History > 2006 > UK > Immigration (I)

Hanoi to Haddon services

- life and death of a stowaway

Vietnamese man killed under truck
came to Britain to earn money for sick brother

Saturday May 27, 2006
Guardian
Paul Lewis in Haiphong


It was 11:25am. The weather was fair for an October morning. Stan Bowden was driving a Volvo lorry with a cargo of freshly dug Belgian potatoes to Doncaster. He was headed north on the A1 near Peterborough.

And then it happened. First there was a clattering sound in the back of the trailer. Bowden, a 56-year-old driver with three decades of haulage experience, instinctively knew what was going on. He decided it was too dangerous to pull over on the motorway and indicated left to come off at the next slip road where he knew he would find a service station.

Driving up behind Bowden in a Ford Iveco box lorry, another driver, Tom Whisker, had a clear view of the scene unfolding before him. As Bowden's lorry signalled left and crossed over to the inside lane, Tom saw the upper bodies of three or four people poking out of the trailer, their faces covered in mud.

Then, as the first lorry came on to the slip road, slowed to 25mph and straightened up, two of them hopped off and vanished into the bushes. It was at this point that Whisker noticed a man hanging from the passenger side of the trailer, about halfway along, his legs swinging in mid-air just above the truck's rear wheels.

Crushed

Customers in the service area car park heard screams, turned, and saw a lorry with the back draped in scruffy looking men and women. They watched, stunned, as what looked like a man on the side of the trailer held on to a rope attached to the roof. He clung for up to 40 seconds, frantically trying to find a foothold and maintain his grip. As the lorry bore left to enter the service station, he let go. The rear wheels of the trailer rolled over the top half of his body.

The bloodied corpse that lay on the road just outside Haddon services at 11:30am on October 5 must have made a bewildering sight. The man looked Asian and in his 30s. He was plump, with a round face, a trim beard, and black hair with a flick at the front.

His muddied clothes - a single trainer on his right foot, a mod-style black bomber jacket and dark jeans - contained no documentation.

Bowden climbed on top of his trailer in search of clues. The white and red tarpaulin cover had three gashes in it. He pulled back the canvas to find a book, a pair of gloves, a coat, an empty handbag and six black bin liners. Bowden guessed the man must have been an illegal immigrant.

It is not uncommon for stowaways to be killed on Britain's roads and never be identified. On April 24, at a motorway service station on the M11, another stowaway tried to cut himself loose from beneath a truck, but instead slipped under the wheels, and was dragged more than a mile to his death. Today, police have revealed a reconstructed image of his face. They know nothing about him.

Just two weeks ago, on May 12, a man was found dead on the A3 motorway in Hampshire near the Clanfield exit. Police suspect he too was an illegal immigrant who fell from a lorry after entering Britain via nearby Portsmouth. They are appealing for witnesses.

Most of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men and women who creep into Britain in similar conditions remain faceless, their life stories lost amid the screaming headlines and heated rhetoric surrounding the issue of immigration. But occasionally their deaths confront us with the human reality behind the statistics, stories of hope and desperation that offer an insight into why people struggle across the world in such horrific conditions. It happened after 58 Chinese men and women suffocated to death in a lorry in Dover in 2000, and again when 23 Chinese cockle-pickers were drowned by an incoming tide in Morecambe Bay.

But unearthing the life story of the man found at Haddon services was not high on the list of priorities for the investigating officer, PC Paul Symonds. Establishing the man's country of origin, date of birth or name was proving hard enough.

Although all five of the victim's travelling companions were found hiding in bushes and questioned, they knew next to nothing about the man they had met for the first time hours earlier.

But several days later, and 60 miles away, a 48-year-old Vietnamese woman made a grim connection. On the day of the accident, Khanh Truc Nguyen, 48, who had settled in London in 2001, was wondering why her guest was so late.

Days earlier she had received a call from an old friend in Hanoi who told her to expect a visit from a mutual acquaintance who was heading to England. He would be there, she said, on October 5 at the latest.

Nguyen had not known the man well. He used to visit a small shop she ran in Hanoi eight years previously. But regardless, she had not anticipated that he would be so rude as to keep her waiting.

