The Tory prime minister declared he has no regrets about his
recent use of the “swarms” to characterize migrants trying to reach the UK. David Ca-moron goes on to criminalise them further by alleging that they are trying to “break-in” to
the UK although as refugees many have a legitimate and legal right to seek asylum
in the UK without going through the proper channels and by any means possible. The government is purposefully trying to
create an atmosphere of fear by stigmatizing vulnerable people as a threat to
the UK’S security and sovereignty.
In a corner-shop near the Scottish Home Office,
the Unity centre has been fighting for several years to protect refugees and
asylum seekers who have made their home in Glasgow. Asylum seekers come in and
report to Unity before signing in at the Home Office building nearby. If they
are detained during their visit to the Home Office, activists can swing into
action to try and get them released. It’s a system that has helped hundreds
stay in Scotland since asylum seekers started arriving in Glasgow at the end of
the 1990s.
“Glasgow has stood against the Home Office in lots of ways,”
said one Unity activist. “We help anyone in their struggle for papers, it’s
about emotional solidarity as well as practical.” He talks about a flight full
of migrants that has only this morning left Heathrow for Nigeria, stopping en
route in Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone. “Charter flights are a way of
expelling people en masse, where nobody can hear you scream. We know several of
the people who have been sent out on this flight and many of them have legal
processes open, they have families and children here. The Home Office just grab
as many people as they can,” the activist added.
The Unity centre is only one part of a vibrant network of
support for migrants and refugees across Glasgow, rooted in local communities
and bringing together people from around the world with their Scottish
neighbours. When the Home Office decided to start sending asylum seekers out of
London to cities around the UK, Glasgow city council was the first to sign up.
The asylum seekers were placed in empty flats in long
neglected high-rise estates. Neighbours appointed by the council to welcome the
new families took the job seriously, bringing the new arrivals from Kosovo,
Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, into their communities, holding
parties, bringing families from across the world together. When families were
told they would not be given asylum their Scottish neighbours refused to let
the Home Office remove them from the UK. Immigration officials who arrived in
the early hours for “dawn raids” on families were met by enraged Glaswegians
who refused to let the Home Office take their new friends away.
The demonstrations became widespread and saw the end of the
dawn raids. Many thousands of people who had been threatened with removal,
including many families, were allowed to stay in Scotland.
Remzije Sherifi runs the Maryhill Integration Network where
people from around the world come together in award winning dance and music
projects.
“We have established great links between new arrivals and
local people. This grows organically from the heart if people can understand
why someone would have to flee their country. It’s still hard, there are still
people struggling, but there are always doors open where they can get a cup of
tea.”
The world is on the move. Tens of millions are displaced.
Around the world much the same question is being posed: “How are we going to
absorb all those hordes of immigrants?” All across the globe nationalist,
xenophobic groups and movements are busy attacking and intimidating defenseless
refugees. George Orwell defined un-Christian, un-white and un-Western people
simply as “un-people”, in the eyes of the West.
The overwhelming majority of the refugees are forced to
leave their homelands because of political and economic consequences of
capitalism. Only a few Europeans or North Americans are capable of detecting
connection between their continents’ wealth, those hundreds of millions of
ruined lives all over the world, and the latest wave of immigrants. Glasgow's commercial wealth was built upon the slave trade, for example. Great
Britain, responsible for the loss of millions of lives worldwide through its
colonial genocides and triggered/orchestrated famines, is now pretending that
it is facing a serious “refugee crises”.
While tiny Lebanon is now a host of over 2 million Syrian refugees, one
of the main global bullies, the UK, has lesser than 25,000 registered asylum
applicants on its territory. Immigrants are being portrayed as some menace, or
pest, not as a group of desperate human beings – victims of the British Empire
and the neo-colonialism that followed it. Much of the blame can be placed on
the politicians and the toadying media. Even the liberal voices only offer
concessions out of charity and not recognise solidarity as an obligation and so
they do little to throw open the gates or knock down the walls of Fortress
Europe.
As long as capitalism reigns supreme, as long as
profit-seeking rules over the planet, the refugees will be crossing dangerous
seas to seek safety and security. Many will die in the process but some will
make it to be defined as “illegal” and persecuted and where victims will have
to lie, in order to just survive. The Socialist Party as part of the World Socialist Movement stands with the exploited and the oppressed of all parts of the globe.
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