The above report is about a young girl who was born in Spain to two British parents but never issued with a birth certificate (because the parents mistook some other document they were given at the hospital for the certificate) and now cannot prove her identity, and thus get a passport or a discounted bus pass (or, when she is old enough, a driving licence). Readers might notice that the comments to the article contain the usual flood of ill-informed, bigoted nonsense, with a few helpful suggestions, such as that people have proved their family lineage in the absence of a birth certificate with sworn affidavits that someone is their relative, as people born in many parts of the world do not have birth certificates.

The family complain that they cannot go on holidays with their daughter because they are unable to get her a passport. The Daily Mail echo this complaint. Surely they know that if the UK belonged to the Schengen accord, we would be able to travel freely in Europe without a passport, as people living on the mainland already do: they just drive straight across, even at former “Iron Curtain” borders such as between Austria and the Czech republic and Hungary. The Government has not signed up to this, mainly because it fears a backlash from papers like the Daily Mail which would result if it were even suggested. Of course, people would be glad of being in the Schengen area when they realise they could travel to France without a passport, requiring only photo ID and then only when boarding a plane.

However, there is not much use arguing about who is to blame for the mix-up; she was born seven weeks prematurely, so the mother might well have been more concerned about her daughter’s health than filling in forms. It should not, in this day and age, take a birth certificate to prove that someone is a child of a British citizen, anyway — all that would require is a DNA test of the girl and one of the parents. It’s easy to prove; the authorities should get on and let it happen so that this young woman can have a normal life.

One of the articles mentioned that the tests were justified on the basis of “dark age prejudices” about Asian women: two Australian legal scholars, Dr Marinella Marmo and Dr Evan Smith, say that the women were presumed to be “submissive, meek and tradition-bound” and always virgins before marriage. They also point out that the tests were of no use, because not every woman has a hymen (and it is often perforated before marriage, particularly if they marry at 35). The assumption was therefore that if a woman was a real bride, she would be a virgin. However, it is not reported that these kinds of tests happened anywhere else, even though women from other non-white parts of the Commonwealth, such as Nigeria, came to join settled spouses.

Could it have been, regardless of the excuses offered, that the tests were nothing more than gratuitous sexual abuse, perhaps intended to make immigration to the UK as unpleasant as possible? One recalls that Enoch Powell’s notorious speech specifically mentioned the inflow of thousands of dependents, not immigrant workers. Immigration officials knew that, in general, there is a much stronger taboo about extramarital or premarital sex in South Asian society and that men and women do not touch each other unless they are married or closely related. They knew, then, that the woman would enter her marriage having suffered a traumatic and humiliating experience which they would be unable to tell anyone for fear of rejection or, in some cases, violence. It is odd that no more stringent investigation, with a view to prosecuting those responsible if they are still alive, has taken place.

Cases like the Sadeghi family’s (that’s the Iranian family) are pretty difficult, because it is difficult to gauge whether the document they had presented in their defence was genuine or not — the court said it was not — but they do have the support of the local community and the way the border agency have repeatedly harassed the family, putting them in detention and then releasing them twice, has clearly been traumatic for the youngest son, 10-year-old Mehrshad, as testified to by one of his teachers. I wonder what expertise the judge has, or who he used, to decide that their papers were forged — how fluent is his Persian, I wonder, and what is his knowledge of the composition of Iranian and British paper? There was a report in the Guardian today that says that all their legal avenues have been exhausted and they face deportation fairly soon.

The young Afghan man in the second section of the programme said he was 16, and said that when he first arrived in the UK, he told the Home Office in Croydon that he was 14. The officials he said that to gave him documents that said he was 19, and put him in adult accommodation. Local authorities have a vested interest in overestimating the age of a teenage asylum seeker, as assessing them as an adult means they are not responsible for their care as a minor, but it is a fact that most Afghans do not know their exact ages as birthdays are not marked. The man was the son of a brigadier at a British prison in Afghanistan, and the family was attacked by the Taliban which caused him some injury and his mother much more serious harm. The authorities refuse to believe his connection to the brigadier, so Channel 4 went out and got him to record a video to testify to being the refugee’s father. He, too, has been repeatedly arrested and incarcerated, and reports that he was often bullied in the prisons, and had the self-harm scars to show for it.