Then she happened to read a small report about a suspected illegal immigrant who had been killed in a road collision on the day her guest was meant to arrive. She leafed through an old photograph album, found her only picture of the man, and drove to the mortuary. Nguyen was the only person to offer a positive identification. She declined to speak to the Guardian.

A brief inquest at Huntingdon coroners' court on March 30 concluded that Ky Anh Duong, a 42-year-old Vietnamese man, died of head injuries sustained in a road traffic incident. The coroner recorded a verdict of "death by misadventure". The case was closed.

The life that ended on a busy stretch of road near Peterborough began in a glass factory commune in the suburbs of Haiphong, a tough industrial port city in north-east Vietnam. There, in the doorway to a ground floor house tucked down a back street in the district of Ngo Quyen on Thursday, the dead man's mother, Dao Thi Loan, listened to the story of her son's death.

The 68-year-old grandmother knew her son had been killed on the road. But she thought it had happened in London. No one had bothered to tell her the full details, and the news that Ky had been crushed under the lorry that had brought him into Britain came as a shock.

"You need to understand that we are not ready to grieve yet," she said. "Until we have the ashes and we conduct our ceremonies, my son's soul will remain restless." She said she had been visited by her son's spirit in her dreams. "He tells me his soul is lonely and cold in London. How can we care for his spirit when it is somewhere so far away?"

The one-bedroom family home Ky grew up in has grown since he left in 1998. The house is now composed of two rooms, the front of which has been converted into a street-side restaurant selling warm beer, boiled meat, sticky rice and peanuts.

Low pay

The family business generates just enough money to maintain a well-kept home for Ky's mother, her other two sons, Truong, 43, Thang, 36, her daughter-in-law, Mai Hong, 35, and her granddaughters, Vi and Duong, both aged five.

For seven months Loan and her sons have waited to commemorate Ky's passing at the small altar in their home. Buddhist practice prohibits them from lighting the first incense sticks before the deceased's ashes - and soul - have been put to rest.

To their despair, the Vietnamese embassy in London has refused to release his ashes until it receives £400 to cover the cost of delivery, and even then, it says, the necessary paperwork would take several months.

Do Van Ky was born on April 22, 1969. He was 37, not 42 as his age was given at the inquest. The name by which he is known in Britain, Ky Anh Duong, was a false identity he had adopted in 1998.

From early childhood, Ky had two outstanding characteristics: he was big, at 1.7m (nearly 5ft 6ins) the tallest in the family, and extremely shy. "He had a big heart," said his younger brother, Thang.

Holding a forwarded letter from Huntingdon coroner's office, Thang stared across the street. His brother would sometimes sit in the stall opposite and sip tea, watching in silence as the commune's workers rushed to and from the glass factory.

"Ky would put his friends first," he said. "But his family found it difficult to understand him. He was so shy, even with us."

During his childhood, almost everyone in Ky's extended family, including his mother and his father, Dinh, worked in the glass factory. But the pay was poor. When Ky and left school in 1982 aged 13 his family tried to convince him to join them in the factory. His strength would be an asset, they said. "But he was stubborn, like his father," said Loan. "He just refused. That boy wanted things his own way."

In 1988, aged 19, Ky returned to the commune from three years of compulsory military service. Still he resisted a job at the glass factory, instead securing a temporary work at a construction factory, shoveling sand into trucks.

When there was no work shoveling sand, Ky would carry fish. Each morning trawlers carrying the previous night's catch would dock beside canning factories on the Cam river.

Ky's job was to trudge through the riverside silt carrying crates of fish from the boats to the waiting factories.

"It was hard labour and very unreliable," said Thang. "He would work for a month, and spend the next month without work. First sand, then fish, then sand again. And so his life went on. He was going in circles and getting tired."

It was around this time, in his early twenties, that Ky started leaving his home city whenever he had the chance. He would travel far in search of work, to islands and coastal towns people in the commune had never heard of. A few times he returned home after particularly long spells away and said he had been in China, selling fish. Annoyed at his vanishing acts, his family mocked him: Ky would drift in and out of their lives, they said, like dust.

In 1998, five months after his father unexpectedly died, Ky told his brothers he was going to Hanoi. Three months later, he called to say he was in the Czech Republic.

