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Dear supporters, 

We hope you are all keeping safe and well despite the horrific far-right racist violence spreading across the country. We are continuing as best we can to look after our impacted staff and wider community, while harnessing our mutual anger to hold those who spread racist hate and division to account. We have written a joint statement with the Islamophobia Response Unit, joined our friends in signing a joint letter calling for Parliament to be recalled and have lots more campaigning planned.

Before this violence erupted, we launched our Hostile Office report, as well as a new campaign on Justice for Sponsored Workers. We have also been busy defying the narrative on migration, including explainers and blogs. You can find out more about the work we have been doing this month below. 

Thank you for your ongoing support and rest assured we will not stop fighting against racist, Islamophobic and anti-migrant hate.

In solidarity,

The MRN Team

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Joint statement on far right violence

Islamophobia and anti-migrant hatred is racism in action

Far-right violence is spreading from Southport to Manchester and Whitehall, accompanied by Islamophobic, racist and anti-migrant chants. The violence followed rampant misinformation online, including comments by Tommy Robinson, in which he linked the tragic murder of three children in Southport with Islam and migrants. This ongoing violence across the country shows the damaging consequences of inflammatory and divisive rhetoric towards marginalised groups.

Eighteen months on from the far-right riot in Knowsley outside asylum accommodation, we must once again confront persistent racism and Islamophobia embedded in the UK. Anti-migrant and Islamophobic chants alongside the spiralling, hate-fuelled riots and demonstrations outside hotels accommodating people seeking asylum clearly shows how easily Muslim and migrant communities are turned into scapegoats. 

We categorically condemn those who have weaponised the tragedy in Southport in order to stoke hatred and division, and we urge solidarity between communities: from the grieving families in Southport, to Muslim communities scared for their safety and sanctity of places of worship, to the people seeking asylum living in inhumane accommodation. 

Cross-sector letter to the Prime Minister

With 80 anti-racist and migrant rights organisations, we wrote to the Prime Minister asking for Parliament to be recalled to address far-right attacks spreading across the country.

The Government must address the rampant racism, Islamophobia and anti-migrant hate fuelling this violence. Thank you to our friends at Runnymede Trust for coordinating this letter, which you can read here.

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Hostile Office

Our report explores how the UK immigration system and visa schemes are grounded in the concept of ‘racial commodification’. They are explicitly designed to ‘manage’ racialised people as assets to extract resources or labour from, or dehumanise them through preventative, restrictive and racist immigration policies. We also trace the racism underlying deprivation of citizenship: of those who have had their citizenship revoked since 2002, 85% had or were deemed to have nationalities of countries in Africa, South Asia, or West Asia (the Middle East) and 83% were former British colonies.

Since oppression is ingrained in our immigration systems, tackling the racism and injustices of the Home Office cannot be achieved through simple reform. We call for a complete overhaul and abolition of these harmful systems, and for a future based on justice and freedom for all.

Our report has been covered by the Morning Star and the Canary, which you can read about here and here. Since oppression is ingrained in our immigration systems, tackling the racism and injustices of the Home Office cannot be achieved through simple reform. We call for a complete overhaul and abolition of these harmful systems, and for a future based on justice and freedom for all.

Our report has been covered by the Morning Star and the Canary, which you can read about here and here. 

Other Hostile Office Updates

• Blog- The Border Security Bill: where Islamophobia, racism, anti-migrant hatred and counter-terrorism meet
• Blog- The Government’s new migration measures: offloading UK responsibility towards people seeking safety, and excluding racialised people from the UK
• CEO’s comment in the Morning Star- The Government’s focus on smuggling networks and deterrence, and its continued failure to create safe routes
• CEO’s comment in the Morning Star- Urging the Government to save lives by creating safe routes for all nationalities
• CEO’s comment in Open Migration- The racism and scapegoating underlying the Government’s migration policies(which you can read in English here)

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Sponsored Slavery

Sponsorship visa schemes are designed solely on the basis of productivity and business and economic interests, rather than the wellbeing and protection of migrant workers in mind. Employers with sponsorship licences in the UK, and recruiters in origin countries, are using deception, coercion of payments, and sometimes threats to exploit sponsored migrant workers. The system explicitly makes sponsored workers vulnerable to exploitation with little safeguards for those arriving in the UK via this scheme.

If you are a sponsored worker and would like to join the campaign, tell your story or find out more, then fill out this form here. Your details won’t be shared outside of Migrants’ Rights Network and Migrants At Work.

Our new campaign was also covered in the Morning Star, which you can read about here. 

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Who Is Welcome?

Podcast: Masculinity and migration

The single male migrant has become one of the most maligned groups of people in Western popular thought. Why, even in ‘pro-migrant’ arguments, does empathy tends to extend to women and children but stops when it comes to men, especially when they are Black and Brown men? In the latest episode of our podcast Because You Were There, we discuss how racist and Orientalist stereotypes about men from the Global South means their reasons for migrating are often downplayed or ignored. Listen to the full episode here.

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Words Matter

Get involved

• Commission a Words Matter workshop.
• Share your story about the words that matter to you.
• Donate to help us continue to defy the narrative.

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Decolonising migration

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Sector Vacancies

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If you want to support our work…

…would you consider making a donation?

We are a small team that receives minimal funding. To keep us going, we need all the help we can get, so we can achieve more in 2024.

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