Slave labour

[Vladimir]

Melanie McFadyean
Monday June 6, 2005
The Guardian

...<snip>

"We would not want them to be destitute," he told the House of Lords in June last year. "However, we must recognise that there is a cost to the taxpayer of providing ... support. Those failed asylum seekers who are able to participate in community activities should ... give something back while they are waiting to return home. By asking people ... to make a short-term contribution ... we will continue the enormous progress that we have made in restoring credibility to the asylum system."

For restoring credibility read getting rid of the marauding scroungers of popular press and imagination, finagling their way around the welfare state and doing us out of housing, health services, benefits and education. The idea that there is a plague of human locusts sweeping through the land is one in which many of us collude, making acceptable a succession of restrictive laws, most recently this one condoning slavery. We are complicit - the government makes the laws, but without our collusion they wouldn't work. We don't catch the asylum seeker's eye; we look away.

<snip>

The Home Office invited voluntary bodies to run a pilot scheme, and until last week YMCA England had been in the running for it. Challenged on this, Kevin Williams, a spokesman for YMCA England, had agreed that asylum seekers should be allowed to work and be paid, but since they aren't the YMCA would offer "meaningful activity".

<snip>

Williams gave examples of "meaningful activities" such as working with elderly people or those with learning disabilities. What about training? Williams replied that many asylum seekers had "expertise". (Indeed: 1,000 asylum-seeking and refugee doctors are on the BMA database, only 57 of whom are practising in UK.) Rooker suggested hard cases recipients could contribute to the "maintenance of their own accommodation". How marvellous for property owners.

My comment: I've asked this before: is there really nothing to which the Home Office won't stoop? Nothing at all? Can we find a bar low enough for these morons?

[tjwmason]

1. This is about failed applicants

They are waiting to be sent back.

It's unbelievable. What they are being told is:

"Piss off, we don't want you here - in the mean time, here's a trech for you to build."

There's a very strong argument for allowing applicants to work whilst their claims are being processed (after all, that's surely what they want to do, come here, work and support themselves); but once they've been turned down. This policy would probably have been rejected as too extreme if the Mail's editorial staff ran the Home Office (God forbid).

[sweetheart]

2. Its a bit OTT

It won't work. Human beings are not that enslaved, that without
coercion, they will work for free when goodwill has been withdrawn.

Years back, i got a letter from the home office to re-apply for a visa
or quit the country in 14 days, and it is a terror note, i tell you.
Sit in your home with your family and pets and consider what would
happen if you've to be thrown out of your home for an airplane to a
place that is no more home than anywhere else. I quickly got them the
documents they wanted and they fixed things (taking 6 months! to do so).
It seems that us immigratns must act in a fortnight, but the home office
can lounge about for half a year to return passports.

I tell you, had i really had to quit the country, i'd have been so
involved with making sure my dogs had good homes, that slavery would
really have not been a concern... i would just say "no" to slavery.
If they then collected me and took me to prison, i would still say no,
wondering from the prison about my loved ones, waiting to be sent to
the ameirca-prison state in an inter-prison transfer... and no way would
i have the heart to do slave labour... what the heck are they
thinking? Have they any clue about the actual states of mind of the
persons they're talking about?