Ky never said how he reached eastern Europe. Most probably, like most economic migrants heading west from Vietnam, he would have hidden in the cargo compartments of trains and lorries, meandering across China and Russia, and into Ukraine.

He only called home about 10 times during his seven years in Europe. First he told his family that he had found work picking tomatoes in the Czech Republic and Germany.

Later, he was recruited into a "company" that provided cheap labour to chicken slaughterhouses across Europe. The company would drive groups of labourers wherever they were needed for short stints of work. Ky said he was often shuttled between factories in France and the Netherlands, killing and plucking up to 100 chickens a day.

Family

He earned just enough to share a rented room with several other Vietnamese migrants, but never enough to send money back home. He had travelled more than 5,000 miles for a better life, but the essence of Ky's life had barely changed. In his last few phone calls, he said he wanted to come home.

It was in the interests of his family, it seems, that Ky decided to seek more lucrative employment in Britain. In his last telephone call, six months before his death, Ky had been told his brother was ill.

"I told him I tested positive for hepatitis B and was suffering from liver failure," said Thang, a pang of guilt flashing across his face. "I asked if there was any way he could to earn more money to send to us. Ky promised me he would do his best."

Late at night on October 4 last year, somewhere in northern France - possibly next to a lay-by on the A16 outside Moëres where Bowden had parked his trailer - Ky met the people who would join him on his final trip.

He was introduced to two young Vietnamese women, Van Than Mgo, 19, and Hang Mguyen, 29, and three men, Dung Tran, 30, Tuan Van Bui, 19, and 17-year-old Xuain Huing Bui, the youngest in the group, who had travelled non-stop since leaving his home in Vietnam 10 months earlier.

Around midnight, agents climbed on to the roof of the lorry and sliced three holes into the tarpaulin cover, probably for a substantial fee. Ky was the oldest and no doubt the most experienced stowaway in the group.

In the early hours of the morning on October 5, laden with what he thought was a cargo of potatoes to be used as animal feed in Finningly, near Doncaster, Bowden started up the engine and headed for Calais.

At the ferry terminal, a security guard waved Bowden's lorry into the "heartbeat" shed, a machine that uses sensors to detect stowaways. Somehow, the six Vietnamese hearts inside, which must have been racing, slipped by unnoticed.

Bowden, his potatoes, and his clandestine cargo, boarded the P&O ferry Pride of Kent at 9:35am.

It was Ky who decided it was time to escape. One by one, the others followed his lead, climbing out of the dark and into the morning sun to take their first breaths of English air.

As the lorry decelerated, they scrambled to the back to descend a metal ladder. Then, very possibly because the ladders were full, Ky decided to climb down the side of the trailer.

Seven months on, Bowden is still haunted by the day he ran over Do Van Ky. "What happened back then has been playing on my mind," he said this week, speaking as he drove past Haddon services for the first time since that fatal day.

"A man made all that effort to struggle halfway across the world for a better life, he tried so hard, he must have been desperate. The first time he hit British soil, some bastard ran him over. That bastard just happened to be me."

Gamble

Earlier in the week, back in Haiphong, Ky's mother decided to take a gamble herself. At the expense of the family's life savings and a loan that will take three years to repay, Loan resolved to fly to England to retrieve her son's ashes.

The frail grandmother will travel alone, crossing Vietnam's borders into a foreign land for the first time in her life.

Yesterday morning, she hitched a ride with the Guardian to Hanoi, where she applied for a passport. Next week, she will retrace her son's footsteps to the other side of the world.

She will collect her son's ashes - and, she believes, his soul - near Kensington Gardens, in London. And then she will bring him home.

    Hanoi to Haddon services - life and death of a stowaway, G, 27.5.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/immigration/story/0,,1784322,00.html

2.15pm update

System 'not fit for purpose', says Reid

Tuesday May 23, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Hélène Mulholland and Matthew Tempest

The home secretary, John Reid, today admitted that the beleagured immigration directorate was "not fit for purpose" - and warned that people are likely to be sacked over the foreign prisoners fiasco.

Making his first appearance in front of the home affairs select committee since he took over the reigns from Charles Clarke in this month's reshuffle, Dr Reid admitted his department was failing to deliver as he refused to rule out the dismissal of immigration officials in light of a "tidal wave" of scandals.

