Above Photo: Almost half of homeless people in London are citizens of other European countries. | Photo: Reuters
The war on the homeless has turned into a war on migrants and non-profits are readily offering their services.
London nonprofits are collaborating with immigration authorities that collect intelligence and conduct raids to detain and deport hundreds of homeless people, and are even lobbying for harsher policies, according to a report published Tuesday.
At least three organizations with the shared goal of ending homelessness and connecting the vulnerable to appropriate resources — St. Mungo’s, Thames Reach, and Change, Grow, Live — regularly conduct joint operations with the Home Office “Immigration Compliance and Enforcement” and “through a creeping process of changes they are being turned into informers,” Corporate Watch found in its investigation.
nonprofits fill in a “rough sleeper (homeless) database” for municipal and local authorities including “sleepers” location, and they provide intelligence like nationality and if they are European citizens, employment and education information to determine whether they are legally able to be deported.
They are also paid a “social impact bond” by municipal authorities based on the number of migrants they help to deport.
The basic idea is that the scheme is at least partly funded by private investors, and carried out by private contractors; and both get ‘paid by results’ depending on how well specific ‘social impact’ targets are met,” deportation being one of the main targets, wrote Corporate Watch.
Almost half of homeless people in London are from other European countries, especially Romania and Poland, and most of them have the legal right to live and work in the U.K. Still, the intelligence gathering often leads to raids and “supported reconnection” — a euphemism for detention — mostly affecting Eastern Europeans, according to Corporate Watch.
Rhetoric against Eastern European migrants was largely seen as propelling the Brexit vote. As of last year, “rough sleepers” can be arrested after being found sleeping on the street just one night.
While the nonprofits responded that they only encourage “voluntary return” to migrants’ country of origin, the report found that in many cases, they threaten to use force and refer the “sleeper” to the Home Office Immigration Compliance and Enforcement if they don’t accept the voluntary conditions.
The report counted 141 instances recorded on public documents of ICE patrolling alongside aid workers in the Greater London Area, not including Westminster or the City of London, where they expect the concentration to be even higher. A dozen London council also reported 133 joint visits with ICE in under one month in each borough.
Finally, the report found that some of the bigger-name nonprofits — often dependent on state funds — not only complied with immigration authority demands, but also lobbied for even harsher rules and helped draft them.
The charity bosses “are not just reluctant parts of this system,” writes Corporate Watch. “Some have enthusiastically supported collaboration with ICE.”
For the rest, the U.K. government has employed a strategy that is sure to work.
“In many authoritarian systems, change is introduced incrementally, through a slow or ‘creeping’ process, so that those involved may not notice how it happens. This is how some homelessness workers describe the shift in the sector since 2010, as new targets and ways of working with Immigration Enforcement have been introduced one by one.”