: “These are people who fled persecution in their own countries looking for a place of safety….they want to work, support themselves and their families, pay taxes, and contribute to the economy. But they are being denied these opportunities. Instead they are forced to live on handouts…or are denied support altogether and end up destitute. It is unhumane to treat people in this way and it makes no economic sense.”

Helen Connor, of the Educational Institute of Scotland, said: “The right to work is a fundamental right – one the trade unions have founght for through the centuries throughout the world.”

She criticised the myths that fuel media attacks, saying: “Asylum seekers are often referred to as economic migrants or illegal immigrants, which is very misleading to say the least. They have not come to the UK for economic reasons, neither are they here illegally. They have been driven from their homelands by persecution, conflict and human rights abuses They are exercising a legal right in making a claim for asylum – a human right we all share.”

The Refugee Council stresses that the majority of asylum seekers have skills and a high level of education. Some have been employed as journalists and civil servants in their home countries. Many are qualified nurses, teachers and academics. There are, for example, 1,500 refugee teachers in England – and 1,100 medically qualified refugees on the British Medical Association database. The Refugee Council points out that while it costs £250,000 to train a new doctor, it takes a mere £10,000 to prepare a qualified doctor from abroad to practise in the UK.

Donna Covey, Chief Executive of the Refugee Council said:

“We know asylum seekers want to work. Many are highly qualified and had good jobs in their home countries, and are desperate to contribute to the country that has taken them in. It is an outrage that they are left to rely on handouts from the state when they have so much to offer this country.”

Tendai is an example of this. She is Zimbabwean asylum seeker who lives in Brighton with her 2 children. She told the meeting:

“I worked as a Chief Cash Controller for a company in Zimbabwe until I began to have problems because of my political opinions. This forced me to flee leaving my one year old son. I arrived in 2001 to seek asylum and it has not been what I expected. I am able and happy to work and contribute to the British economy but I am not allowed, and I am being forced to live on handouts.”

She added:

“I do really appreciate the protection given to me by this country, which of course my country failed to give me. But what was taken from me is my right to work…Because of this my confidence is taken away, I am deskilled and it has an effect on my children and family life”.

She explained movingly that though she wishes to marry, she is prevented from doing so by government regulations.

The meeting heard that many refugees have become refugees because of their trade union activities. Luka Phiri, also a Zimbabwean, is a skilled toolmaker in his home country, trusted and relied upon by his employer. He told the meeting that the proudest achievement of his career was to design and build a die-casting smelting furnace. He said: “The furnace worked perfectly and the company had to make three more furnaces to sell to other companies. My ambition was simply to accomplish something as a family man and share my valuable knowledge and special skills with young people training to be engineers and toolmakers.”

Robert Mugabe’s government put paid to that dream. Luka was a trade unionist and became regional secretary of the Engineering Trade Union of Zimbabwe. In 2003, as the country began to slide towards anarchy, he was forced to leave because of his opposition to the government.

He said: “When I came to this country I thought it would be easy for me to integrate, since I come from a Commonwealth country. But my asylum case has not been an easy road. My case has been refused and I do not know what the future holds for me in the UK.

“The Home Office has said I cannot work. That deprives me of a lot of things as a human being – especially my dignity. But this policy has meant that the great skills I brought with me to this country have become rusty over the past 5 and a half years. Not only is this a tragedy for me, and wasted potential for the UK economy – it is a disaster for my country.”

He ended poignantly: “When it is safe, I would like to return to Zimbabwe to help rebuild my great nation and recover my shattered dreams and ambitions. How can I do that if I have lost my skills and work experience?”

Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC, was evidently much moved by what he had heard and pledged his full support. He said:

“Forcing often highly skilled, highly trained individuals to sit idle for considerable periods of time is not only a personal tragedy for them but is also a huge loss to the UK economy, which is missing out on their many talents. The Government must think again and change the rules so that asylum seekers are allowed to work….”