"Our system is not fit for purpose. It is inadequate in terms of its scope, it is inadequate in terms of its information technology, leadership, management systems and processes," he told MPs.

In a written answer released simultaneously with his appearance, Dr Reid revealed that that 85 serious foreign offenders, released from prison without being considered for deportation since 1999, were still on the run.

Mr Reid explained he had had ordered a "fundamental overhaul" of the Home Office Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND).

Asked if the review meant that no one would lose their job in the IND, Mr Reid said: "Don't count on it." He added: "If there are people culpable, they will have to bear responsibility."

And he told MPs - perhaps mindful of the abrupt termination of Mr Clarke's career as home secretary: "It's not my job to manage this department - it's my job to lead this department."

He said he had this morning issued staff with an eight-point action plan on which to work

Although Dr Reid didn't echo calls for the Home Office to be restructured and broken down into smaller constituent parts, neither did he rule it out, saying his overhaul would take that option "if it warrants it - anything's possible".

But he suggested creating a system of "unique identifiers" for all prisoners, including foreign ones, to ensure they could be tracked through the criminal justice system.

That came after the revelation that four of the initial total of 1, 023 non-deported foreign were in fact "duplicates", reducing the total to 1, 019.

Another idea he floated was recommending the deportation of all foreign prisoners who had served a total aggregate of six months in jail, even it was for a series of lesser offences carrying shorter sentences.

"Nothing less than a full and fundamental overhaul will be sufficient," he promised the Labour MP David Winnick, who had asked if the Home Office bore responsibility to the victims of those crimes committed by non-deported foreign offenders.

He added that he "inherited" responsibility for that situation.

Dr Reid said he had had to deal with a "tidal wave of events" since his appointment just over two weeks ago. He promised to find out "what was responsible - then who" for the mishaps over foreign prisoners and attempts to deport illegal immigrants - the other flashpoint of the grilling.

One Tory member of the committee, Richard Benyon, praised Dr Reid as the "government's best operator", but gave him a six-month deadline to sort the problems at the Home Office.

Dr Reid also showed his characteristic tough side, revealing he had immediately, on becoming home secretary, paid an unannounced visit to the immigration headquarter at Lunar House, joking that this was the only to find out what was going on without the place "smelling of fresh paint".

He promised to publicise who the remaining eight most serious offenders were among the undeported foreign prisoners, but only if that police agreed that was desirable as an operational matter.

He said he shared the "frustrations" of MPs and the public at the failings that had been exposed.

The IND was struggling to cope with a huge rise in international migration with a system that was designed for an earlier era, he said.

"We are in a state of transition from a paper-based system that was not designed for the problems we are facing towards a technologically based system that seems to be on a horizon that never gets any nearer," he said

Mr Reid said he had appointed new immigration minister, Liam Byrne, to take charge of the reform of the IND, because of the qualities he brought to the job, "including management experience".

Tony McNulty, whom he replaces, had been put in charge of police restructuring because of his experience of local authorities and parliamentary affairs, he said.

A written statement published ahead of the select committee hearing this morning revealed revised figures on foreign criminals still at large after escaping deportation.

The total number of cases had now fallen to 1,019 - four fewer than previously thought - but they had now identified 186 serious offenders among them, a rise of seven.

Under the revised figures, the total number of the "most serious" offenders - including murders and rapists - has risen by two to 37.

Mr Reid explained to the select committee was that the current system for identifying foreign prisoners was open to duplication and pledged to introduce "unique identifiers" to help track individuals.

Speaking on The Daily Politics on BBC2, former Conservative leader and home secretary Michael Howard said Mr Reid's comments were an "indictment" of Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Charles Clarke.

"What he's saying this morning, of course, is the most terrible indictment of his three predecessors," said Mr Howard.

"I believe the Home Office was 'fit for purpose', to use his phrase, when I left it in 1997.

"It's a big department, it's a difficult department to run, but it can be run properly.

"What he's confessed to this morning is the result of nine years of neglect by his three Labour predecessors."

