Global Justice

* Slavery in the UK Independent

This is the story of Somalatha, who is from Sri Lanka. It is not her real name - you are about to find out why. It is a story that most people will disbelieve could occur in modern-day Britain. Sadly, it is true. It happened very recently

Published: 27 December 2006

Somalatha arrived in Britain when she was 29 with a family for whom she had been working in Jordan. Her job was to be a maid. She had to work 16 to 18 hours a day, for which she was paid £200 a month. In the first two years, she was not given one day off.

She was not allowed to eat with the family and had to wait for leftovers. If there were none, she was advised to eat onions and potatoes. If any food was missing, she was automatically blamed for it, or even punished.

* BBC NEWS | Special Reports | Migrants 'shape globalised world'

By David Loyn
Developing world correspondent, BBC News

Near the Wind Tower, an original desert house designed to draw cooling air through its mud walls, thousands of men gather to meet, sit, walk and talk.

They wear their best clothes, filling every available space on the marble avenues and squares that are the preserve of shoppers the rest of the week.

The flower farms where immigrants prove their value to the economy Independent

Terri Judd

 For as far as the eye could see, thousands of daffodils in uniform rows protruded from the boggy ground. At a flower farm in deepest Cornwall yesterday, each stem awaited a flower picker to bend, cut it, bunch it and place it carefully in a tray, one of hundreds of blooms to be transported to Marks & Spencer or Sainsbury's. Shoppers may not be aware of the Bulgarian, Romanian, Russian or Ukrainian labouring over their flowers. But for Ivan Dimitrov, a tall young man contemplating the field through a veil of rain, this will be his life for the next five months.

In officially colorblind France, blacks have a dream – and now a lobby | csmonitor.com

PARIS - Patrick Lozès has a dream: One day France's black citizens will enjoy the equality granted them under law.

"To be black and proud - that's not being anti-French," says Mr. Lozès, whose vision challenges France's colorblind model of assimilation. "It's simply theliberation of a people who don't see themselves reflected in their country's public life - in its theater, television, medicine, and universities - except in negative images."

Bangladesh: At the mercy of climate change - Independent

The Sundarbans nature reserve in Bangladesh's south-west is one of the last untouched places on Earth - and home to the largest population of tigers left in the wild. But the trees in the Sundarbans have suddenly started dying. And not just that: they have started dying in a way nobody has seen before, from the top down.

* Pakistani doctor's suicide highlights plight of unemployed immigrants

By Jonathan Brown and David Langton

Published: 19 February 2007

Imran Yousaf was already a qualified doctor when he said goodbye to his family in their village outside Lahore and headed for Britain to start a new life.

Like generations of other young medics from the Indian subcontinent, he thought he was desperately needed in the UK to shore up an NHS critically short of trained staff.

But two years later, having used up all his family savings and borrowed heavily from friends, Dr Yousaf, 28, was unemployed. Not that he had been idle in the meantime, having paid for and passed with flying colours the exam to practice in Britain. He was also studying for the finals of a Royal College of Physicians post-graduate qualification. Friends recalled how he wrote hundreds of letters each week to UK hospitals and applied for thousands of posts since setting up home in Burnley.

Low Pay and Broken Promises Greet Guest Workers - New York Times

To a rice farmer from Thailand making $500 a year, the recruiter's pitch was hard to resist -- three years of farm work in North Carolina that would pay more than 30 times as much as he earned at home.

The pitch was so persuasive that the farmer, Worawut Khansamrit, put his farm up as collateral to pay the recruiter $11,000 to become a guest worker. "The amount of money they promised was very attractive," said Mr. Khansamrit, a slight, soft-spoken 40-year-old with a 15-year-old daughter he wants to send to college.

But after he arrived in North Carolina with 30 other Thai workers, he found there was only about a month's work. He was then taken to New Orleans to remove debris from a hotel damaged by Hurricane Katrina -- work he says he was never paid for. This month, he and other Thai workers filed a federal lawsuit asserting that they were victims of illegal trafficking.

Foreign Policy In Focus | Migrants: Globalization's Junk Mail?

Laura Carlsen | February 23, 2007 The titles that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attaches to its operations reveal a great deal about the logic behind current U.S. immigration policy. Among the most suggestively titled is the ongoing Operation "Return to Sender," one of the largest such operations in U.S. history. The program, supposedly designed to target "fugitive aliens," has resulted in the indiscriminate round up of over 13,000 undocumented migrants in cities throughout the United States. The cynical name given to this even more cynical operation implies a sender, a receiver -- and an object. The object, or rather objects, are migrant workers and their families. Operation Return to Sender is an instrumentalist policy that ignores the humanity of migrant workers. It refuses to recognize that migrants have hopes and dreams, that they have a legitimate need to eat and think and act. It denies family ties and affective relationships. It also ignores the central role that undocumented workers play in the U.S. economy and the factors that brought them to the country in the first place. In short, Operation Return to Sender acts on the premise that the millions of undocumented workers in the United States today are little more than globalization's junk mail.

