Once in Britain, Syrian children could face further anxieties
Jonathan Lindsell, 9 September 2015
Those who care about the asylum crisis have been focussed on Parliament’s emergency debate and changes to the government’s stance: how many more Syrians will be accepted, the EU’s resettlement plan, how much more funding will be sent to UN camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
For the 20,000 Syrians that David Cameron has promised to accept over the next five years, we should also consider what might eventually happen to them. The former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown alleged that the government would deport refugee orphans and other children, whom it admitted now, when they turned 18.
Ashdown was half-right: their humanitarian protection status would be re-evaluated. This government routinely returns hundreds of just-18 claimants to unsafe states like Afghanistan. Syrian orphans who are given ‘unaccompanied asylum seeking children’ leave when they arrive here will have their cases re-evaluated when they become adults, and may be deported.
During re-evaluation they may be detained in an asylum detention centre – the Home Office detains about 30,000 at present. Britain currently has 16 detention centres, 12 of these privately run, for holding those whose claims are being processed, whose claims have been rejected, who have broken visa/leave to remain conditions, or have outstayed their visa/leave to remain periods.
The policy, unique in the EU, of detaining failed or potentially failing asylum claimants for unlimited periods detention is broken: almost half of those sent to the detention centres are eventually released into the community. Attempts to fast-track asylum cases first resulted in an embarrassingly high number of successful appeals – about 2 in 7 – against government decisions, then the high court ruling that the whole rushed system was ‘structurally unfair’. The centres, run closer to prisons than sympathetic bureaucracies, serve to signal to the public that something is being done, rather than actually improving claims’ processing.
Corporate Watch reveals that detainees are pressured to take work in the running of the centres – cooking and cleaning – at exploitative wages of £1.00-1.50/hour. They take this work in unbalanced power conditions where there is no employer competition, little choice to refuse since basics like toiletries must be purchased, and limited free will given the alleged abuse and sexual harassment in the centres. It is staggering that an elected MP, Catherine West, and UN human rights rapporteur, Rashida Manjoo, were refused entry to check on conditions in one such centre, Yarl’s Wood.
The detention labour scheme is doubly illegitimate since Corporate Watch suggests the firms running the centres underpay claimants in legal limbo with no rights, rather than employ Britons at the minimum wage. The providers and Home Office all deny that this is the case, claiming the work is non-vital and voluntary.
Young Syrians admitted to settle in Britain face an uncertain future. They could be schooled and fostered here, rebuild their lives, then at 18 be treated like prison labourers and deported. Entry is not the only challenge refugees face, nor the only part of a broken system that the government must reconsider.
Parliament will debate the detention system on 10 September