    System 'not fit for purpose', says Reid, G, 23.5.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,1781314,00.html

Revealed: 'sex-for-asylum' scandal at immigration HQ

· Rape victim targeted by top official
· Home Office launches investigation
· Watch the video clip (WMV 1:20)

Sunday May 21, 2006
The Observer
Jamie Doward and Mark Townsend


A 'sex-for-asylum' scandal at the UK's largest immigration processing centre has been uncovered by an Observer investigation, piling more pressure on a government already reeling from a series of Home Office bungles.

Evidence obtained by this newspaper reveals how a chief immigration officer at Lunar House in Croydon, south London, targeted an 18-year-old Zimbabwean rape victim over a two-week period in which he offered to help her with her application to claim asylum in the UK and made it clear that he would like to have sex with her.

Last night the Home Office announced it had suspended an official at the centre following The Observer's allegations and said it was launching a full investigation.

The exposé is the latest in an increasingly long line of scandals to hit the embattled Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) and comes just two months after an official report urged an overhaul of practices at the centre to prevent such abuses taking place.

James Dawute, 53, picked the teenager called Tanya (her surname has been withheld at her request) out of a queue of asylum seekers and asked for her telephone number, promising to help her with her application.

Through subsequent text messages and mobile phone calls Dawute made it clear he was attracted to the teenager and requested her bank details so that he could put money into her account. He then encouraged her to return to Croydon to meet him last Wednesday.

During the subsequent 90-minute meeting with the asylum seeker, in which she discussed having sex with Dawute in return for his help, he claimed he knew 'how to win her case'. When asked for guarantees that he could help her, he tells her to come to a hotel with him. 'I will tell you when we are alone because you are going to have sex,' he said.

At no stage during the meeting - recorded by The Observer - does Dawute make any claim that he will break the rules to help Tanya. But the fact he was attempting a relationship with the teenager, and that, as a chief immigration officer, he claimed he could 'handle' her application, is a flagrant breach of immigration service guidelines and a clear conflict of interest.

During the meeting he offers to coach Tanya on her asylum interview so that she can give the correct answers. He also offers to insert a revised summary of her asylum claim into her file with a view to improving her chances at appeal.

Last night politicians from all parties expressed concern at the revelations. David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, described them as 'disgraceful and shocking'. Davis referred to similar allegations made in the Sun in January, which prompted an official investigation by the IND and a call for management at Lunar House to clamp down on possible abuses. 'It's doubly shocking that the government had already been warned of such goings on,' Davis said. 'Their inquiries neither caught any transgressors nor clearly did it prevent this shameful practice going on.'

Tomorrow Davis will table a series of parliamentary questions to 'get to the bottom of this disgraceful incident'.

'This kind of case is the worst mixture of sexual exploitation and grotesque bullying imaginable and needs to be rooted out instantly,' said Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman. 'Evidence of corruption in the immigration service is a matter of the utmost seriousness. It will be a body blow to whatever is left of the credibility in this area if incompetence is supplemented by corruption.'

Harris Nyatsanza, a human rights activist who fled the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, said Tanya's story raised serious questions. 'I hope that after a thorough investigation - not a whitewash - there will be time to engage with asylum seekers so that this problem does not reappear in the future.'

When confronted by The Observer, Dawute denied attempting a sexual relationship with the teenager or offering to help her with her claim. In subsequent phone calls he claimed he was merely trying to help put her in touch with an immigration charity. He denied having the power to influence her asylum application. 'She's a vulnerable rape victim,' Dawute said. 'I wouldn't want to have sex with her. I'm the father of four kids.'

Last night a Home Office spokesman confirmed Dawute had been suspended. 'We are aware of the allegations made by a Sunday newspaper against a serving member of the Home Office,' the spokesman said. 'An official has been suspended pending a full investigation by the Immigration and Nationality Directorate. It expects the highest levels of integrity from its staff and any suspicions of corruption are investigated fully.'

    Revealed: 'sex-for-asylum' scandal at immigration HQ, O, 21.5.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,,1779772,00.html

'I will help you,' he said. Then he asked for sex

Tanya is just 18. Raped in Zimbabwe and rejected by her husband in the UK, she fled the marriage and sought asylum. Then she faced a new ordeal. The official handling her case said he would help her claim. But he also wanted sex. Jamie Doward and Mark Townsend on a horrifying abuse of power

Sunday May 21, 2006
The Observer


Tanya is the sort of person you notice in a crowd. She has a big, blinding smile and exudes a magnetic aura, a captivating calmness uncommon among normal 18-year-olds.

