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

182 Open Borders
Home Office monies to enforce the poor law either through the
provision of accommodation or advice. No One Is Illegal – Break the
Links Between Welfare Entitlement and Immigration Status!
• For workers within the welfare system to refuse to comply with the
denial of benefits or provisions based on immigration status. Most
workers within the welfare state, at either local or national level,
entered their jobs in the belief they would be providing some form of
socially useful service. Instead they now find they are denying services
and have become part of the apparatus of immigration control. No One
Is Illegal – No Compliance, Be In and Against the State!
• Of course non-compliance by individual workers would leave them
absolutely vulnerable to victimization and dismissal. Non-compliance
requires major trade union support. It is manifestly important to try
and win trade unions to a position of no immigration controls. To do
this it is equally important to form rank and file groupings within
unions of welfare workers who are being obliged to enforce internal
immigration controls. No One Is Illegal – Workers’ Control Not
Immigration Controls!
• For a massive trade union campaign of recruitment of undocumented
workers – of immigration outlaws. Such a recruitment campaign
would help break the division between the documented and the undocumented.
It would enable a campaign to develop against sweated
labour and for the protection of migrant rights – rights to a fair wage,
right to proper work conditions and, most of all, the right to work itself
– as now it is unlawful to work without the correct immigration documentation.
It would also provide another base for the undocumented
to resist deportation and to fight for the regularization of their status.
No One Is Illegal – Everyone has the right to work, the right to be in a
union, and the right to have proper working conditions!
We are not alone!
No One Is Illegal is a phrase first used by Elie Weisel, a Jewish survivor from
Nazi Germany, a refugee and a Nobel Prize winner. He was speaking in 1985
in Tucson, Arizona at a national sanctuary conference in the USA in defence
of the rights of refugees to live in the USA . The sanctuary movement
undertaken by religious communities in the USA (and to a far lesser extent
in the UK) in support of those threatened by immigration controls is one of
many pieces of resistance to controls. Over the last few years No One Is Illegal
groups have been formed throughout Europe and North America – for
instance in Germany (Kein Mensch Ist Illegal), Spain (Ninguna Persona Es
Ilegal), Sweden (Ingen Manniska Ar Illegal), Poland (Zaden Czlowiek Nie Jest
Nielegalny) and Holland (Geen Mens Is Illegaal).
In August 1999 anarchists organized a demonstration in Lvov against
the deportation of Ukranian workers under the banner of No One Is Illegal.