Illegal immigrants are people too

Mark Harper may or may not be a name your familiar with. If you have heard of him, it’s probably due to his resignation in February of this year following the discovery that his cleaner was an illegal immigrant. This would be embarrassing for any MP, but excruciating for the Minister of State for Immigration, famed for his tough stance on illegal immigrants, which culminated in his ill-fated “In the UK Illegally? Go Home or Face Arrest” vans which were scrapped almost immediately after causing massive controversy and failing in their aims.

Mark Harper (photo from Wikipedia)

After his resignation Mr Harper spent a few contrite months in the doghouse, long enough for the schadenfreude to dissipate, before being given a new position: that of Minister of State for Disabled People. This may be considered a step down or a step sideways, I’m not sure of the rankings of the various ministerial positions, but he still has political influence beyond just being an MP and, until the next election at least, his job as MP for the Forest of Dean is secure.

Isabella Acevedo is a name you are most likely not familiar with. She is the cleaner at the centre of this and unlike Mark Harper, for whom the revelation of her immigrant status was simply a minor embarrassment that caused a slight but soon corrected derailing of his career, her life has been ruined.

Before I get into the details I should point out that I understand that as a nation with finite space and finite resources it is not possible to house everyone who may want to move here. If you come here illegally then the government has every right to deport you. I do have issues surrounding our rhetoric on immigrants, both legal and illegal, and it’s something I intend to get into more in future posts. But for now I want to focus on Isabella Acevedo and use her as an example, a case study if you will, to illustrate the effects of this rhetoric.

Ms Acevedo was arrested. This is not unexpected and would cause little concern, except for the manner in which the arrest was conducted. While the details are in dispute the facts remain: Ms Acevedo was arrested at her daughter’s wedding. A number of immigration officers, accounts range from between 7 and 15, and between one and several police, came into the registry office just before the wedding began. The wedding was halted, in part due to the arrest and in part because of claims of discrepancies in the paperwork that threatened to prevent the wedding from going ahead. Registrars found the paperwork to be in order and allowed the wedding to be conducted.

Just think about this for a minute. It’s a wedding, a happy day. The bride and groom are excited to be starting their new life together, the mother of the bride is feeling happy for her daughter. Everyone’s standing around waiting for the service to start when, suddenly, the doors burst open, a load of uniformed men thunder in and everything starts to feel like some awful movie. The mother of the bride is dragged away, begging to see her daughter but being prevented. Someone goes to the registrar and implies that this is a sham marriage, only done for the purposes of gaining residency and should be stopped. The guests stand around bemused, confused, frightened. The bride and groom wondering what on earth is going on, what just happened to turn this from the happiest day of their lives to be the surreal disaster that’s playing out before them.

Ms Acevedo after being arrested (photo from the Guardian)

The government has justified their actions by saying that Ms Acevedo had eluded them and they had to go to the wedding as it was a place they knew they would find her. This makes sense, but why go about the arrest in the manner in which they did? Why so many men? This is a 47-year old cleaner, unless there’s some unreported skill with hand-to-hand combat that she possessed, this seems like overkill. I also find the accusations of irregularities in the wedding documentation to be troubling. If they thought this was a sham wedding then I can understand why they would let it take place, as it means catching the perpetrators in the act. But given the high-profile nature of the case I would expect accusations to be well-founded. The fact that they were unsubstantiated and the wedding later took place suggests that this was little more than an attempt at intimidation.

Ms Acevedo was taken to Yarls Wood detention centre where she was held. She was given a ‘window’ of two weeks within which she could be deported, which opened at 11.59pm on Wednesday 30 July. Her deportation took place the next day, being taken at 12:06am, still in her pyjamas. She was, it is believed, put on a 6.20am flight to Madrid with a connecting flight to Bogota. Her lawyer, Gerard Hall, said he had never seen this tactic used in 20 years of handling immigration cases.

