Cycle for Citizens
Today I cycled the Circle line with approximately a dozen others in aid of Strangers Into Citizens. I'm having difficulty believing it was a full 15 miles as they're claiming but hey, if it was, so much the better. Go me.
We joined the main rally in Trafalgar Square afterwards -- I sloped briefly off to Pret A Manger for something to eat as I was famished, but then hung out in the Square for about an hour and listened to some of the speakers. Too knackered to consider the after-party, I'm afraid, and in any case I should get to work preparing for my criminal mock trial on Wednesday!
Here is a good opinion piece about Strangers Into Citizens and what it hopes to achieve.
The short version is:
There are 750,000 "irregular migrants" in the UK. Mostly they entered legally and then became "illegal" when the rules changed, or their visas ran out, or their asylum claims failed (despite it being still too dangerous to go "home" -- asylum claims from Zimbabwe, Congo and Iraq are regularly rejected).
To send them home would cost £11,000 EACH, or £9 billion in total, besides taking decades. It would also cripple the industries they work in. Currently, however, they are forced to live shadow lives, working illegally, forever at risk of deportation and vulnerable to exploitation.
Strangers Into Citizens proposes a one-off amnesty -- not combined with any relaxation of border enforcement, etc -- for migrants who have been in the UK four years or more, allowing them two years in which to work legally and "prove themselves." At the end of those two years, subject to meeting certain qualifications, they would be able to become British citizens. In the words of one of their banners: "We work. We live. We belong."
We joined the main rally in Trafalgar Square afterwards -- I sloped briefly off to Pret A Manger for something to eat as I was famished, but then hung out in the Square for about an hour and listened to some of the speakers. Too knackered to consider the after-party, I'm afraid, and in any case I should get to work preparing for my criminal mock trial on Wednesday!
Here is a good opinion piece about Strangers Into Citizens and what it hopes to achieve.
The short version is:
There are 750,000 "irregular migrants" in the UK. Mostly they entered legally and then became "illegal" when the rules changed, or their visas ran out, or their asylum claims failed (despite it being still too dangerous to go "home" -- asylum claims from Zimbabwe, Congo and Iraq are regularly rejected).
To send them home would cost £11,000 EACH, or £9 billion in total, besides taking decades. It would also cripple the industries they work in. Currently, however, they are forced to live shadow lives, working illegally, forever at risk of deportation and vulnerable to exploitation.
Strangers Into Citizens proposes a one-off amnesty -- not combined with any relaxation of border enforcement, etc -- for migrants who have been in the UK four years or more, allowing them two years in which to work legally and "prove themselves." At the end of those two years, subject to meeting certain qualifications, they would be able to become British citizens. In the words of one of their banners: "We work. We live. We belong."