illegal immigrants in UK --- 'system riven with failure or hypocrisy'

[bobbieinok]

(this is one of several articles about the male immigration judge blackmailed by the female immigrant cleaner over his sexcapades)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1884862,00.html

Mary Riddell

The case of the shamed judge overshadows a real travesty

While we pick over the details of Khan and his cleaner, immigrants are being denied the justice they deserve

Mary Riddell
Sunday October 1, 2006
The Observer

....

Move on, for a moment, from judicial trouser-dropping. Remember The Observer's recent investigation into a senior immigration official accused of seeking sex from an 18-year-old Zimbabwean rape victim in exchange for helping her win her asylum claim. Look at Lunar House in Croydon, the immigration service's headquarters, where the vulnerable arrive in hope and linger in despair. Read the allegations of corrupt officers offering papers for £2,000 or so a case.

From the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, deemed unfit for purpose by the Home Secretary, to the hospitals, shops and restaurants kept open by illegal and sweated labour, the system is riven with failure or hypocrisy. Even if it were possible or desirable, and it is neither, deporting the irregular migrant population would cost £4.7bn, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research.

This Saturday, UK migrants will march in London, in an echo of the US demonstrations demanding equal rights. The protesters will not be judge bait, like Driza. Many will have fled vicious states, only to find that enlightened democracies have their own ways of subverting human rights. Some will end up in removal centres, their children incarcerated with them; some will not emerge alive. A failed Angolan asylum seeker hanged himself not long ago at Yarl's Wood so that his 13-year-old son, arrested with him, could go to school in Britain.

Far from being 'swamped', Britain has seen asylum applications drop for the third year running, in line with the rest of the industrialised world. What is needed now is a proper tightening up of our porous borders, plus a one-off amnesty, or 'regularisation', for many of those who live and work in Britain's shadowlands, exploited and fearful of expulsion.

The alternative is a deportation programme that would take 25 years to shift even the current undocumented migrants, besides enshrining a mood of spite and fear.

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