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The obsession with foreign prisoners returns

by · 26th December, 2007

Last week, the popular obsession with kicking out foreign prisoners returned, when a prison service memo stating that officials have no interest in deporting foreigners jailed for less than a year came to light, a message which was at odds with that being sent out by the Prime Minister, which is all for deporting the lot of them, regardless of whether they are dangerous or not. Crimes which attract less than a year’s sentence include common assault, drinking and driving, assaulting a police officer, stealing a car and harassment.

The earlier scandal kicked off last May, when the press suddenly discovered that it had never been policy to automatically deport foreigners convicted of crimes after they had served their sentence. In the dragnet that went out after the government took fright, a number of people who had been convicted of crimes years ago and had completed their sentences were rounded up and sent to immigration detention; these included Ernesto Leal, jailed for causing GBH in a racially-motivated pub fight, who had been in the country for thirty years since fleeing the Pinochet dictatorship; this had been his only conviction. A few months earlier, a young man named Sakchao Makao was arrested in Shetland, where he had earlier served a sentence for arson, and threatened with deportation to his native Thailand. He had been in the country since he was ten years old.

As I recall saying the last time this “story” became news, I do not object in the least to deporting people who come to this country on criminal business, or who start their criminal career on arrival; candidates for deportation would have been, for example, the Hungarian criminals who came in 1956, using the migration from the crushed revolution as cover. I absolutely do not support deporting those who have been here for years and have one or two convictions, particularly if they result from lapses of judgement and certainly not if they have family in this country.

The impetus seems to come from the USA, where long-standing residents can be deported in response to a criminal conviction, regardless of family ties or how long they have been in the USA. In one case, this included a German citizen who had been adopted by Americans as a baby, who was nearly deported after a conviction for domestic battery (pulling her boyfriend’s hair) came to light when she applied for citizenship (something which her adoptive parents could have done for her, which would have prevented the question of her being deported from arising). This law, writes Andrew Stephen in the New Statesman, was signed into law by Bill Clinton, and the issue arose after the governor of California used a crackdown on illegal immigrants and foreigners who get in trouble with the law as an election stunt, and won. It is this moronic brutality which comes to mind when reading of the remarks of the Liberal Democrat (?!) home affairs spokesman, Chris Huhne, regarding last week’s memo:

It’s at odds with common sense. If you have a foreign convict they should be deported at the end of their sentence. It’s as simple as that.

I have a couple of serious objections to any blanket policy of deportation. The first concerns the prisoners and their families: many of them are long-standing residents and taxpayers, not scroungers and career criminals, who face having their families deprived of a wage-earner and sent back to a country where they may no longer speak the language. However, the second concerns what may not be British citizens but are certainly British criminals - those who came as children, went astray while exposed to a criminal culture in British inner-city areas or out-of-town slums, and are involved in gangs and gang-related crime. Their home countries are not to blame for their criminality, so why should these people be dumped on them? This is an aspect of the US “Ira-Ira” law Andrew Stephen did not mention; large numbers of gangsters from American cities have been dumped in the third-world countries of Latin America, and have taken their criminality with them. This is unethical behaviour towards those countries, but it also raises the possibility of these people forming connections with both British and local gangs.

The deportation of Abdullah Faisal, the Jamaican preacher who was jailed in the UK for inciting murder in 2003, is a case in point. In this country, as offensive as some of his preachings might have been (and as I said at the time, the vitriol he directed at his fellow Muslims was far in excess of his remarks about Hindus and Jews), there does not seem to be much evidence that he had any real impact; nobody seems to have tried to prove that anyone is dead, or suffered broken bones, as a result. In Jamaica, with more poor people to command, he could do a lot more damage. (So far, however, he has not; indeed, as this PDF from salafimanhaj.com demonstrates, he has been delivering a much more conciliatory message, which the author suggests is “due to his fear and realisation that he can in no way whatsoever preach the extremism for which he became so infamous in the UK and the US”. The possibility always existed, however, and recent comments I’ve received here suggest that his followers see him as he was before 2003. In any case, I believe that his “rebel” appeal could be neutralised by allowing him to return to the UK.)

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