Is 'success' in getting over 600 east European migrants to go back home really something we should be celebrating?

The London segment of the BBC1 News  (scroll to 10:42 for the item)  last night featured an item about a controversial scheme financed by the government and run by local charities which is supposed to to tackle the plight of homelessness European migrants in the capital. The selling point of the scheme is that it helps hundreds to leave the UK with a free ticket and a small sum of money to tide them over the first few weeks of their return.

Readers of these blogs will have picked up on the fact that MRN sees a lot of downside to an operation which some will want to laud for its humanitarian objectives. Our concern is that the 'Routes Home' project is entirely unmatched by any similar effort aimed at working with migrants to ensure that they do not fall into positions where they become the victims of gross exploitation and criminal activity. It is not unreasonable that provision should be made for destitute people who do want to return home.  But this would have more merit if there really were robust systems in place that worked with the migtrants to make sure they were in secure, decent employment and benefiting from the full range of services and entitlements extended to other citizens.

The BBC news item featured brief interviews with the people who seem to be slotting into the charity-run scheme. Amongst them was a middle aged woman who provided an account – very familiar to anyone working closely with migrant worker communities – who got herself into debt in order to meet the fees charge by private employment agencies in order the be brought to the UK and placed in employment.

Fine – except the job she had been placed in involved insecure agricultural work at minimal level wages which gave her no hope of paying of the debts due to the agency for the ‘services’ they claimed to have provided her with. The story can be told at this point onwards by anyone who has talked to migrant workers in agriculture and other low paid jobs. Pressured from all sides and with little or no help from the social security system, the worker loses her accommodation, is perhaps helped for some time by friends and co-nationals, but then ends up sleeping rough with prospects as poor in her country of origin as they are over here.

It wouldn’t be hard to list all the points in this story where a degree of help and assistance from charities and other organisations committed to tackling the root cause of these injustices could kick in and begin to turn the situation around. Those of us who have been made angry at the way migrants are too often treated in this country know that the real need is for a determined campaign to tackle gross exploitation, the under-payment of wages, the absence of decent standard of accommodation, and a fair crack at getting the social wage – the services we receives in benefits and welfare support – which is the moral entitlement of anyone who has paid tax and national insurance.

But instead of this determination to tackle root causes we find that that an important government department like Communities and Local Government decides to back a pilot project which explores the best way to help this group of migrants find a ‘route home’.

How convenient. Get the homeless charities drawn into this scheme to proclaim the view that, without the ‘route home’ they are offering people will be dying in droves and the whole operation even begins to look like an emergency humanitarian relief project aimed at rescuing people from disaster.

In truth the alternative to what is essentially an ambulance service for people who have fallen into desparate circumstances is not death on the streets, but a systematic campaign, involving a broad range of organisations, working with the sanction of government and the law, to transform the UK labour market from a place where people are too often cheated and abused of their most elementary rights, into one where work is attracts decent wages and access to the welfare support which everyone should be entitled to.

Over the past six months MRN has worked hard with other partners concerned with these issues to bring about a different approach to the issue of migrants who have been pushed right to the end of their tethers. You will get a sense of some of the things we are trying to persuade the homeless sector to pick up on the advice notes and briefings published on these issues and to support a community-based approach which promotes solidarity and action on exploitation and injustice.

This approach to the issues is being worked on in projects across the country, but usually with only precarious of funding and now evermore threatended with new cuts to frontline services. Had these structures been in place our firm view is that the vast majority of the 670 plus people the BBC news item said had been sent on their route home would have not fallen into such destitution and would be working through the plans they originally set themselves when they started out on their migrant journeys.

Until we are sure that every migrant who finds him or herself on their uppers in the UK has been given every assistance to access all their rights, as workers in the workplace and as people entitled to use public services and welfare support systems then, in my view, any  project which applauds its ‘success’ in showing hundreds of people the ‘route home’ is operating in a misguided and potentially dangerous fashion.