Natalie Sedacca considers hostile environment's impact on migrant women, Imranali Panjwani says notion of evidence in immigration law needs broadening
Two interesting open-access academic articles with relevance to immigration and asylum law were published this month that are well worth a read.
Image credit: UK GovernmentMigrant Work, Gender and the Hostile Environment: A Human Rights Analysis by Natalie Sedacca, assistant professor in employment law at Durham University, can be read here in the Industrial Law Journal.
In the article, Sedacca considers work-related and gendered harms caused by the UK's hostile environment immigration policy, with a focus on how the policy impacts migrant women and how it contravenes international and regional human rights obligations.
The author finds that hostile environment measures lead migrants to be concentrated into precarious, low-paid and unregulated sectors of the labour market and make it more difficult to access justice, enforce rights at work, or exit exploitative situations.
Women are particularly impacted: "For migrant women, this exacerbates an otherwise precarious situation in the labour market, including a concentration into feminised and hidden sectors such as care and domestic work, and constrained dependency created by restrictive visa schemes, while hostile environment measures and the need to retain status deter the reporting of gendered crimes such as domestic abuse. Even for women with permission to work, the denial of welfare benefits and resulting lack of access to affordable childcare severely constrains employment options. As well as fuelling labour abuses and exploitation, these factors increase migrant women's vulnerability to gendered harms including workplace sexual harassment."
Sedacca highlights a number of specific human rights violations directly affecting migrant women, flowing from the hostile environment's restrictions on labour market access, denial of wages, a lack of labour inspection and sexual harassment.
New last week in the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law is The Importance of Incorporating Religious, Cultural and Linguistic Evidence in UK Immigration Procedures: An Analysis of the Semiotic Codes of Asylum Seekers by Imranali Panjwani, a senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University's (ARU) Faculty of Business and Law. You can read it online here.
The article examines how asylum seekers, particularly from the Middle East and North African (MENA) region, may be fleeing threats that are alien to Western immigration tribunals, which can lead to religious and cultural evidence that contribute to the understanding of persecution being ignored.
The author explains: "Using two real-life case studies involving a Yemeni immigration applicant and Nigerian asylum seeker respectively and my practitioner experience as a country expert having written 140 reports, I will critically explore the value of a primary, semiotic understanding of key religious, cultural and linguistic dimensions in asylum claims (as opposed to secondary source evidence). I argue that the UK's immigration tribunal system should place more value on how language is embodied within the MENA regions. I do not wish to just highlight this issue but semiotically analyse immigration and asylum procedure, the arguments of the Home Office and tribunals in accepting or rejecting claims and suggest substantive reform by broadening the nature of evidence."
Panjwani proposes that the notion of evidence within immigration law needs to not only be broadened but also categorised in accordance with its probative value.
He states: "It is clear that the concept of evidence in law is already broad and includes both primary and secondary sources. In immigration tribunals, a solicitor and barrister may present a range of the above evidences to support the claim of the asylum seeker to show he is telling the truth. However, despite these numerous categories of evidence within law, immigration tribunals generally do not place great weight on 'original' evidence which has an independent probative force of its own and 'derivative' evidence which derives its forces from some other sources such as scripture, theology, culture and language. Moreover, since the definitions of original and derivative evidences are somewhat vague, they are generally not utilised effectively in immigration tribunals, court bundles and barristers' submissions."