‘Hiding is better than going home’

Zimbabwean failed asylum-seekers in the UK fear they could be forced to go into hiding if the authorities enforce a new court ruling that allows the Home Office to deport them.

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Control of Immigration statistics

List of graduate level occupations for Tier 2 published

Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) publishes list of graduate level occupations for Tier 2

In November, the government announced its intention to raise the minimum skill level for jobs under Tier 2 from National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) level 3 to graduate level. The government asked the MAC to advise on two questions, and the report addresses itself to answering the first question which was:

- What standard occupational classification (SOC) codes should be considered as graduate level occupations for the purposes of Tier 2 of the points-based system?

The Committee was asked to use NVQ level 4 as the benchmark for graduate level for this commission. Its findings have resulted in the list of occupations for Tier 2 applicants being shortened from 192 at NVQ level 3 (56% of full time occupations) to 121 at NVQ level 4 (39% of all full time occupations).

The Committee’s report can be found by following the link: http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/aboutus/workingwithus/indbodies/mac/

Detention by another name

Article first published February 03 2011 (Institute of Race Relations)

By IRR News Team

Campaigners have issued a warning about another private company that is seeking to profit from the detention of asylum-seeking families which was meant to have ended.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that plans had been submitted to Crawley Borough Council by the Home Office to convert a building in the area to detain asylum seekers. The plans detail a ‘Pre-Departure Accommodation facility’ for families on the site of a residential school for children with behavioural and learning difficulties in Pease Pottage, Crawley. The area has seen plans for removal centres before; in January 2010, Arora International’s planning application to convert Mercure Hotel into an immigration removal centre failed. The site where the school is situated is, according to NoBorders, owned by The Crossroads Children’s Education Services Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Arora Group.

The current proposals come a month and a half after the family unit at Yarl’s Wood closed and the coalition announced the end (by May 2011) of the practice of detaining children for immigration purposes. Yet, in a document obtained by London NoBorders (http://london.noborders.org.uk/), the proposed accommodation is described as a ‘facility [which] would only house families with children who have been referred to it by a new Independent Family Returns Panel being established by the UK Border Agency… where families would be accommodated for a maximum of 72 hours, before being taken to a departure airport. In exceptional cases they might be held for one week.’ The document, a letter from CgMs Consultants (a company which describes itself as ‘Specialist & Independent Advisors to the Property Industry’) also states that ‘up to 8 families of up to 6 persons at any one time’ will be held at the centre and that the UKBA ‘desire[s] [to] create a facility which provides a more family-friendly environment’ where ‘Families would be accommodated in self contained units, consisting of living, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom spaces.

Staff, healthcare, social and welfare facilities would also be provided to meet the needs of the families during their stay at the facility, helping them to prepare for leaving the UK.’ The existing ‘2.5m palisade fence’ would remain as would electronic entrance gates The letter also claims that ‘The facility will be run on a care model rather than a secure one, supported by a third sector organisation. In short, it will look and feel very different to the UK Border Agency’s immigration removal centres.’ However, childrens would only be allowed to leave for short periods subject to a risk assessment and suitable adult provision, and there is no mention of the children’s parents being allowed to leave. And the letter also states that ‘the timescales for having the facility up and running are critical due to the closure of the previous facilities and the Governments policy timeframe. It is important that the new facility at Crawley Forest School is operational by the 11th May 2011.’

NoBorders (http://www.noborders.org.uk/) has started a campaign against the centre and Rosie Young, of London NoBorders (http://london.noborders.org.uk/), commented: ‘Arora seems to be attempting to move into the immigration detention business at any price. This time they want to do it quickly and silently. If Arora thought they would get this through without anybody noticing it they have failed.’ Thomas Harburg, also of London NoBorders, added: ‘It is obvious what trick the Home Office is playing here. It does not matter what they call this facility, if you are forced to be held in a building with a fence around it, waiting to be deported, it is another immigration detention facility. All that talk about the ending of the detention of children and families was just a media stunt.’

The language of the document and the use of words such as ‘facility’, ‘care model’ and ‘family friendly environment ‘ belie the reality of the proposals, they are a continuation of the detention of families, albeit by another name.

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FOOTNOTE

For any further enquiries, please email: [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) or phone 07535 319 119.

HAT news is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are therefore those of the authors.

Best interests of children: new Supreme Court case

Source: Free Movement

The Supreme Court has today handed down judgment in a major case on the best interests of children generally and the best interests of British Citizen children specifically.

ZH (Tanzania) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] UKSC 4 finally addresses the weight to be given to the right to a British Citizen child to grow up int he country of his or her nationality. In short: a lot. The best interests of children are a primary consideration and although they will not always determine the outcome of a case, no other factor should be given more weight. Lady Hale gives the leading judgment with which the other judges all agree. Lord Kerr’s judgment is perhaps the most explicit:

It is a universal theme of the various international and domestic instruments to which Lady Hale has referred that, in reaching decisions that will affect a child, a primacy of importance must be accorded to his or her best interests. This is not, it is agreed, a factor of limitless importance in the sense that it will prevail over all other considerations. It is a factor, however, that must rank higher than any other. It is not merely one consideration that weighs in the balance alongside other competing factors. Where the best interests of the child clearly favour a certain course, that course should be followed unless countervailing reasons of considerable force displace them. It is not necessary to express this in terms of a presumption but the primacy of this consideration needs to be made clear in emphatic terms. What is determined to be in a child’s best interests should customarily dictate the outcome of cases such as the present, therefore, and it will require considerations of substantial moment to permit a different result.