However, it was the last story, of the young woman named as Mary from Uganda, which was most troubling. She had first come to the UK at age 16, and was allowed to stay as a minor (presumably she had documentation to prove this) and told her claim would be assessed when she was 18. Her father had been a businessman until the government accused him of supporting rebels, at which point they stormed their house, raped Mary in front of her mother, killed her father and injured her mother and brother. However, when Mary’s asylum claim came up, she was called an unreliable witness. It should be added that her testimony would have concerned traumatic events that happened at least two years earlier. She exhausted all her avenues and was expelled; after bribing her way past Ugandan border officials, she ended up living on the streets before being taken in by a church, but was found by the police, rearrested, and subjected to terrible torture which produced very visible marks on her body. She was again helped out of the country, and made her way to an organisation in the UK which helps torture victims. The woman interviewed said that this was the most clear-cut case of torture they had ever seen, but the judge still called her a liar and rejected her claim.

I’ve been following the issue, on and off, for a number of years and I recall a number of reports about the tendency of British immigration judges to flatly disbelieve stories of torture and rape from refugees, particularly those from Uganda. There were accusations that the system is ridden with racists, that there is a culture of disbelief and that the same lines are used by judges again and again; it was reported that one judge “described rape as a terrible crime, but said it was also terrible to make false allegations because genuine complaints were more likely to be disbelieved”, using this line to reject numerous asylum claims.

It’s obvious that immigration policy is targeted at the hostile media, but I do not believe that the persistent refusal to entertain asylum claims, even in the face of very strong evidence, from Ugandans can be solely based on racism — has our government done some sort of deal with the Ugandan regime, for intelligence in return for the return of dissidents, or do they still cling to the regime’s relatively progressive reputation, which it no longer really deserves? We have a historical link to Uganda — one that this country chose for itself — and we do not have a vast influx of immigrants from there anymore, but mostly desperate refugees. It is grotesque that we are sending people back knowing that they have been raped and tortured, particularly after having been deported from the UK a first time.

The two stories are about two people, a man from Jamaica who moved here in the 1960s with his father, and a woman born in Canada to a British mother who has lived here since she was six months old, who have both been told that they are not British citizens and have to leave within six months, despite having spent almost all their lives here, and in the case of the woman, having British children. The blog entry above questions whether the Daily Mail, which ran the story about the white woman, will run the story about the black Jamaican man with a white British wife.

Given the Mail’s record, regardless of his wife’s colour, I don’t believe they’ll run the story, but that’s not what concerns me here. What concerns me is the fact that these two people, who have lived here nearly all their lives and are not criminals (and I don’t support automatic expulsion for anyone who is not a citizen and is convicted of a crime, but that is another matter), being denied right to remain because of obscure citizenship rules and paperwork. It may come as a shock to some people but if you were born before 1982, you can claim British citizenship through your father but not your mother. Now, most immigrants who brought young children with them will have sorted out citizenship for them if they came from somewhere like India, but as a British-Canadian couple, they might well have assumed it was not necessary.

Even if this woman is not a British citizen and does not want to be one, she should have the right to lifelong residence by virtue of a long marriage to a British citizen, having raised children in the UK, having lived here nearly all her life, and having a British parent. There should be no question of sending this woman anywhere. I also believe that these factors should automatically entitle one to citizenship without any need for a test or a fee, but they should certainly entitle anyone to residency. One can gain Irish citizenship (which entitles one to residence anywhere in the EU, including the UK) by virtue of having a single Irish grandparent.

I accept that British immigration “services” are much harsher to people who are not white, have the need for asylum, or are married to British citizens but are from less developed countries than Canada. However, we should simply not be even thinking of deporting an elderly person who has lived nearly all their life in this country because of a technicality. The government should rectify this problem now, and introduce legislation to make sure nothing like this can happen again.

Michael said he became aware that a man was in distress as soon as he boarded the plane.

“The first thing I saw was the stewardesses running forward. One of them was almost in spasms she was shaking that bad … I saw three men trying to pull [Mubenga] down below the seats. All I could see was his head sticking up above the seats and he was hollering out: ‘Help me’.

“He just kept saying ‘Help me, help me’. Then he disappeared below the seats. You could see the three security guards sitting on top of him from there. And then it went kind of quiet.”

There are differing accounts as to how long Mubenga was restrained. The two previous witnesses estimated he was restrained for 10 minutes and 45 minutes respectively.

Michael, who said he was sitting less than six metres (20ft) from Mubenga, said he watched the security guards on top of him for around five minutes, but then looked away as the plane taxied on to the runway. The flight was later aborted.

“What I am trying to understand is: if the man was putting up such a fuss and a fight that it took three burly security guards to hold him down, why didn’t they take him off the plane?” Michael said. …

“I’m not sure [Mubenga] even got any medical attention until he got back to the terminal,” Michael said. “I didn’t hear anything over the PA: ‘Is there a doctor on board, is there a medic on board?’

