BRITISH
IMMIGRATION IN SWOOPS
British Immigration
officials and the police have intensified their war on
immigrants, with the tactics of swooping on immigrant
dominated work places.
Not quite long ago fifteen Immigration Officers and 20
Police raided 21 immigrants working for the
UK
's super market giants, Tesco in
Milton Keynes
They detained 21
Africans including three women at the Immigration
Services Headquarters in
Wolverhampton
. 20 of them were charged for breaking immigration
laws. They were subsequently served with notices of
immigration offences and were ready to be deported.
A local newspaper
in Milton Keynes, the MK News, reporting on the
incidents observed 19 of the detained Africans were
from
Ghana
, one South African with the other from war-torn
Liberia
.
'We stormed the
two sites at
3.00am
and detained 21 people. We would seek to remove all
those who are in the country illegally'.
A Home Office spokesman said.
Officials of Tesco
betrayed their staff, saying 'we were duped into
employing the immigrants due to the high standard of
their forged documents. But opinion leaders in the
African community in the area think differently.
One Opinion leader
of the African community in
Milton Keynes
told African Echo in a telephone interview that 'it is
suspected that the operations were arranged by the
Tesco officials, just to get rid of the workers and
forfeit their wages and entitlements for the period.'
It would be
recalled that after declaring a colossal amount of 2
billion pounds as profit for the just ended fiscal
year, many international organisations like the Action
Aid condemned Tesco's insensitive approach to its
employees.
For instance,
Tesco provides very appalling working conditions for
thousands of its workers majority of them being
immigrants from the third world countries.
African Echo's
investigations at the time revealed that, the mammoth
figure declaration came as a result of exploitations
meted out to people employed by the company in certain
parts of the world especially in
Africa
.
For instance,
Tesco provides very appalling working conditions for
thousands of women they employ in
South Africa
. These women grow fruits that end up on Tesco's
shelves.
In another
development a combined team of Immigration Officials
and the police again raided some immigrants at a bus
garage in Stockwell, just this week.
Nine immigrants
were arrested while on duty in the night. Most of them
cleaners of the buses were suddenly surrounded by the
officials who sent them to an unknown confine.
'There are several
such exercises of the Immigration Officials and the
police that you do not know about. They swoop on homes
and even pick suspected illegal immigrants at the pubs
and bus stops. They at times, get into people's
homes'. An African commented in anger.
Some immigrants
interviewed on the issues observed that much as such
exercises must be carried out, they must be done in a
very circumspective manner so that legal immigrants
would feel free and comfortable to go about their
normal duties.
They reckon that
some of the exercises are embarked unfairly and put
fear and unnecessary stress on them
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