Families which fear the knock on their door in Britain

Press, 19 May 1984, Page 17

Families which fear the knock on their door in Britain

Four years ago many New Zealanders were shocked to read of police making dawn raids on overstayers in Auckland. Britons are belatedly suffering from similar happenings. LYN OWEN of the London “Observer” reports on the way Britain deports immigrants whose papers are not in order.

A knock in the night. The demand: “Are your papers in order?" The quick departure, with no time to settle your affairs, to jail or deportation. No crime committed, no evil-doing. But no chance of bail and no legal trial. It all has a familiar ring: yet this is Britain in the 1980 s for people like Afia Begum, aged 20, deported with her daughter Asma, aged two.

after living “underground’ for a year to avoid her police searchers.

More than 20 demonstrators were arrested at London’s Heathrow airport as they protested against the Begums’ enforced departure.

Mrs Begum had been given permission to join her husband in Britain in 1982, but it was with-

drawn when he died before her arrival. The Pereira family’s tribunal appeal against deportation is yet another reminder that these things are happening now to one section of Britain’s population — immigrants from the New Commonwealth. Some 2000 are ordered deported each year.

The Pereiras — unlike others — received their marching orders in civilised fashion, with a chance to appeal. Even so, their entire village, Bishop’s Waltham in Hampshire, was outraged. Mr Rodney Pereira arrived in Britain six years ago: one of his children was born here.

Others get less gentle treatment. Like the 70 Pakistanis rounded up in a house-to-house dawn raid on a Bradford Street, most of whom proved to have every right to be here — after summary arrest. Police have amended these tactics now, but joint police/immigration “raids” on immigrants continue. The latest was a “round-up” at the Granada Bingo Hall in

Battersea, on March 6, yielding 10 arrests. What kind of criminality lies behind this? The bulk are ordinary people who have been in the country or have had relatives here for a long time. They believe they have surmounted the formidable obstacles to British citizenship — a difficult task because the rules often change. Mr Pereira is a former British Merchant Navy officer and area manager of a double-glazing firm. Counsel for the Home Office said at the tribunal. “They are just an ordinary nice decent couple — and is that enough to stop their deportation?”

Apparently, no. Worse, like a Chinese supermarket manager in Hampstead, it means they can find themselves taken to Wormwood Scrubs to wait many months while their cases are sorted out, simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Half the subjects of deportation orders go to jail, although they have been convicted of no crime

nor ever will be. Ashford Detention Centre now has 117 cells specifically allocated to Immigration Act cases. For the past few months, all have been full. On any one day, two thirds of their occupants will be from the Third World.

Of the 2,242 deportation orders made last year, 1591 were for administrative reasons, not for crimes. Many were people whose residential status had changed because they had been made redundant — just getting another job isn’t good enough. Some 16,000 immigrants lie under threat of deportation if their firm folds; or if their marriages break down. They become deportees in many ways; motoring encounters with the police, visits to social services departments. “If you have a black face or a foreign name,” says the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, “you may have a trace run through a computer. If your papers aren’t in order, deportation can be the result.” Mr Noel Houlden, of East London, had a minor traffic tangle

with the police. He also had a black face. He had lived in Britain since childhood, was now in his early 20s, working, married, respectable, and had never dreamt he was not British. His brother was actually trying to join the Metropolitan Police. The police ran Mr Houlden’s name through their computer. They found forms his parents should have completed when he was a child had not been filled in.

Dora Asoaka was picked up through applying for help to the social services homeless families unit, after her husband had abandoned her. They, too, “ran a trace” and discovered the husband had not filled in the right forms. There is little appeal against deportation. Adjudication, if it occurs at all, is by the body which is trying to deport you — the Home Office. It appoints the adjudicators of such cases, and few appeal cases succeed.

Their reports, as barristers say, are “weighted” by “strained attempts to find misconduct.”

Mrs Pereira’s “misconduct,” for example, was “lack of candour.” She had not told officials interviewing her she was expecting a child, though she was then eight months pregnant. Deportees can languish in detention for six months or more, “banged up” for 19 hours a day, with no access to bail, or freedom of association, in conditions condemned by the prisons inspectorate itself.

At the end, release, after months of suffering. Or a rush to the airport without a chance to pack up.

Police powers are such that in one case — Vinol Chauhan of

Ashton-under-Lyne — police dipped literally into his savings to buy him a first-class ticket to Bombay, leaving him $4OO with which to start a new life. First class, because there were not any second-class tickets on the first plane out. What was the rush? Was Mr Chauhan peddling heroin, or com-

mitting any other mayhem? On the contrary, he was an ordinary man whose wife had left him. The only seeming reason for hurry was that his white neighbours — like the neighbours of the Pereiras —

mounted a campaign to save him which looked as if it might succeed.

Police had “virtually abducted him," says the vicar who tried to rescue him, the Reverend Paul Weller. As this case indicates, the Government seems increasingly embarrassed about the public learning of deporation cases. The adjudication report on the Pereira case gave warning that immigrants might do better without Press help. The Home Secretary, Mr Leon Brittan has complained to the Monday Club of “pernicious attempts by unscrupulous politicians and others to erode the basis of present immigration controls through agitations and allegations based on highly selective and biased accounts of individual cases.”