But then Tanya's short, tragic life has been far from normal. When she was 11, Tanya's father died. When she was 15 she was raped by an important donor to Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party. The man pulled strings to ensure the doctor's report into the rape - and Tanya's allegations - disappeared. Things got worse. Tanya was accused of making the rape up. People spat at her in the street. She was branded a 'slut' who was trying to blacken the name of a respected member of the local community. She plunged into depression.

At 16, she ran away from home. Her family had arranged for her to leave Zimbabwe to marry a man in England she barely knew. He was a member of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the political organisation that the Zanu-PF is intent on destroying. His family was relatively wealthy and promised money and cattle to Tanya's family in return for her hand in marriage. Tanya's uncles wanted the marriage to proceed. She claims that they found her, locked her in a room and beat her with whips until she agreed to the marriage. Three years later she still has scars on her hands, legs and back.

She entered the UK on Christmas Day 2003. Upon discovering his bride was not a virgin, Tanya claims her husband turned on her. 'He always kept going on about how he was going to get another wife because I wasn't a virgin, how I never really got raped because I had come on to the man,' Tanya said. She alleges that her husband, who had successfully claimed asylum, regularly ensured there was no food in the house they shared in the West Midlands. She had no money and often went hungry.

Tanya left him after one month of marriage. But her options were limited. She could not return to Zimbabwe - her rape allegations against the Zanu-PF donor, and her marriage to an MDC member, meant she was an obvious target for the country's notorious security services. And she was also in a legal limbo - her husband withdrew her application for British citizenship shortly after she fled.

A male friend who knew Tanya's husband offered her a roof over her head. 'He ended up being violent,' Tanya said. 'I felt I had to keep having sex with him for him to put me up. There were times when I tried to leave. I went to the Refugee Council but they couldn't give me a place to stay because I wasn't an asylum seeker.'

With no money, nowhere to go and few friends Tanya's only option was to follow her solicitor's advice and claim asylum. She had no choice but to beg the country she called home not to return her to a brutal dictatorship, a place where a bang on the door in the small hours pressages rape, torture and murder.

What happened next constitutes a disturbing abuse of power and raises fundamental questions about practices within the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND).

Lunar House in East Croydon is an ugly building to house so many people's dreams. But it is here, behind the concrete walls of the towering office complex, that those seeking asylum in Britain come to plead their case. What the officials say and, more importantly, what they do, helps determine an asylum seeker's fate. Theirs is an extremely powerful position, an asymmetry between applicant and official emphasised by the reinforced glass screens from behind which IND staff grill the asylum seekers.

On 5 May, as she nervously clutched her forms detailing her home office reference number, a letter from her lawyer and a potted, scrawled chronology of the ugly events that led to her seeking asylum in a faceless office in Surrey, the Zimbabwean teenager cut a forlorn figure in the Lunar House waiting room.

James Dawute spied Tanya almost instantly. The chief immigration officer signalled to a security guard for her to be brought forward. Tanya was searched and given a ticket with a number on it. Moments later Dawute approached the teenager and gave her another ticket with a different number. Instantly she jumped up the queue by several hundred places.

Soon she was being interviewed by a female immigration official only for Dawute to take over. Once his colleague's back was turned, Dawute passed a scrap of paper with his telephone number on through the window and asked for her number in return. She complied.

Tanya claims Dawute suggested he could find accommodation for her in Croydon that day, but she declined, saying she had no money. Instead he signed some forms allowing her to claim accommodation and emergency benefits from the Refugee Council.

Dawute rang two days later, telling Tanya he liked her and wanted to see her. Tanya claims Dawute he offered to help sort out her leave to remain. He also transferred £50 into her bank account, the first of three such payments he was to make over the subsequent fortnight. The following day Dawute called again saying he couldn't wait to see her and arranged to meet Tanya in Croydon.

