October 2022 Newsletter - Migrants’ Rights Network

In this newsletter, we discuss our #ChallengeTheChecks campaign, and include reflections on our #WhoIsWelcome event + Black History Month.

New Campaign: #ChallengeTheChecks

Right to work checks are broken. Its time to #ChallengeTheChecks.

The Government’s ‘hostile environment’ policies have brought immigration enforcement into every area of life. This includes the workplace.

The Migrants’ Rights Network, Migrants at Work and Open Rights Group have partnered to uncover the negative effects of expecting employers to enforce immigration law in the workplace.

Legislation that is causing this suffering is complex and confusing, incorporating aspects from employment, data rights and Home Office applications. Migrants are effectively living in fear as their futures depend on error-prone digital services or employers who don’t understand the rules.

The Challenge the Checks campaign aims to investigate and raise awareness of two key areas:

Issues arising from right to work checks including the Government checking service and third-party apps
- Technical issues with platforms such as share code errors, data sharing, discrimination from facial recognition software and workers being illegally asked to pay for them
Unfair dismissal or discrimination in the workplace due to a pending immigration status application in the Home Office, known as Section 3C Leave

This campaign will run indefinitely. The coalition will use their combined expertise to piece together the wide extent of how these two areas are affecting migrant communities across the UK.

Black History Month 2022

“It is odd, in a nation where much of the population is apparently proud of Britain’s empire, that critics of one of its most obvious legacies should be asked to get over it, the very same thing from the past that they are proud of…” -Akala, ‘Natives: Race + Class in the Ruins of Empire’.

Here at MRN, we commemorate Black History Month by celebrating the resilience of Black joy, in spite of a legacy of repression. But we also need to emphasise how MUCH WORK STILL NEEDS TO BE DONE to dismantle racist structures.

Much of our work at MRN centres around challenging narratives, because we recognise that language is weaponised in order to prevent meaningful change.

Language is used to alter the realities + violence of Empire + its legacy. It even goes so far as to glorify it. The deliberate erasure of this history means Black communities are gaslit when they point out the racist legacy of Empire.

To honour Black history, and to build a more equitable world, we must stand with Black communities across the world, as they call for reparations, and an end to anti-Black violence in all its forms: physical, psychological or otherwise.

To read more of this month’s newsletter, click here.

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