As yet more anti-migrant laws make their way through Parliament the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants is calling on migrants to show that immigration is a cause for celebration, not fear. Habib Rahman JCWI Chief Executive urged migrants their families, friends and supporters to join the migrants’ day of celebration planned for London on Monday 7 May, just two days before the UK Borders Bill is back in the Commons.

This Bill will permit the collection of non-European nationals’ biometric data before UK nationals; and empower immigration officers to conduct searches for migrants’ documents and seize their earnings. This is on top of other measures already, or being introduced, including:

• By the end of this year beginning to hound half a million irregular migrants out of their jobs and make them destitute even though many of individuals have skills, do jobs that require doing, pay taxes and may have families here
  
  
• More than doubling the fee for indefinite leave to remain to £750 and introducing tests for ILR so that some of the poorest and disadvantaged children who have grown up in the UK could be denied citizenship indefinitely.
  
  
• Detaining asylum seekers and tagging others as though they have committed crimes
  
  
• Deporting failed asylum seekers to some of the world’s hotspots for conflict and human rights violations
  
  
• Tying most migrants to sponsors making it even more difficult for migrants to escape abusive employers in the future and threatening to remove the right to switch employers from the most vulnerable women domestic workers
  
  
• Taking poor countries’ mostly highly skilled migrants while slamming the door shut in the faces of their unskilled workers
  
  
• Changing the rules for highly skilled migrants already in the UK at the last minute so that people who were told they would have the right to work now face being deported and left thousands of pounds in debt
  
  
• Making the rules for Bulgarians and Romanians so complicated that many will end up fined and prosecuted for illegal working even though they want to work legally and have every right to be in the UK
  
  
• Denying free non-urgent health care including antenatal services and midwifery to poor migrant women
  
  
• Preventing migrants like failed asylum seekers the right to marry legally even though they have no chance of returning home safely and they have UK partners who have homes and jobs here.

Habib Rahman said: “These anti-migrant laws fly in the face of the immense good that migration can do by offering the persecuted a safe haven, people from the developing world the chance to send money to the poorest countries, and bringing cultural and economic enrichment to the countries that host migrants.

“We urge migrants and everyone who supports them to take the opportunity on May 7 to remind people that immigration should be a cause for celebration – not another repressive immigration act that is going to make more of our lives a misery.”