Indigo Jo Blogs

Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective

Women and children targeted for immigration service abuse

by · 14th August, 2004

There is a real blood-boiler in today’s Guardian, Women and Children First by Natasha Walter, in which she explains how the immigration services seem to be targeting women and children for deportation and abuse. A few points stick out from this article:

  • Some of these women are mothers of British citizens. Why are they not automatically entitled to British residency? Why are there delays with handing over these children to their British parent?
  • The women are being abused in front of their children
  • A woman is arrested by police who come to her friend’s house looking for her friend. The likely reason is that the woman was foreign, which begs the question as to who is not at risk who looks foreign in this country. This comes the same week as it was reported that the immigration services have been stopping people on the London Tube railway system and checking that their “papers were in order”. I never knew anyone had to carry papers when out in public – I’ve never been asked for mine, although I’m white and British so perhaps that’s why.

    • But it begs the question as to why the Government feels the need to pander to the racist popular gutter press instead of facing them down. Three of this country’s biggest selling newspapers are vehicles for what amounts to racist propaganda and other bigotry – if it’s not “bogus asylum seekers”, it’s savage hordes of Gypsies from Eastern Europe, or travellers who supposedly defecate wherever they stand, or whoever. We don’t have an American-style free-speech amendment here – our press cannot comment on matters currently under judicial investigation (sub judice) because it could prejudice the outcome, and incitement to racial hatred is also illegal. Why are the press here allowed to spread this kind of poison for money? (This is not new – 19th century almanacs pushed a diet of anti-Catholic and anti-French propaganda to the masses, so we’ve had more than a hundred years to find a fix to this problem.)

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