“I’m not sure he got any attention from anybody until the medics got there and that was 15, 20 minutes after everything went quiet. Maybe somebody could have revived him if they had been asked. I can give CPR – I’ve been trained in it.”

More here, here and here.

A fact that is buried in the details of this story, however, is that he was not a recent arrival with a failed asylum claim, but someone who had been living in the UK for 16 years, had a wife and several children still living in Ilford. Four of his children were born in the UK:

The couple [Jimmy and his wife Kambana] had fled Angola in 1994. Today Mubenga’s lawyer, Hani Zubeidi, said he had been a student leader who had fallen out with the regime.

Kambana said: “They killed my father and they threatened to kill Jimmy. They were looking for him. We had no choice but to leave.”

She and her young son arrived in the UK in March 1994 and Mubenga joined them three months later. After a protracted legal battle he was granted exceptional leave to remain. Over the following 16 years the couple moved across London and had another four children. Mubenga worked as a forklift truck driver and was a devoted family man, his widow said, and the couple eventually settled in Ilford in Essex with their children, who are now aged 16 to seven months …

In 2006 Mubenga was convicted of actual bodily harm and sentenced to two years following a brawl in a nightclub. After serving his sentence he was transferred to an immigration detention centre and his lawyer said he has been in and out of detention ever since as the family fought to stop him being deported. It is believed that his criminal conviction was a factor in his deportation.

Well, since none of the rest of the family, particularly the wife, was served with a deportation order and it was Jimmy himself who fell out with the Angolan government, not his wife, it is plain that the reason was his conviction — and more particularly, the media-generated “foreign criminals” scandal, in which the Daily Mail, in particular, kicked up a fuss about the fact that a whole lot of foreigners with criminal records hadn’t been kicked out of the country as soon as they finished their sentence — something nobody had apparently thought of doing before, perhaps because nobody thought to just kick someone out of the country because of anything but the most egregious of crimes, particularly if they were here in the first place because their life was in danger in their home country.

Two others who had been in the UK for a long period, Ernesto Leal and Sakchai Makao, were also threatened with deportation and were reprieved after public campaigns supported by local communities and trade unions. Unlike those two, Mubenga had not been in the UK since he was a child, but he has strong family ties in the UK including several children who have never lived anywhere else. Actual bodily harm is the next level of assault above common assault but below grievous bodily harm, and includes (according to Wikipedia, sourced from the Crown Prosecution Service):

• The loss or breaking of a tooth or teeth
• Temporary loss of sensory function, including loss of consciousness
• Extensive or multiple bruising
• A displaced broken nose
• Minor fractures of bones
• Minor (but not superficial) cuts requiring medical treatment
• A recognised psychiatric disorder

So, not serious lasting injuries (except for the last) and certainly not permanent disability or death. Clearly he deserved to be punished, but certainly not by permanently separating him from his wife and children and sending him back to possible persecution or death, let alone letting him be choked to death by state contractors on a plane. There is a case for repatriating foreign citizens, particularly those who came for economic reasons, when they commit a murder, rape or another very serious offence, but not for breaking someone’s nose in a fight in a pub (at least, not for a first offence). It is entirely disproportionate that a British (or EU) citizen gets two years in jail (likely to be reduced to one) for such an offence, but a foreigner is permanently removed and separated from their partner and children.

The “foreign criminal scandal” is a media trick imported from the USA, which passed a law which allows for the deportation of foreign citizens, even if the convictions were for minor offences, were several years ago and time had already been served; this led, on one occasion, to a German woman, with two children, one of whom had cerebral palsy, who had been adopted as a two-week-old and had lived in the USA ever since, having deportation proceedings launched against her over a scuffle over a boyfriend while still at school, in which someone’s hair was pulled. She was saved only when the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles pardoned her following a public outcry, but she had in fact always been entitled to American citizenship, but her adoptive parents never got round to taking it out for her). She was not the only person who had a narrow escape, or was threatened because of a trivial and long-forgotten offence, but others, including those with families and children still in the USA, were expelled for these reasons. The “scandal” was invented in the USA by a governor who was trailing in the polls, so he used immigration and crime as a trump card.

