Immigration - new material (77)
01 March 2005
Il viaggio dei dannati [The journey of the damned], F. Gatti. L’espresso, 24 March 2005. This article by investigative journalist Fabrizio Gatti recounts the story of the journey of migrants repatriated by Libya (including small unaccompanied children) as they were transported across the desert in lorries to return to their countries of origin, a journey which some of the migrants who were repatriated by Italy experienced. He reports that 106 deaths have been recorded by the Red Half-Moon (the equivalent of the Red Cross in Islamic countries) since repatriation operations from Italy began in September 2004, with the most serious accident occurring in October, when 50 migrants were crushed by a lorry that overturned near the Libya-Niger border. Other tragic incidents included a boy who was eaten by wild dogs in January 2005, and three Nigerian girls who died of thirst in March, while 19 other persons from the same group who ate their own faeces and drank their urine to survive, were rescued in critical conditions after they were abandoned by the people who organised their return. Libya's commitment in agreements with Italy to combat immigration has resulted in the targeting of dark-skinned Africans through raids and arbitrary detentions in the street. The full-text version of the article (in Italian) is available on:
http://www.meltingpot.org/articolo5076.html
Asylum & Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act 2004, Alan Caskie. SCOLAG Journal, April 2005, pp69-71. This is the fifth immigration act in eleven years and the Labour government's third. Caskie examines this new legislation on asylum appeals, reserving his most trenchant criticism for Section 8 - on the "credibility of asylum seekers’ - which he describes as "the worst piece of drafting in the field of immigration law on the UK".
Mugak, Centro de Estudios y Documentación sobre racismo y xenofobia, no. 29, (October-December) 2004, pp.59, euro 8. This issue focuses on two main themes: the regularisation of migrant workers and the Regulation that has been agreed for the implementation of the Spanish immigration law. In both cases, the Spanish government is criticised for treating migrants as expendable labour rather than people. With regards to the regularisation, a large degree of the responsibility for it lies in the hands of employers as only workers who they choose to put under contract are eligible. The restrictive criteria that are applicable in terms of the documentation required for submitting applications are highlighted as negative factors (in fact, the government subsequently relaxed these requirements somewhat as the problems that migrant workers were facing became apparent). With regards to the Regulation, this issue includes an in-depth analysis by SOS Racismo entitled "You can't get a good regulation from a bad law" which calls for a radical change of an immigration policy that is described as "unfair and ineffective". Available from: Peña y Goñi, 13 1_ - 20002, San Sebastián