The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies, The Open University

THE FERGUSON CENTRE FOR
AFRICAN AND ASIAN STUDIES

Roehampton Conference Abstracts

1. Teresa Hayter (author and activist, UK):
The Campaign to Close Campsfield

Teresa Hayter’s numerous books include OpenBorders: The Case against Immigration Controls (2000), Exploited Earth: Britain’s Aid and the Environment (1989), The Creation of World Poverty (1981) and Aid as Imperialism (1974). She has been involved in the campaign to close the Campsfield detention centre in Oxford since 1983, and has been a member of the Barbed Wire Britain network since it was set up in 2000.

When the Campaign to Close Campsfield was set up in 1994 we agreed that our policy would be to call for the end of 'racist immigration controls'. Most of us believed, and still believe, that this means calling for the end of all immigration controls. After many years of campaigning for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, and in particular against their imprisonment without trial or time limit, and with minimal rights to bail, in Campsfield and elsewhere, we are more than ever convinced that the gross abuses of human rights and civil liberties will not end, and in fact will continue to get worse, until the whole repressive apparatus of immigration controls is abolished. It is not, in fact, possible to have partial, fair or non-racist immigration controls. Suffering is an unavoidable consequence of controls. It is indeed not some unintended consequence of controls, but is deliberate government policy; governments believe that the way to stop refugees and others coming here is to make them suffer. Governments, however repressive, are not very successful at preventing people from migrating, but currently their only response to what they perceive as a 'problem' is to increase the repression, and all the violations of human rights that follow. Yet they accept publicly that migration is in the self-interest of Britain, and apparently wish to allow the nationals of the EU accession states to come here freely to work.

It is absolutely essential that people who come here to work should also have rights equal to those of the rest of the population. The recent exposure of the appalling exploitation of so-called 'illegal' workers, including some whose asylum claims had been turned down, ought to make it clear that their vulnerability is the result of immigration controls and their lack of legal immigration status. But, in addition, the current proposals to allow more migrants to enter to work legally, but on short-term contracts without the employment and other rights enjoyed by British citizens, do not give them much greater security or protection from exploitative employers, since if they try to resist poor working conditions or for example join a trade union, they are likely to be sacked, which in turn means deportation, or illegality if they try to stay here. The fact that those who came to Britain from Commonwealth countries before the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act had the same rights as all other British subjects obviously greatly strengthened their ability to resist ill-treatment by employers and protect their interests in general. More recently, in other European countries movements such as the Sans-Papiers point out that, if they do not have the same rights as others in the countries in which they are living and working, they will be used as a way of undermining those rights in the sectors in which they are working and eventually in society as a whole. As they say, they are forced to contribute to the precarisation of all workers.

In a similar way, the denial of the human rights and civil liberties of immigrants risks undermining the rights of everybody, including the right to a fair trial and the rule of law. It has led to the proposed introduction of identity cards, at first for foreigners and then for all residents. Some have warned that the operation of immigration controls is leading to a creeping fascisisation of society. And of course controls themselves were first introduced, in 1905 and again in 1962, as a result of pressure and agitation from racist and semi-fascist organisations. Far from reducing racism, they pander to it, legitimate it and feed it.

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