"On all other occasions we've been provided with notification of a date, time and flight details – all that would be required . . . for us to obtain an injunction if necessary. . . My personal view is that that was done to frustrate efforts to assist her."’

[Source]

A woman was arrested at her daughter’s wedding with excessive force, she was grabbed roughly enough to leave bruises, and she was then deported without any warning, preventing her lawyer from filing an injunction and she was then put on a plane to Bogota without, seemingly, any concern about what happened to her when she land. Whatever your stance on illegal immigrants I hope you agree that this treatment is not the actions of a civilised country.

The actions of the Home Office were not those of a department having to carry out an unfortunate but necessary part of their role and doing so with humanity and dignity. They were the actions of a bunch of ramped up rent-a-thugs who were high on the power and supposed impunity their positions provided them, who thought nothing of ruining the wedding day of an innocent bridge and groom, who thought nothing of verbally and physically roughing up a scared middle-aged woman, and who thought it was fine to take a woman from her room in the middle of the night and stick her on a plane with nothing more, it seems, than the pyjamas she was wearing.

I disagree with the government’s stance on immigration, I admit that. But I would be more willing to listen to their position if it came with an ounce of humanity, an ounce of consideration and concern for those less fortunate than themselves. Mark Harper was perfectly happy to pay £30 a week (paid for with parliamentary expenses) for someone to clean his house and do his ironing for 4 hours (that’s £7.50/hr). Now, anyone with any ability to think would realise that it’s tough to live on that sort of salary in London, especially if you’re only doing a few hours in each property as you lose a lot of time to travelling between jobs. If Mark Harper had been willing to pay a decent wage for this work then he would have been more likely employing a legal worker. But when you only pay pennies you are only going to get people for whom there is no other choice, and that means illegal immigrants.

What I find most appalling about this story is the consequences for the two sides. Mark Harper, the man who made the government pay a pittance for his housework to be done, was demoted for 5 months before being given a new ministerial position. The effect on his career and his life are negligible. The cost of the hypocrisy of paying wages only an illegal immigrant would agree to, while simultaneously decrying their presence in the country, is minimal. Yet the cost of being an illegal immigrant, working hard every day of your life to earn a small amount of money in order to try and provide a better life for you and your family, of never having holiday- or sick-pay, of never being able to ask for a raise, is such that when the hypocrisy of your employer is discovered it is your name that is pariah, your family that is torn apart, your life that is destroyed.

All Isabella Acevedo did was come here to work and she did that since 2000. If she hadn’t worked for Mark Harper she would still be here, working hard, cleaning the flats and houses of rich people for barely more per hour than the amount they spend on a decent cappuccino. The outrage should be over these people thinking there is nothing wrong with paying so little. The outrage should be over the hypocrisy of these people who decry these immigrants “coming here and taking all the jobs” while simultaneously paying so little that only illegal immigrants are willing to accept the work. The outrage should be over the Home Office thinking that being an illegal immigrant means you have no right to dignity or compassion. The outrage should be over the fact that the MP at the centre of this has lost nothing yet the woman who did nothing except clean his flat and iron his shirts has lost everything without any opportunity to plead her case or even see her daughter’s wedding dress.

The treatment of Ms Acevedo is a direct result of a sustained campaign of demonization of illegal immigrants by the right wing press and politicians. Ms Acevedo was employed by many people yet they have not been pursued and punished for employing an illegal immigrant: the focus of ire has been entirely on her. The embarrassment she caused the government was great and they vindictively ruined her for this. If the government hadn’t taken such a hard-line stance on immigration they could have passed this off as a minor embarrassment, but for a government that has been trying to complete with UKIP over who can be the most xenophobic this was not something that could be overlooked. The way Ms Acevedo was arrested, detained and deported is a direct result of the rhetoric around immigrants that makes them out to be less than us – less worthy of humane treatment, less worthy of dignity, less worthy of due process. This rhetoric is poisonous. It’s caused us to destroy the life of one harmless woman in the most callous of ways and will continue to do so until we, as a nation, realise that illegal immigrants are people too.