Criminalisation of asylum seekers fine tunes system to oppress others

THE decision of 33 Afghans to embark on a hunger strike in Dublin rather than face deportation highlights the grim plight of asylum seekers in contemporary Ireland — and throughout fortress Europe.

It comes during a week when the right-wing Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, revealed that 100 young people, including teenagers, have gone on the run in Ireland rather than face deportation under the racist 1995 Refugee Act and still more racist 1999 Immigration Act.

In Ireland, as in Britain, the criminalisation of asylum seekers isn’t just immoral, it affords a cutting edge in the perfection of repressive state machinery that can then be used against trade unionists, democratic rights and other layers of dissent.

It is also a process that has very little to do with fighting terrorism and crime — something that all sane citizens are in favour of, but which the Fianna Fáil/PD coalition isn’t very good at.

Indeed, Mr McDowell’s pumping of resources into the Garda Immigration Bureau, whose main ideological function is to criminalise foreigners as a ‘problem category’, contrasts starkly with the fact that there are only 50 detectives nationally committed to dealing with armed gang crime and that the minister’s idea of community policing is cheapskate tokenism in the form of a garda reserve.

In Britain, racist criminalisation of asylum seekers and economic migrants played a major role in the perfection of the coercive state to which New Labour’s travesty of social democracy has completely adapted.

It long preceded the war on terror and has comparatively little to do with it.

This state racism, combined with a closing down of working class politics and New Labour’s support for the free market, also fuels fascism in the form of the BNP.

Roger Cottrell

School of English

Queens University

Belfast