Immigration Bill

Lord Ahmed Excerpts

Monday 10th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmed (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, first, I declare my interest as a small landlord. Since the late 1960s, I have noticed successive Governments have used legislation for a more robust position on immigration, and it is always before the general election or even just before the European election. The debate should have been about the new EU arrivals from Romania and Bulgaria, but it is always the visible minority communities and people from outside the EU who will face the consequences.

I regret that I may be repeating some points so eloquently made earlier by your Lordships, but I will repeat them anyway. Parts 1 and 2 would remove due process protections and judicial scrutiny of immigration decision-making. Part 2 would also give immigration officials the power to demand biometric information from individuals. Officials currently believe they have the right to question during in-country spot checks. I am sorry that the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, is not in his seat, but I wonder how many of your Lordships have been stopped at an airport. The noble Viscount asked what was wrong with being asked to produce documents. I will tell your Lordships.

Last year I was stopped twice: once at Heathrow and a second time at Birmingham. At Birmingham in June I was asked to produce my documents, which I did, and I was then asked where I was going. I told them that I was going to Pakistan and why I was going there. I told him that I was going to attend the Prime Minister’s inauguration ceremony. Then he asked what I did, and I said, “I am a Member of the House of Lords”, and he asked, “In what country?”.

I made the point to the former Immigration Minister, Mark Harper, that that man needed some training. When I asked him whether he was targeting or profiling, he said that he was profiling. When I have asked Ministers and officials, they have said that there is no such thing as profiling. If that happened to any white, indigenous parliamentarian or member of the public, people would be appalled. That is my point. I can give you the dates: April and June 2013.

In November 2013, there was a raid in Rotherham at a restaurant, the Orient Express, the old train station. I just happened to be there when about eight or 10 officers walked in. Some of them stood near the door. The others went into the kitchen. They moved all the staff, who were very busy. They questioned everybody. I was watching, and then I asked one of the officers if I could speak to the senior officer present. He said, “Who are you?” and I told him that I was a just servant, a Member of the House of Lords, and I just wanted to ask what they were looking for. Actually, the raid resulted in nothing, because it was not based on intelligence but, having made that point, the officers, having come through the front door, went through the back of the restaurant and did not want to speak to me. That was recorded with the immigration officials in Yorkshire and Humberside.

Parts 3 and 4 would mark a huge shift in the British tradition of immigration control at the border, transferring responsibility to the daily lives of people across the country. Landlords, vicars, imams and healthcare workers will be asked to check on the immigration status of individuals who want to use their services, inevitably setting race relations back decades in the process. The point has already been made about the former Minister, for whom I have the greatest respect, but even he could not detect the immigration papers. How can we expect landlords, vicars and health workers to behave like UK Border Agency officials?

In my opinion, the Bill is a sinister piece of legislation. Building on our laws that define certain humans as illegal, it is intended to create an even more hostile environment for an already marginalised section of society. Consequently, people will be deprived of employment, bank accounts, driving licences, accommodation and family life. Legal rights for seeking redress will be severely curtailed, and courts will be instructed by Parliament on how to decide cases. At the same time, social media channels are churning out material, propaganda wagons have been sent to patrol the streets bearing a slogan of hate, and “papers please” checks on public transport and the streets are spreading.

Families will not simply accept their extermination. Lovers will not part because a bureaucrat makes an error. Parents will not abandon their dreams for their children because some politician says so. Children will not exile their parents to a distant and lonely death because compassion and rights are no longer relevant to modern public policy.

Nor will society return to the chalky white days of the 1950s, before all these inconvenient cross-border, cross-racial family relationships. The Government’s hostile environment is not just about purging those modern, loving families from our society; it is also about wishfully thinking that such relationships can be discouraged in future. The setting of minimum income for a spouse at a level that literally half the population cannot meet warns our young and poor people that love with a foreigner comes at huge personal cost. It is intended to dissuade.

