Jewish Socialists’ Group message at Stop Rwanda protest

The Government intends to transport people to Rwanda.  Who are these people? 

They are asylum seekers who have taken tremendous risks to seek safety and security here. Most will have no connection to Rwanda or the region. Some will have fled from Rwanda or its surrounding area. Either way it makes no human sense and is a moral outrage for them to be dumped there.

And why is the Government doing this? Priti Patel says it is to put the people traffickers out of business. I can tell her that there is one way of defeating the traffickers at one stroke – Open the Borders.

Recently The Mail on Sunday ran a story claiming that a large percentage of those on the boats crossing the Channel are Albanian – which is not a war-torn country. According to The Mail it means that they are “abusing asylum”.  In the first place we don’t know if these figures are true. I don’t trust The Hate Mail on Sunday or its sources.  Leaving that aside, since when does a country have to be at war for there to be no victims of persecution?  Look at Jews in Germany between 1933 and 1939.  Did they not suffer persecution?  Not according to The Daily Mail then or now. And we know that Roma people experience serious persecution in Kosovo and Albania.

This Rwanda Plan might seem illogical, and at a human level it is. But it flows logically from immigration controls.

Immigration controls criminalise people or restrict their rights according to where they were born, where their parents were born, the language they speak, the colour of their skin, and whether they adopt “British Values”. That makes them inherently racist. Once racist controls are accepted you end up with something like the Rwanda plan.  This is the logic of a hostile environment which has been going on for at least 130 years.

We must tear down the whole edifice of immigration controls – brick by brick, wall by wall.