THE TABLET (28 April 2007)

Feature Article: Plight of the Shadow People

Austen Ivereigh

As many as half a million long-term irregular migrants cannot earn a living legally. Rather than damage the country as the Government claims, a naturalisation programme would benefit Britain, argues the coordinator of the pressure group Strangers into Citizens

Is the Government in conflict with the Church over immigration? I didn't think so until reading an interview last week with the Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne. It followed widely reported remarks he made in Australia that mass migration had enriched the United Kingdom but left British society so "unsettled" that the issue risks losing Labour the next general election. Hence his introduction of a new, points-based, managed migration system, tighter border controls, and a crackdown on employers who recruit illegal immigrants.

So far, no conflict. But in China he criticised - without naming it - the Strangers into Citizens campaign, which is calling for a pathway into citizenship for long-term irregular migrants (refused asylum seekers or visa over-stayers who are working and paying taxes). The campaign has been backed by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor; the Archbishop of Birmingham, Vincent Nichols; the Anglican Bishop of Southwark, Tom Butler; and the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, as well as trade unions and business groups.

"The bishops and others are calling for an amnesty," Mr Byrne told The Daily Telegraph. "This would severely damage our country. At the moment local authorities are still coping with the pressure on schools and services but if we had the green light for unprecedented immigration they wouldn't be able to handle it."

Now Mr Byrne knows - from our agreeable meeting on 26 March - that Strangers into Citizens is not calling for a general "amnesty" but a six-year pathway to citizenship for long-term migrants; and is certainly not issuing "a green light for unprecedented immigration".

One-off naturalisation programmes of the sort we propose have been introduced by Spain, Germany and the United States (among many others) as part of a wider strategy of border enforcement. They are designed to cope with the consequences of mass migration, not encourage it; they are about extending the rule of law, not undermining it. "Regularisations" may not stop illegal immigration - that is a matter for the border controls - but they do bring thousands out of limbo, recognise realities, clear asylum logjams, bring huge benefits to the state, and shrink the black market economy on which people-trafficking and exploitative employers thrive.

We think that it is time that Britain considered a similar measure, measured to fit our needs. But Strangers into Citizens has never argued with either border controls or the need to enforce them. The current race by the political parties to stiffen the frontiers might elicit disapproval among our supporters, or it might not. But as a campaign we are agnostic on that question, just as the faith leaders who support us have never, to my knowledge, expressed a detailed opinion about how many immigrants Britain should accept from where and on what terms.

What the faith leaders - and the dozens of faith-based organisations and migrant NGOs that are behind Strangers into Citizens - do care about is the dehumanising limbo into which long-term irregular migrants have been condemned in modern Britain. They are challenging the political parties to consider the fate of a large number - including some 250,000 refused asylum seekers - who have been here for many years and put down roots in the country, yet are denied the basic rights that British people take for granted.

Inspired by the cardinal's call last year to consider ways of regularising some of those who are working and contributing to society, Strangers into Citizens has a specific proposal, elaborated with help from experts and studies of European regularisation models, which we think annuls any "magnetic" effect. Only irregular migrants who have been in the UK for four years or more would be eligible; they should be given a two-year work permit, without access to benefits, at the end of which, subject to certain criteria (English test, no criminal record, employer and sponsor references), they are given indefinite leave to remain.

The proposal is a challenge that arises directly, perhaps even uniquely, out of faith, whose stance on this question cannot easily be clamped on to the existing poles of the immigration debate. Dr Luke Bretherton, an Anglican theologian at King's College, London, who advises Strangers into Citizens, summed up these different approaches as those who see borders as "filters", and those who see them as "fences" - while proposing a third position in a faith-based approach to borders as "faces".

The first favour open borders, either because they take a humanitarian view that rights of the weak should be favoured over the strong, or because they take a liberal economic approach: human beings should flow freely between countries just as money and goods should, and the state's attempt to restrict or manage migration is bad news for both rich and poor countries. But few in this camp argue for completely open borders: borders are necessary to "filter out" criminals or undesirables.

Christians will have sympathy with the filterers. Joseph and Mary, fleeing Herod, would certainly qualify for asylum under the 1952 Convention on Refugees. A welcome to those fleeing persecution has long been defended by the Churches, just as papal documents and bishops' conferences have emphasised the need to recognise the human rights of illegal immigrants. But an abstract love of humanity is not prior to the needs of the host community. Those same church documents underline the necessity of border controls and the right of states to control migration. The Old Testament may want us to love the stranger, but it is also strong on integration. A nation is a particular people gathered under God, not an aggregation of atomised individuals. It is not racist to believe that the common life can be undermined by too much openness to the outside.

When Mr Byrne says that the institutions and values of the UK may be "unsettled" by the sudden arrival of large numbers of foreigners, he is flagging a communitarian concern. "Social cohesion, the willingness of one part of the community to trust and make sacrifices for another, depends on us all having common values," David Conway, research fellow at the think tank Civitas, wrote last week. "Many of the immigrant communities are isolated islands: they show no signs of integrating into British society."

But the problem with the "fences" approach to which this concern leads is that it over-values the maintenance of a (continued on page 8) (continued from page 7) particular community in isolation from the common good. It turns away from the vulnerable in the name of preserving the rights of a particular community. It expresses an often irrational fear of being overrun by the "other".

A Christian approach to immigration, says Bretherton, sees the border as "a face we present to the world". A face says: "I have a personality and a history and a way of doing things but I am made for relationships and without coming into relationship with others who are different from me, I do not grow." Such a face seeks to look upon the face of God - not just in the strong and able but also in "the orphan, the widow and the refugee".

It is not the abstract unwashed of the world but a group of people who work among us and contribute in countless ways to our communities that we wish to unchain. They are condemned to live furtive lives, vulnerable to exploitation, living in fear, severed from their families back home.

We wish them to play a full part in our communities and to ask for "proper legal recognition to those who steadily contribute to our economy", as Archbishop Nichols put it recently. But our message is not a liberal, laissez-faire one: it is a call to integration and community. That is why we are asking thousands of migrants and their supporters to come to Trafalgar Square on 7 May following a Mass for Migrant Workers at Westminster Cathedral - and to bring with them a Union flag.

The fate of the irregular migrants in Britain cannot be separated from the wider debate on immigration, but that debate is really about something else. The strain on local services that worries Mr Byrne is primarily a consequence of massive legal migration - often of a transitory nature - from European Union countries. The economic benefits of this immigration are obvious; weighing the social benefits and costs will remain a matter for national discussion.

What Strangers into Citizens brings into that discussion is the limbo of long-term undocumented migrants from outside the EU who have made new homes among us, and who are contributing, valued members of our society. It is not their presence that is unsettling, but their plight. Restrict the inflows of future newcomers by all means. But the shame of Britain's shadow people, and the mounting call for their liberation, must still be faced.