The TUC and Refugee Council will now be working together to persuade the government to reinstate the right to work. Given the passion and deep commitment expressed at the meeting, it is hard to imagine they will fail.

Anyone wishing to help the campaign should contact the Refugee Council on 0207 3466700 or visit the website at www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/letthemwork. Trade unionists can email Wilf Sullivan, TUC Race Equality Officer at wsullivan@tuc.org.uk. Brighton Voices in Exile can be contacted on 01273-328598.

Gypsies

Argus title : Racism doesn’t spare children

My family and I have recently returned from a trip to the Italy’s Lido di Jesolo near Venice, where there are ten miles of near perfect sandy beach and safe swimming in the Adriatic. We lounged by the beach, swam when we chose and ate and drank far too much in our very comfortable hotel. It’s a place we have visited many times before.

The only slight irritation on this occasion was that our somnolent lazing on the sand was regularly interrupted by hawkers selling cheap watches, bags, towels and toys and others offering massages. It troubled us that they appeared both more numerous and more desperate to sell items than they had ever been before.

We returned to Britain to learn that just a week or two earlier, elsewhere in Italy, two child hawkers 13-year-old Cristina and 11-year-old Violetta Djeordsevic had died by drowning, on just such a beach, surrounded by holiday-makers.

The two were part of a group of four children who traveled from a poverty-stricken gypsy community outside Naples to the beach at Torregaveta, west of the city, which is popular with Italian day-trippers. Like the men and women offering their wares on the Venetian Lagoon, the girls went to sell cheap trinkets to visitors and tourists.

The red flag was up and the tourists weren’t swimming. However, for reasons that are not yet clear, Violetta jumped into the water and got into difficulties. Cristina attempted to help her, but tragically both drowned.

The dead children were dragged from the sea by a passer by and surrounded by a curious crowd, but when they could not be revived were simply left on the sand, their corpses laid side by side under beach towels. No ambulance attended.

Photographs of what happened during the hour it took for the mortuary van to arrive, were flashed around the world – and have shamed Italy. As the girls lay dead on the beach, their thin feet protruding from under the towels, Italian holiday makers around them began to return to their leisure activities. There are photographs of them picnicking, applying sun lotion, sunbathing and even playing ball and throwing frisbees.
The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported. “Few left the beach or abandoned their sunbathing. When the police from the mortuary arrived an hour later with coffins, the two girls were carried away on the shoulders [of the officers] between bathers stretched out in the sun.”
One eyewitness on Italian TV said: “It was very surreal. There was this picture of a typical Italian beach with families enjoying the sun and then just metres away were the bodies of these two children. People were completely indifferent about what had happened.”
Laura Boldrini, a spokeswoman for the UN High Commission for Refugees, commented: “Accounts would seem to suggest that hardly anybody intervened to save this children and even in death there seemed to be total indifference as their bodies lay on the beach while people continued to enjoy themselves.
Crescenzo Sepe, the Cardinal of Naples, condemned the attitude of holidaymakers, saying: “At times turning the other way or minding one’s own business can be more devastating than the event itself…. in the background holidaymakers…appear more upset at the fact their view of the beach has been obstructed.”
He said that Cristina and Violetta “had faced nothing but prejudice in life and indifference in death; an unforgivable truth.”
Laura Boldrini commented: ”I wonder if these people would have behaved in the same way if the children in question were Italian and not Roma?”
It is a question being asked across Italy. Civil liberties groups have pointed out that a Roma encampment near Naples was burned to the ground this year after its inhabitants had been evacuated for their own safety. It was just one of several such attacks.
Italy’s Roma live in discrimination and poverty and their situation has become worse since Silvio Berlusconi’s rightwing government came to power in May. One of Berlusconi’s key partners in government is the National Alliance, a party formed as a successor to Mussolini’s Fascists. Another is the Northern League, a party comprised of individuals whom Dan McDougall of the Observer has recently called “restyled former Fascists, anti-immigrant forces and traditional conservatives.” The League’s leader Umberto Bossi is notorious for having advocated shooting at boats bringing immigrants into Italy.
Berlusconi has ordered the fingerprinting of the country’s Gypsy population, including children. According to Francesca Saudino, a human rights lawyer “The Italian right blames much of the country’s street crime on the Roma, in particular on children sent out by adults to rob and steal” adding: “..many working class people think the Roma no better than animals, and the government is using this xenophobia to win votes and popularity…The deaths of these girls has come to represent something more, perhaps a battle for Italy’s soul.”
Berlusconi has told the European Commission that the children are being fingerprinted to encourage school attendance. Saudino suggest a different reason “There are an estimated 152,000 Roma in 700 camps across Italy and the Interior Ministry hopes to dismantle them all. Thirty per cent have Italian citizenship, but the rest are immigrants, many from Romania and the Balkans. We suspect that the Gypsies are being identified only so that they can be expelled.”.
The European parliament has recently approved a motion condemning fingerprinting as an act of discrimination banned by the European convention of human rights. Catholic human rights organisations have criticised the practice as reminiscent of the Nazi persecution and the chief rabbi of Rome has insisted it must be stopped. Amos Luzzatto, former head of the Italian Union of Jewish Communities, said that the policy recalled “days when I could not go to school, and people would point at me saying: “Look Mummy, it’s a Jew.” This is a country that has lost its memory.”
The British, unlike the Italians, have no strong tradition of fascist activity, but we are very capable of racism and of indifference to the suffering of marginalised groups. It is not so very long since a Sussex bonfire society caused outrage by choosing to torch, not a Guy, but a caravan decorated as a travellers’ home, complete with cardboard figures of women and children it referred to as “Pikeys”.

