New development: Faith, community organizing and migration—the case of ‘regularization’

Abstract

When civil society organizations pool their muscle, it is amazing what they can achieve. The London Citizens ‘Strangers into Citizens’ campaign has put the idea of a conditional amnesty for illegal immigrants on the political table—and won powerful backers, including the Mayor of London and the Catholic Church.

Notes

*The London Citizens Summer Academy report (2006) found that ‘(cleaning) agencies such as Ocean and KGB purposefully employ irregular migrants. Workers are commonly underpaid or not at all, and are then threatened with being turned over to immigration authorities if they complain. Workers employed by Ocean estimate that they are owed tens of thousands of pounds in unpaid wages’.

**There is a very large number of reports documenting the scale of destitution among refused asylum-seekers: for example Refugee Action (2006), Destitution Trap; Amnesty International UK (2006), Down and Out in London; Centre for Social Justice (2008), Asylum Matters; and Independent Asylum Commission (2008), Safe Return.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Austen Ivereigh

Austen Ivereigh is a community organizer in West London and was formerly the public affairs adviser to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor when Archbishop of Westminster.