Tanya was torn. She held no illusions about what the man wanted. But she was terrified of being sent back to Zimbabwe. 'He said he was a really influential person,' Tanya said. 'What if he could get me my papers and get me sorted like he promised? But then I realised they could take the papers off me at any time if it was found out I had to do things with him to get them.' Her friends in the Zimbabwean community persuaded her to talk to The Observer with a view to exposing what had happened. Nervously, Tanya agreed.

The self-styled king of Lunar House shaves off his white hair to make himself look younger. He claims to be 47 but is actually 53. As he sidled up to Tanya, waiting for him in a platform cafe at East Croydon railway station last Wednesday afternoon, Dawute was looking forward to the next 24 hours. He planned to show her off to friends who were meeting in a bar to watch the Champions League final. He had already thought about the hotel where they would spend the afternoon.

Over lunch in a noodle bar, the civil servant with five years' experience in the IND promised to help the teenager. As he did so he took a phone call in which he discussed booking a hotel room for later that day. 'I will do my best to make sure you are OK,' he said. 'I know how to win your case.' At one stage he claimed to be able to obtain her a Ghanaian passport. Several times during the meal he admitted he wanted to have sex with Tanya. At one stage Tanya said she could not have sex with Dawute unless he guaranteed to help her. Dawute told her to 'trust him': 'I'm very honest and I keep my word.'

Tanya was still unconvinced and asksed why she should go to a hotel with Dawute. 'I will tell you when we are alone,' Dawute said. 'Because we are going to have sex.'

When confronted by The Observer, Dawute denied any wrongdoing. He claimed he was simply trying to put her in touch with an immigration charity and that he could not help her with her asylum application even if he wanted to. He denied discussing sex with her.

The Observer intends to hand its evidence to the authorities to let them decide. In January this year the Sun splashed on 'sex-for-visa' claims made by a former immigration officer who was based in Lunar House for four years. 'One girl came in and told us an admin officer had visited her flat and they had slept together. She got indefinite leave to stay,' the whistleblower, Anthony Pamnani, told the paper.

He revealed how female asylum seekers would ask for officials by name. 'A Lebanese girl came into the office in a foul temper asking for one of the guys who worked there,' Pamnani recalled. 'He had moved to another department. She told us that he'd promised to give her an extension to a visa and that they had slept together at her flat in Brighton.'

The claims prompted questions in parliament and an official investigation. But on 14 March this year Baroness Scotland told parliament: 'I am pleased to say that the investigation found no evidence to support the Sun's central allegation that there was a corruption 'racket' in the public enquiry office involving 'sex for visas'.

Scotland admitted the inquiry had unearthed examples of minor misconduct, but went on to praise staff at Lunar House for their 'hard work' and 'professionalism'.

The civil servant charged with investigating the claims took pains to emphasise the complexities of the immigration process. Lunar House, he pointed out, had 140 staff who last year processed more than 120,000 immigration cases. This was separate from Lunar House's Asylum Screening Unit which hears thousands of cases. Pressures on the system were obvious throughout the report. 'The office continued to struggle with long queues, packed waiting areas, lengthy delays for customers and generally poor standards of service,' it stated.

The report also found evidence male staff had been jumping women to the front of the queue. 'In several of these cases the unprofessional behaviour alleged by the Sun is the most likely explanation,' the report disclosed, before calling for the appointments booking process to be modified to prevent officials bypassing the system.

But, despite this remarkable admission, little appears to have changed at Lunar House. Pamnani told The Observer he felt the report had failed to address his fundamental concerns. 'I felt it was a bit wishy-washy to be honest,' he said. He was concerned no attempt appeared to have been made to interview any of the applicants who had allegedly been asked by staff for sexual favours.

The IND's security and anti-corruption unit is still investigating one official in Lunar House following a specific allegation made by Pamnani. When told of The Observer's revelations, Pamnani, who left Lunar House in disgust at the practices he witnessed, expressed shock. 'This guy is from a totally different department to the one I mentioned,' Pamnani said. 'This is explosive; this will cause a lot of problems for the Home Office.'

The official report into the Pamnani affair concluded that questions had to be asked 'about how IND learns lessons, and retains knowledge from such episodes.' Given its recent turbulent history many would agree. The picture that has emerged over the last 12 months is of a chaotic department in which staff are stretched beyond capacity, bereft of guidance from senior management and where systems for processing visa and asylum applications are often ad hoc and open to abuse.