The Government’s social engineering is unnatural and morally wrong. It cannot possibly work, but it can cause misery along the way. The Bill removes appeal rights against decisions made under the Immigration Rules. For more than 40 years, we have had immigration tribunals to correct administrative decisions profoundly affecting people’s lives. It appears that tribunals will continue to exist for tax disputes, school place allocation, parking fines and welfare benefits, but not where one is faced with permanent separation from spouse or children or removal from the country.

The Bill proposes the removal of the right of appeal to an independent judge, to be replaced with “administrative review”, as many of your Lordships have already mentioned, by the department’s own staff. Immigration appeals have an almost 50% success rate, according to the Government’s own figures. A recent freedom of information request reveals that, between July 2012 and June 2013, 6,096 administrative reviews were resolved and, of those, 1,077 were overturned. That is 18%. That is why the Government want to remove the right of appeal. It is the same reason why the Government want to reduce access to judicial review: they do not like losing. The Government would rather reduce access to justice and remove independent scrutiny than improve decision-making.

The Government propose to empower the Home Secretary to deprive a person of British citizenship acquired by naturalisation, even if by doing so she will render the person stateless. The Home Secretary will be able to use that power if the person,

“has conducted him or herself in a manner which is seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the UK”.

Nearly 60 years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States decided in the Trop v Dulles case that it was a cruel and unusual punishment to deprive a person of citizenship, making him or her an outcast in his own land. Statelessness has been estimated to affect up to 12 million people worldwide. Possession of nationality is essential for full participation in society and a prerequisite for the enjoyment of the full range of human rights. Those who are stateless may, for example, be denied the right to own land or exercise the right to vote. They are often unable to obtain identity documents. They may be detained because they are stateless, and they can be denied access to education and health services or blocked from obtaining employment.

The evil of statelessness is a profound concern of the United Nations, which has produced two conventions on the issue: the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons 1954 and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness 1961. The UK has signed both. Article 8 of the 1961 convention states:

“A Contracting State shall not deprive a person of his nationality if such deprivation would render him stateless”.

Although Article 8.3 allows the state to derogate from their obligation in respect of a person who,

“has conducted himself in a manner seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the State”,

the UK has until now deliberately not relied on that derogation. Section 56 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006, passed in the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bombings, gave the Secretary of State the power to deprive a person of British citizenship on the grounds that that was conducive to the public good, but not if to do so would render the person stateless. I am puzzled by the use of the phrase,

“conducive to the public good”,

because it has been used arbitrarily and in a discriminatory manner.

Let me give you an example: a man called Moazzam Begg—a former Guantanamo Bay detainee—and a political leader from Pakistan both live in north London. In the case of Mr Begg, his passport has been confiscated due to his travel abroad, and I understand that he has been collecting information regarding the complicity of various authorities in the Syria dispute. He has never been charged with any criminal or terrorist activity anywhere, but he is now without a passport. In the case of the Pakistani politician, according to the BBC “Newsnight,” there are very serious allegations of murder, incitement to violence and money-laundering, which have been investigated by the Metropolitan Police. This man has no connection with British society. To the best of my knowledge he does not have a job or a business in the UK. Many people, however, have been killed in Karachi after his telephonic addresses, when he speaks from London. Thousands of people have made complaints to the Met police and written to the British authorities on his activities related to violence in Pakistan, yet the Home Secretary has not made any efforts to have him removed. There are thousands of people who question me on every trip to Pakistan on why the British authorities have this double standard—why they treat some people differently. It is “conducive to public good”.

The Government’s plan risks the UK’s losing a proud position—a position of solidarity and a potential position of leadership—instead of remaining at the forefront of international efforts to reduce statelessness. I have a very long list of things that I wanted to go into, and I realise that I have gone over my time, but I hope that the Bill will be changed, at least in Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6, including Clause 60. Amendments can make this Bill much better than it is now.