Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

Resistance 135
had made. Abdul then continued to speak at public meetings. Others have
campaigned publicly against their own deportation, often with success.
Ivoiriens, as a national group, have demonstrated outside courts, at
Campsfield and even outside their own embassy; some of them have been
active in organising opposition groups with, unusually, a socialist
orientation. Algerian and Zairean community groups have organised
protests and spoken at meetings. Many in the Kurdish community, some of
them PKK members, have been active protesters and demonstrators. But it
is inherently hard for refugees, given the extreme precariousness of their
situation, their vulnerability and the dangers they have faced and still face
in their own countries, to organise active campaigns against their mistreatment
by the British authorities.
It is a different matter for black communities who are already settled in
Britain, many of whose members were born in Britain and who had from the
start, unlike in other European countries, full political and voting rights if
they had migrated from Commonwealth countries. Over the years there has
been growing black self-organisation to assert black people’s rights and
against racism, police harassment, other forms of institutional discrimination
and the far right. There have been a succession of organisations formed
among black and Asian immigrants, sometimes jointly with white antiracists,
including the West Indian Standing Conference, the Campaign
Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), the Joint Council for the Welfare of
Immigrants (JCWI). The Institute of Race Relations, initially a white-led and
staffed research organisation, later became radicalised and is now black-led;
it produces the journal Race and Class. The Indian Workers’ Associations
(IWAs), first set up in the 1950s, with connections with the Communist
Party of India, developed sometimes acrimonious relationships with the trade
unions and the Labour Party. In the late 1960s Black Panthers were active
in Brixton in South London. More recently Southall Black Sisters, the
Southall Monitoring Group and the Newham Monitoring Project in London,
in defending the rights of black people, have of necessity been engaged with
asylum seekers, for example in protesting against the murder of Ibrahima
Sey, a Ghanaian asylum seeker killed by police. Some black-led organisations,
in particular in the late 1990s the National Assembly Against Racism
(NAAR), have explicitly extended their campaigning to refugees and other
persecuted so-called ‘illegal’ migrants. They have pointed out that the
increasing abuses of human rights and racist attitudes to which refugees and
new migrants are subjected affect also the settled black communities. Since
it has become a criminal offence for employers to employ people who do not
have the correct immigration status, employers have become even more
wary of employing anybody whom they suspect of being a foreigner, and
especially black people. The greater emphasis on internal rather than border
checks by immigration officials and police, and the greater powers of arrest,
entry to private premises and the use of force given to immigration officials,
is likely to subject black people, including long-term residents, to yet more