As Barbie mania subsumes everything in its path, UK activist group Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants have seized the opportunity to call out the Prime Minister and other key members of British Parliament over their support of the inhumane Illegal immigration bill that’s just passed the House of Lord’s and is now only waiting on Royal Approval (a mere formality) to come into effect.
Posters put up by the organization depict Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and other key architects of the bill such as Suella Braverman and Priti Patel inserted into the much-memed Barbie character poster template, with captions such as “This Barbie is a c*nt” and “This Barbie is gagging to deport your Grandma.”
A deliberate escalation of the hostile environment, the Illegal Migration Bill will prevent anyone who arrived in the UK outside of legal channels from claiming asylum. Justified by its supporters as a pro-refugee bill that will prevent human trafficking and dangerous small boat crossings over the English Channel, it is instead a collection of human rights violations that breaks international law. Not that international law is any sort of a deterrent for the current British government as this isn’t their first time violating it, nor, given their obvious disregard for it, is it likely to be the last.
Opposed by refugee and human rights organizations including the Red Cross, the Illegal Migration Bill will see mandates that any asylum seeker who arrived in the UK outside of specific, hard-to-access legal pathways be deported within a few weeks of their arrival becoming known. If their country of origin is deemed unsafe—something the UK is notoriously bad at determining even during the normal, much longer process of assessment—they will then be deported to a third country instead. And while the UK’s £120 million deal to send refugees to Rwanda is on hold after the Court of Appeal ruled it “cannot be considered a safe third country” the government plans to appeal the ruling and resume its planned deportations as soon as possible.
One of the many problems with this new bill is that it criminalizes people who were brought to the UK under false pretenses or against their will, and then subjected to forced labour or modern slavery on arrival. Previously anyone who was subjected to these abuses would have been entitled to seek asylum, but now, due to the illegal means by which they were brought into the country, they will be detained and deported upon discovery instead, despite their not having participated willingly in any crime. Described by critics as legalizing modern slavery, this bill makes it even harder, and more dangerous, for those who find themselves in this position to seek help—thereby actually enabling human traffickers and modern slavers, and quite possibly increasing the number of victims as a result, rather than acting as a deterrent. Not just cruel, these new laws directly violate the UK’s legal obligations under the Council of Europe Convention Against Trafficking and the European Convention on Human Rights, something the government seems unwilling to acknowledge.
Beyond its impact on victims of human trafficking and slavery, this bill also prevents the vast majority of refugees from ever being able to seek asylum in the UK in the first place, because the incredibly narrow legal channels by which refugees are permitted to enter the country are simply out of reach to majority of people fleeing violence and oppression. This is intentional, as the current UK government has made it known for years now that they see no reason for refugees to come here when there are closer “safe” countries between their home nation and the UK. That some of these “safe countries” may not be so safe in practice, especially for already marginalized groups, or that refugees who speak English or who have family already in the UK have very good reasons to want to come here instead, is all dismissed as irrelevant.
Then there’s the bill’s treatment of children, especially unaccompanied minors, who arrive in the UK outside of legal channels. Children traveling in the care of adults, and therefore lacking the autonomy to make their own decisions, face lifetime bans from returning to the UK because of a decision they didn’t make, while unaccompanied minors face similar punitive treatment despite their special circumstances and our legal obligation to care for them. Previously, families with children could not be held in detention for more than a week, and unaccompanied minors could not be detained at all, instead being cared for by the foster system. These limits have now been removed, with the bill allowing children to be detained indefinitely until their cases are resolved by deportation. Finally, the removal of the right to appeal age assessment decisions—made in a matter of minutes by border force officials, roughly two thirds of which currently incorrectly identify children as adults before being overturned on appeal—will leave hundreds of vulnerable teenagers in danger by placing them in adult detention centers, without any of the proper safeguarding measures in place to ensure their well being.
However, despite the EU, the UN, and the government’s own Human Rights Committee making it clear that the Illegal Migration Bill violates multiple laws and treaties on human rights and the treatment of refugees that the UK has agreed to uphold, the government flatly denies this; insisting the bill is not just legal but a positive thing that will be of benefit to both refugees themselves and the country as a whole. Several of the bill’s chief proponents—from Suella Braverman who claims she dreams of the day refugees are deported to Rwanda, to Priti Patel whose immigration laws would have excluded her own family from settling here—have even taken a ghoulish delight in their achievements, expressing rapturous joy over the impact of their work on the desperate people trying to seek refuge.
The Barbie posters put up by Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants really capture the spite-fuelled pleasure these politicians have been expressing in their campaign against asylum seekers and immigrants as a whole. Hopefully, they’re just bright and blunt enough to cut through the morass of horrifying things going on in UK politics right now to reach the public, and fill them in on what’s happening to some of the most vulnerable people in this country.
(featured image: Warner Bros.)