According to Rachel Shields of the Independent: “Studies in recent years have shown that Gypsies and Travellers experience more racism than any other group in the UK, including asylum-seekers. The most recent Mori poll on the issue revealed that a third of UK residents admitted to being prejudiced against Gypsies and Travellers…”
According to the British Medical Association, the community has the lowest life expectancy and highest rate of child mortality in the UK. Ofsted has also reported low levels of educational achievement and high rates of illiteracy among Traveller children, due to a disrupted education and bullying.
Richard Sheridan, president of the Gypsy Council said “”I don’t think that the situation in the UK has changed much since the 1960s – those ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Gypsies signs’ are not very far away.”
Here in Brighton, the settled community is faced with a decision about where to site a permanent travellers’ site. The Council’s preferred location for a 14-pitch site is at the former BMX track off Wilson Avenue. Labour and Green councillors asked for the decision to be reviewed, but this was not agreed. The matter will now go forward to the Planning Committee, which will make a decision taking into account public representations. The stage is set for major and potentially nasty confrontation.

I have no knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of this particular location and confess ignorance of the planning issues involved. However, the one thing of which I am certain is that our community needs to make provision for well-planned traveller sites which are appropriately situated, resourced and landscaped – not least so that traveller children can receive the education and access to health care which is their right.

All one can ask of members of the settled community is that they make their representations and decisions on a basis of generosity, fact and reason and that they do not allow travellers – especially their children – to become pawns in what could become a very ugly political game.

Omar Deghayes Comes Home

Argus title : We must welcome Omar and show him he will be safe here

My mother has a poor memory. The other day I reminded her that Christmas is coming. She looked a bit confused, so I asked her if she could remember what we do at Christmas. She pondered hard, then replied “We think about God”. I asked what else and she said “We eat a lot” and then added triumphantly “and we think about people”.

My mother has always thought about people. She was one of that generation of women whose lives revolved around their families. She did not go to university and had no career to speak of. I think my father would have liked her to work, but her own father would have greatly disapproved. He loved her dearly, but as far as he was concerned it was the duty of men to provide for their wives and that of wives to care for the home.

And so my mother spent her life caring for her husband and her children and later her own mother and grandchildren. She did not question things or rebel. My father, on the other hand, raged against the world. He was fascinated by politics and in the early days of their marriage flirted with the South African Communist Party.