USA: Immigration officers treated asylum-seekers like criminals
from
Miami Herald:
Instead of offering sympathy and comfort, some American immigration officers have treated foreign asylum-seekers like criminals and tried to deter them from asking for protection, according to a report released Tuesday.
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Asylum-seekers are frequently confined in prison-like facilities, including at the Krome detention center in west Miami-Dade County, according to the report, which studied several airports and one border crossing and some detention centers across the country.
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UK: New strategy will leave asylum-seekers in limbo
from
politics.co.uk:
Maeve Sherlock, chief executive of the Refugee Council, today attacked the Government’s new asylum and immigration strategy for proposing to give refugees a five-year temporary permit while their situation was reviewed.
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Refugee Council
Australia: call for urgent immigration centre review
from
ABC:
Civil libertarians are calling for an urgent overhaul into the way immigration detention centres are run in Australia.
The calls follow an incident where Australian citizen Cornelia Rau, 39, spent 10 months in detention after Immigration Department officials determined she was an illegal immigrant.
Ms Rau, who has a mental illness, spent six months in the Women's Correctional Centre in Brisbane and four months in the Baxter detention centre in South Australia.
Australian Civil Liberties Council president Terry O'Gorman says there is obviously a problem and says it is not good enough for officials to say they tried to establish the woman's identity.
"Clearly those efforts were second best and there is something wrong with the way the system is run," he said.
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UK: Cockling victims remembered one year on
from
BBC:
More than 100 people gathered on the shores of Morecambe Bay on Friday to mark a year since the cockling disaster, in which 23 Chinese died.
The cockle pickers, who had come to the UK in search of work, drowned in rising tides off Hest Bank on 5 February 2004.
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Gina Tan, a leading member of the Chinese community in Morecambe and organiser of the event, said: "This was a terrible tragedy and many workers drowned. They were taken away by the sea.
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"We are still very worried it will happen again. People are still going out there picking and I beg people not to do it. It is dangerous."
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USA: NYCLU protests immigrant arrests
from
NY News Day:
Police arrested 18 immigrant day laborers Wednesday during a sweep in Queens after receiving complaints about public urination and other quality-of-life crimes, authorities said.
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The arrests mark the third time the police have cracked down on immigrant workers loitering in that neighborhood while waiting for potential employers to drive up and hire them for a day. Police said that 14 similar arrests were made in the previous two sweeps.
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UK: Migrants 'used as forced labour'
from
BBC:
The plight of some migrant workers in the UK is so bad that it meets the international legal definition of forced labour, the TUC has said.
The TUC study said many migrant workers in the UK receive "shocking" treatment from their employers.
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Europe: UN concerned for refugees caught in 'crackdowns'
from
United Nations' News Centre:
Concerned that genuine asylum seekers are mixed in with the flow of illegal migrants that the European Union (EU) is battling, the United Nations refugee agency, in cooperation with the European Commission, is launching a one-year project to gather essential information on migration through North Africa into Europe.
... the agency stressed its increasing concern that in their effort to combat illegal migration EU countries tend to overlook the needs of the refugees mixed in with the illegal migrants. Because the refugee dimension of transit migration has so far been largely ignored, comparatively little is known about the number of potential refugees involved.
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Malaysia: 'bounty hunters' search for migrants
from
Radio Australia:
Half a million police and civilian volunteers will begin hunting hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in Malaysia on Tuesday in a widespread campaign condemned by human rights groups.
The civilians will receive cash payments for every illegal immigrant arrested.
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