immigrants rights in the UK:
Recent statistics from the Sri Lankan government highlight the threat to the wellbeing of children under five years old who are left behind by mothers working abroad for long periods of time, and it is currently legislating to ban these mothers from working abroad. In Britain, where many migrant domestic workers come to earn money to support their children, the government is pushing a new piece of immigration legislation, part of its "Making Migration Work for Britain" strategy. This will reduce domestic worker visas to non-renewable, six-month, business-visitor visas, and make it illegal for them to change employers.
(...) All existing rights, won in 1998 after a decade of campaigning, will be washed away. Low-skilled migrant workers are currently entitled to basic protection under British employment law, such as the National Minimum Wage, statutory holiday pay and a notice period for dismissal. They also have the ability to annually renew their working visas, and are entitled to apply for settlement after five years.
(...) The status of migrant domestic workers was restored by immigration legislation in 1998, granting basic rights and regularising the status of a number of migrants who had been made undocumented under the earlier laws. These changes were aimed at a specific group of workers, but were part of a set of immigration policies which proved to be the harshest in British history. These were followed by "Secure Border, Safe Haven" in 2002 and "Controlling our Borders" in 2005. Pandering to tabloid hysteria over immigration, each piece of New Labour legislation has made it more and more intolerable for those coming into Britain.
(...) Both Devika's and Reena's experiences are widely shared among the 17,000 non-EU domestic workers who enter Britain every year. According to Kalayaan, 86 percent of domestic workers registered with Kalayaan during 2005-06 worked over 16 hours a day, 71 percent have been deprived of food, 32 percent had their passports withheld by their employers and 23 percent have been physically abused.
(...) Demand for migrant labour is highly racialised in domestic work. Mary, Reena and Devika were employed because they are non-EU migrant workers. As Bridget Anderson from the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at the University of Oxford points out, it is the flexibility, extremely low costs, and the employer's power to retain, coupled with the necessity to stay in employment, that makes this section of workers so favourable to employers. Few EU workers can compete with these factors. As retention is maintained by workers' immigration status, immigration legislation determines the degree of employers' control over workers.
(...) "The new law will give employers even more power than they already have, and will be very damaging, not only to our lives, but our children's lives," Mary said. Her son and daughter are missing her. They said to her, "Come back home! We don't need that kind of money." But Mary knows it is not possible to return home, because she is the only breadwinner.