The court is also very clear on the point that the sins of the parent must not be visited on the child. The mother in this particular case had behaved very badly indeed in immigration law terms, but that was of no relevance in determining what should happen to the children. To remove the mother would effectively exile the children from their home country. The court held that this was unacceptable.

Perhaps now, finally, UKBA and the immigration tribunal will start taking the rights of children seriously.

[I've had to knock this post off quickly and may come back and revise later]

Refugee Council facing severe funding cuts

The Refugee Council is facing substantial funding cuts to its Home Office funded services. Policy director Jonathan Ellis says that the charity, which relies on the government for 86 per cent of its revenue, will be ‘decimated’ by the cuts.

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Source: Civil Society

Home Office Waste

Source: Free Movement

I thought I’d start putting together a list of the myriad ways in which the Home Office wastes money (mainly public funds, also private sometimes) in the small world of immigration. It makes my blood boil that legal aid is being brutally slashed in immigration and across the whole area of social entitlements law for the most vulnerable in society while the Home Office fritters away cash like there is no tomorrow. In several of the ways that follow, the extreme ‘institutional indulgence’ to the Home Office shown by the immigration tribunal is a very significant contributing factor.

Additional suggestions through comments are most welcome. My list, in no particular order, is as follows:

1. Rubbish, awful, abysmal decision making. In the official statistics for 2009 it was revealed that 28% of asylum appeals succeeded. 48% of non-asylum appeals succeeded. These statistics tell you something about the appalling quality of decision making. Each appeal requires tribunal time and resources and more implementation resources at the Home Office or FCO than would have been the case if the decision were made correctly in the first place. Some of these decisions have also be legal aid cases in the past, although that looks set to change. This is incredibly, criminally, wasteful of public resources.

2. Indefinite detention of immigrants. The prolonged and in some cases indefinite detention of immigrants is a stain on this society. Sometimes the detainees have committed crimes. Their immigration detention often exceeds their criminal sentence. While The Daily Mail might celebrate this, any right thinking person should be horrified. Deprivation of liberty is the most serious sanction we possess. To use it for months and months on end on people for whom there is little or no prospect of removal demeans all concerned. And costs a small fortune, to boot.

3. Changing the contents of decisions at the last minute on the day of a hearing. This leads to many unnecessary adjournments and often leads to unnecessary appeals – because points have been put to a witness or lawyer for the first time at a hearing it often proves to be the case that there is more to say or further evidence that could not reasonably be pointed out at the hearing.

4. Serving new evidence on the day of a hearing. As above. While I’m well aware that appellants do this very regularly, they are often first time litigants who do not understand the niceties of the legal process. The Home Office has no such excuse for its Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

5. Failing to attend hearings. This is a chronic problem in London, but seems less bad outside London. It causes similar problems to those above. The Home Office even sometimes has the timerity to try and appeal decisions resulting from hearings they failed to attend.

6. Refusal to accept the decisions of the courts. See Metock. See Baiai. See Pankina. I’m getting really fed up of appealing UKBA decisions that pretend that Pankina does not exist and that the Home Office decided not to appeal it. The deliberate flouting of the authority of the courts is antithetical to the rule of law and is appallingly wasteful. It has to be ideologically driven – some sort of self-perception by officials that they are the true bearers of the torch of public interest, total faith in the correctness of Home Office decision making (despite pretty compelling evidence to the contrary) and total disregard for constitutional niceties.

7. Lack of evidenced-based policy. I read an interesting draft research paper the other day that pointed out that there is no such thing as conventional policy research at the Home Office. Everything is driven by an ex post facto attempt to justify decisions that have already been reached. The one that most gets my goat in a legal context is the contention that genuine refugees would claim asylum on arrival in the UK. There is not a shred of evidence that this is true. Countless genuine refugees do not claim on arrival. So why was this built into an Act as a legislative presumption and why does it appear in almost every reasons for refusal letter? It is all about how bureaucrats and busybodies would like people to behave rather than how they actually do behave in real life.

8. Over legislating. The wastage caused by constant re-making of the immigration system is awesome. For example, the entire tribunal system has been almost totally restructured three times in the last decade (in 2003, 2005 and 2010). Major immigration legislation was passed in 1993, 1996, 1999, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Most of this was totally pointless as far as I can see. The new criminal offences are never prosecuted. The reception centres are never built. The ‘automatic’ deportations are subject to a human rights exception. The Certificates of Approval are scrapped while occasional sham marriages continue. The major changes are brought in through changes to the Immigration Rules, which do not require Acts of Parliament. It was all pointless posturing. And did this headless chicken impression convince the public that immigration was ‘under control’? Surprisingly, no.

Bitter? Yes, I’d love a pint please. Further suggestions welcome.

G4S loses Home Office contract

G4S, the security firm at the centre of a police investigation into the death of Angolan man Jimmy Mubenga, has lost its Home Office contract. It will be replaced by another private contractor, Reliance Security Task Management.

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Monthly Asylum Statistics

UKBA bids to restrict jobs for asylum seekers

By Alan Travis

Home Office ministers are trying to thwart the impact of a supreme court ruling lifting a work ban on 45,000 asylum seekers by severely restricting the jobs they can apply for.

The immigration minister, Damian Green, wants to bar the asylum seekers from more than 28.5m jobs and restrict them to industries in which there are official staff shortages.

Home Office officials are investigating the possibility of telling asylum seekers they can apply only for vacancies among 400,000 skilled jobs in shortage occupations – a tiny fraction of the jobs in the UK economy. Asylum seekers would have to be qualified maths teachers, chemical engineers, high-integrity pipe welders or even experienced orchestral musicians or ballet dancers to have any hope of being allowed to work. The conditions mirror the restrictions of the points-based immigration system which bans unskilled workers from outside of Europe from working in Britain.

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