From the BBC website –
Lawyers for Jamaican Alrick Glanville, 34, accused officials of playing “a trick” on their client, as he had been promised a meeting about a work permit.
Mr Glanville had been offered a three-year permanent position for a medical design and production firm.
His employer had offered to obtain a work permit for him, and he had applied for leave to remain, wrongly believing that the permit had been granted.
But immigration rules meant that, without a work permit, Mr Glanville needed to leave the UK and apply for leave to remain from Jamaica.
Mr Justice Moses said Mr Glanville’s application for leave to remain was consequently turned down, but that he was not told.
So, let’s get this straight, this guy had been in the UK for a while, had been offered a job, applied for a work permit, got mixed up with the bureaucracy, and instead of helping him, telling him what he needs to do, he is summoned to a meeting, on the pretext that it’s in his interest, and is then arrested.
Bastards. I’m embarrassed that I live in a country where things like that are legal. It’s not like he was even living off the state (he still wouldn’t have deserved this treatment if he was, but even hate-fuelled Daily Mail readers can’t resent a guy doing a job!).
I have a friend who worked with a charity helping girls trafficked into the country to work illegally in the sex trade. Kept as slaves, they have little chance of escape. When they finally got to a safe-house, the workers at the safe house had to go with them to sign on, otherwise they would be kidnapped by the immigration service and deported, without any thought for the danger they were in, or the huge likelihood that they would be kidnapped again, and trafficked straight back out of the country again.
Our immigration service is a disgrace, and not for the reasons bandied around in the right-wing media. If a country like ours with a centuries-old tradition of empire building and fucking up the rest of the planet can’t see its responsibility to the people whose countries we’ve helped to render bankrupt, we should be ashamed. I’m ashamed. The treatment of those who come here seeking asylum or a better life (can we please get away from this idea that economic migrants are somehow a bad thing??) is appalling and the changes that are needed in our immigration policy ought to make life easier on the immigrants not harder. And don’t get my started on the prison conditions that asylum applicants are kept in…
I hope Alrick is able to sort his life out, and that he is able to appeal and win, to come back and take up the job he’s been offered, and I wish the immigration bastards were forced to apologise for treating him this way.
Soundtrack – Rise Kagona’s tracks for the gig on the 13th.