It wasn’t just the individuals deported that paid the price for the unjust American policy — quite innocent people in Latin America, whose cities faced an influx of real career criminals deported from the USA after having emigrated with their parents as children, faced an upsurge in violent crime and gangsterism. The justification was that the offenders had “abused the hospitality” of the host nation, as if they were given the red carpet treatment and provided for in everything, and as if some of them hadn’t also made a positive contribution, working for a living, paying taxes, raising children. It all pales into insignificance in comparison to providing a human sacrifice to the popular press and to bureaucrats seeking to justify their existence. We ought to realise that the popular press is a commercial entity, it exists solely to make money and will print whatever garbage will fulfil that aim. Rather than deliver any more sacrificial goats, I suggest delivering tougher regulations than the toothless Press Complaints Commission can muster. At a time when economic conditions are tough, attacking minorities, foreigners and other easy targets is an easy way to divert people from their hardship and sense of uncertainty; since they do not care who they hurt, someone else has to take care of that instead, namely, the government, and the law.

The UK issues two types of domestic worker visa, and the most common one allows workers to change their employers while they are in the UK. The diplomatic domestic worker’s visa, however, doesn’t give the worker that right, with the result that they can be treated abominably and, because their employers have diplomatic immunity, they cannot be prosecuted for assaults or other crimes against their workers, and court judgements cannot be implemented against them. It was suggested that diplomatic immunity be amended so that it doesn’t apply to what goes on in the private lives of diplomatic staff, or what is unrelated to their diplomatic mission.

They could also make offences against the person exempt, but any such change is likely to be reciprocated against British diplomatic staff in other countries. Another solution might be to simply prohibit diplomatic staff from bringing their domestic staff with them, and require them to recruit in the UK, as British-based workers would be more likely to know the law and less likely to tolerate abuse. However, if a court judgement is made against an abusive employer and they refuse to pay, the money could be extracted from them by seizing their cars or buildings to be sold so that the amount concerned could be recovered. The inconvenience of losing such properties would probably motivate these people to pay what they owe pretty quickly.

There were three organisations mentioned in the programme which help or campaign for domestic workers in such situations: Anti-Slavery International, Kalayaan and Afruca (Africans Unite Against Child Abuse).

The wording on the card reads:

Extremists are trying to hijack this election. They want you to vote Lib Dem to punish Phil for being strong on immigration. The Lib Dems plan to give hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants the right to stay. It is up to you. Do you want the extremists to win?

The card could, as one of Osama’s friends said, could have come from the BNP. It is clearly intended to associate immigration, illegal or otherwise, with Muslim extremism as it already exists in this country, as if to say “let immigrants in (let alone Muslim immigrants) and before long they’ll be destroying our freedom”. Extremism is a home-grown problem; with the exception of a handful of dissidents given shelter here who then proceeded to cause trouble (and who are mostly now in jail or out of the country), it’s not something that can be blamed on immigrants.

I was unaware that Canada had such a policy with regard to disabled dependants; I was well aware of it with regard to Australia. To an extent, one can understand this in Australia whose ecological position, exacerbated by climate change (desertification, chronic water shortages, wildfires etc), means that whether it can take many more immigrants at all is debatable. Canada is not like that; it’s a mostly sparsely-populated and rich country. It also seems to have a history of such discrimination, as when the Chapman family, from Wokingham in Berkshire (England), attempted to move to Nova Scotia to start a business. While their immigration application was in process, they attempted to visit the country and were told that their daughter had a life ban on account of her disability (Angelman syndrome, which results in mental impairment although it does not in itself produce other health problems.

There are a number of problems with developed countries holding such policies. First, if disabled people can move from the UK (or France) to Canada, they can also move the other way. This is how it works in the EU: anyone, disabled or otherwise, can move to any other EU country, stay as long as they like, work, marry, whatever (this does not universally apply to the eastern European member states, whose citizens can, to my knowledge, only settle freely in the UK and not other EU states). I haven’t heard of the British health service being overburdened with the health needs of disabled people from the other EU countries (and we have a more generous health service than in some other countries, which work on the basis of compulsory insurance rather than a state-funded health service) or any scandal about the state being “bled dry” by paying for care for severely disabled EU nationals (and there would be if it were happening). In any case, if people can freely move either way, no country — at least in this day and age, when the former colonies have reached a stage of development equal to ours — will be shouldering a disporportionate share of the burden of caring or treating another country’s disabled.

However, assessing someone’s value to society purely in terms of whether they have care or health needs ignores the contribution they might make to society, in terms of paying taxes, of any cultural, literary or scientific achievement, and so on. A disabled person is inherently less likely to become a violent criminal (not that they could not participate in white-collar crime), and we have plenty of such criminals in the UK, and the disabled commonly feature as victims as demonstrated in a BBC programme shown in Wales last week (anyone in the UK can watch it on iPlayer for the next four days). Most immigrants are not criminals, but most disabled people are, at worst, harmless.