Migrant workers stand to lose their rights

news.independent.co.uk

Independent Online Edition Leading British institutions gripped by racism rows

Three British institutions are engulfed by race rows - but the protagonists all deny any charges of bigotry

By Robert Verkaik

Published: 09 March 2007

Britain's institutions stand accused of fostering a climate of casual racism after a series of race rows yesterday provoked clashes between MPs, academics and leaders of the black and Asian communities.

In the most high-profile case, David Cameron, the Tory party leader, was forced to sack his frontbench spokesman on homeland security, Patrick Mercer, because he suggested that being called a "black bastard" was part and parcel of life in the Army for ethnic minority soldiers.

Al Jazeera - Agents fleece Bangladeshi migrants

By Tony Birtley in Dhaka

On the outskirts of Dhaka, adults and children pick through the city's biggest rubbish dump Millions of migrant workers from developing countries travel abroad each year to jobs they hope will bring money and security to their families, but many end their journey in prison, despair and financial ruin. Construction and manufacturing industries in the growing economies of the Middle East and Asia could not survive without the migrant workers who travel from some of the world's poorest countries. They often have to work long hours for little pay, enjoy few rights and often endure poor living conditions.

An altered state Guardian

Britain has seen extraordinary rates of change through mass migration in recent years. Now we must develop strong policies that recognise this.

Jon Crudas

April 19, 2007

In the past few years many communities have experienced extraordinary rates of change through mass migration, changing patterns in the demand for labour and the dynamics of the housing market.

Such huge demographic changes have proved difficult for the state to respond to, or even to comprehend, not least because many of the people affected do not show up in any census and therefore do not even exist for the purposes of public policy making.

Unskilled workers to be barred from UK - Independent Online Edition > UK Politics

By Nigel Morris, Home Affairs Correspondent

Published: 19 April 2007

Lower-skilled workers from outside the European Union will not be allowed to migrate to Britain from the start of next year, under new immigration rules.

With official figures today showing net migration to this country of 185,000 in 2005, the Government signalled a new drive to control the influx. Liam Byrne, the Immigration minister, set out the timetable for a new points-based system designed to limit numbers of newcomers.

UK asylum detainees in epidemic of self-harm | UK News | The Observer

Report claims overcrowding and staff abuse are driving asylum seekers to desperate behaviour

Jamie Doward, home affairs editor
Sunday May 20, 2007
The Observer

Hunger strikes, rioting and self-harm are now endemic in Britain's biggest detention centres as detainees become increasingly desperate about living in what they claim are deteriorating conditions.

At Yarl's Wood in Bedfordshire, more than 100 women are refusing to eat, and there have been recent reports of major disturbances at Lindholme, South Yorkshire, and at Colnbrook in Middlesex.

Rules to make migrants integrate | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

Ministers say citizenship should depend on good behaviour, passing English tests and knowledge of UK

Patrick Wintour, political editor and Alan Travis
Tuesday June 5, 2007
The Guardian


Proposals from ministers stress that migrants should be made to feel that British citizenship is something that has to be earned. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty
 

A point system at the heart of the immigration bill before Congress would bode poorly for Herminia Licona Sandoval, who wants her son to come to the United States.

WASHINGTON, June 4 -- Ekaterina D. Atanasova, a civil engineer from Bulgaria who lives in southern Maine, wants to bring her husband to the United States. Under the Senate immigration bill, he would get high marks -- at least 74 points -- because he too is a civil engineer, has a master's degree and is fluent in English.

The true story of a refugee in Britain - Independent Online Edition > UK Politics

 

Immigration is one of the most highly charged political issues of our time. Yet how much do we know about the lives of those arriving in Britain as refugees? In the first of a series of extraordinary personal stories, 'Dog' describes the journey that brought him here - and his struggle to survive in a cruel and indifferent world

Interview by Carole Angier

Published: 18 June 2007

I I'll tell you my story, but I won't tell you my name. People say "it's a dog's life". You can call me Dog. I come from Africa. I won't say where. My father left my mother when I was very young. I don't remember him, he never took care of me. My mother did her best. She worked selling fruit in the market, but we were poor. In Africa, if you have no money, you get no schooling, so I never went to school. Sometimes my mother would go away for a long time and would leave me with friends. They didn't treat me well. Sometimes I didn't have enough to eat. I had to beg on the street. I was only five or six years old. Young.

So my life was rough from the start. Maybe God wanted to prepare me. But he prepared me well, because my mother is a good woman. She loved me and taught me good things: work hard, don't steal, trust in God. But one day she didn't come back. I asked and asked her friends, but they didn't tell me what had happened to her for a long time. Finally, they said she had died. I was about 10 years old. I don't even know where she is buried, or who paid for her grave.