Even if someone has a disability which does result in complex needs and a shortened life expectancy, this is likely to mean that they will not experience the disabilities and declining health associated with old age, to say nothing of conditions like Alzheimer’s. We have an ageing population in most western countries, and providing old age pensions is so costly that those who could afford it bought into private pension schemes (of course, several of these collapsed). In this particular case, the disability concerned is cerebral palsy, which although it can be severely physically disabling, in and of itself it only causes physical disability and does not have the ramifications of muscular dystrophy (which is degenerative) or spinal cord injury. However, the child’s disability is not being weighed only against their own potential contribution, but against that of their whole family; a country will turn away productive and law-abiding entrepreneurs who stand to provide jobs and pay taxes because it all counts for nothing when they bring a disabled child with them.

Immigration in most countries nowadays is always politicised, with laws which cause pointless expense and frustration to the immigrant and split up families for no good reason, all so that politicians can tell the press that they’re being tough on immigrants. I actually know a Canadian lady with multiple physical disabilities who is seeking to move to the UK to be with her fiancé, and I am pretty certain that she has much to contribute. As far as I know her disabilities will not count against her as long as she is able to manage them (which she is) but I am just hoping that everyone she encounters knows this. I have no problem allowing law-abiding people with disabilities into the UK, but it is sad that a British person with the same disabilities might have serious trouble moving to other parts of the English-speaking world, even to join family. There is no real reason why there cannot be free movement and settlement between them, much as there is in the EU, given that the countries are at similar stages of development and have much more similar politics and cultures than is the case among the EU nations.

I don’t know if Canada would gladly see the back of any disabled person who wanted to move abroad. One group they are more than willing to dump on us is people who moved there as children, with their parents, and became criminals, particularly sex offenders. Often, when they get sent back here, they have not set foot in the UK in decades. (The USA is also notorious for simply deporting immigrants who commit felonies, even if they came as children; in one case, a woman had to fight to stay in the USA after a domestic battery conviction, and she had been adopted from Germany but her adoptive parents never bothered to secure a passport for her.) I would much prefer my taxes to be used on the care of a disabled immigrant than on the behaviour-management or incarceration of a sex offender who wasn’t a sex offender when he left the UK.

This is the story of how a woman who had fled persecution, including rape, in Uganda after being involved in the opposition to the Museveni régime was separated from her daughter for seven years. Her application to bring her daughter over have failed as she supposedly cannot prove that her daughter is her daughter (DNA tests have since done that) and has not supported her (because she could not work because she was an asylum seeker). The woman’s mother has died, so the daughter is now stranded in a boarding school.

Why do the British immigration service behave with such cruelty? Is it because the British government wants to pretend that the Museveni government are good guys? Or is it because the service is stuffed with racists? Refugee organisations tell us that people deported to Uganda face being imprisoned in “safehouses” run by their security forces, tortured and raped. The immigration system uses extraordinary excuses to refuse asylum, among them that a woman had been so resilient through several months of being a sex slave with the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army that she could “certainly cope with return”.

What an utter disgrace.

This is the story of a couple consisting of a British man and his Canadian bride, who married quite legally in the UK last year, and their marriage was delayed because of paperwork getting lost. Four days after their marriage, new rules were brought in which meant that foreign spouses under the age of 21 were no longer going to get spousal visas. This was supposedly to prevent forced marriages.

This all sounds like nonsense. The laws were aimed at Muslims, but not to stop forced marriage. They are a social engineering measure, intended to bring the age of marriage among Muslims more into line with the rest of society (of course, women usually marrying in their late 20s or 30s is a quite recent phenomenon; my parents got married in 1972 when my Dad was 21 and my Mum 19), to lower the birth rates (a woman could have two in those three years) and to make sure that more of the spouses have degrees. A similar measure was introduced in Denmark, with the age set to 24, and Migration Watch has campaigned for the same law to be introduced here. If the government had wanted to deal with the forced marriages, they could have provided means for such spouses to escape, but immigration rules such as “no recourse” often prevent foreign spouses (usually wives) who are trapped in abusive marriages from escaping.

As ever, the media makes a huge fuss when a white person gets treatment usually reserved for wogs. I think this woman should be allowed to remain in this country, but I also think that any foreign spouse of a British citizen should be allowed to stay in the UK if the marriage is legal in the UK and not obviously fake. And this goes for white and black, whatever their religion.