The government's recent failure to identify and deport foreign prisoners is largely down to chronic problems within an over-stretched IND. Three years ago, alarmed by mounting public concern over asylum seekers, the Home Office transferred scores of staff out of deportation to assess asylum claims. And the astonishing revelation last week by Dave Roberts, the director of enforcement and removals at the IND, that he had 'not the faintest idea' how many people were in Britain illegally confirmed the image of a department in disarray. More embarrassment came on Friday when it emerged that illegal immigrants had been working in the Home Office for years.

Amid the maelstrom, the government has hardened its stance on immigration, introducing a new fast-track asylum application process. The statistics tell the story. At Harmondsworth detention centre, for example, figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal 99.6 per cent of fast-track asylum claims are rejected.

The danger is that the voices of genuine refugees - those such as Tanya, who will be subjected to violence and persecution if they are returned to their native countries - are lost.

    'I will help you,' he said. Then he asked for sex, O, 21.5.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,,1779782,00.html

A sickness at the heart of our immigration service

Sunday May 21, 2006
The Observer
Leader

There are countries where the state is to be feared, where bureaucrats abuse their powers and vulnerable people are exploited by the officials to whom they turn for help. People flee such countries in the hope of finding a better life in safer societies, such as Britain. That they may encounter a system which grimly echoes the one they fled shames us.

Today, The Observer reveals the scandal of a senior immigration official accused of seeking sex from an asylum seeker in exchange for help to win her case. James Dawute selected a young woman who had come to Lunar House, the immigration service headquarters in Croydon, in desperate need of help. A teenager who had suffered terrible abuse in her native Zimbabwe found that her quest for asylum might lead to a sleazy hotel-room encounter with a civil servant. Mr Dawute has been suspended pending a Home Office investigation.

That will be the second such investigation this year. In March, a report into allegations that immigration officials were demanding 'sex for visas' concluded that no such racket existed. But it also revealed a culture of bad practice, in which undertrained, under-supervised staff bypassed security procedures and treated applicants with contempt. Most worrying, it indicated that front-line staff had little understanding of what constitutes inappropriate, even corrupt, conduct. The report made tame procedural recommendations that appear to have been of little consequence.

The Observer's revelations will make grim reading for the Home Secretary whose department is already groaning under a weight of scandal. Last week, David Roberts, the civil servant responsible for removing illegal immigrants from the UK, shocked MPs by admitting he had 'not the faintest idea' of the numbers concerned.

Mr Roberts's remark was disturbing and yet refreshing in its candour. By definition, illegal immigrants evade identification and so cannot be counted. His failure to conjure a statistic affronted the government's love of numerical targets as the benchmark of progress. But it also stoked public fear of an invisible horde of foreign interlopers. The problem that needs urgently to be addressed is not the number of Britain's illegal workers - although there are too many - but the crisis of confidence in the state's ability to manage its borders. Insecurity about the immigration system breeds racism towards those who come through it.

Xenophobia is everywhere in the debate on these issues. Mistrust of outsiders is encouraged when politicians and the media routinely fail to distinguish between immigrants, who come to the UK to work or study, and asylum seekers, who come for sanctuary. We have sound economic reasons to welcome a managed intake of foreign labour and moral reasons, not to mention treaty obligations, to take in genuine refugees. But the arguments for a liberal migration policy cannot even be heard unless all are seen to be conscientiously vetted. That is the purpose of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate and it is clearly unfit.

The 'caseworkers' who process applications are poorly paid and poorly qualified. They are recruited from the bottom of the Civil Service chain. Their output - the number of cases they process - is monitored but their treatment of applicants is not assessed. Promotion, as elsewhere in the Civil Service, depends more on length than on quality of service. In a culture where asylum seekers and immigrants are usually portrayed as likely abusers of the system, it is not surprising that the system sometimes ends up abusing them.

Thanks to the exceptional courage of one young woman, a terrible dereliction of duty has been exposed at Lunar House. When this episode is matched to prior revelations, the case for sweeping institutional change becomes unarguable.

    A sickness at the heart of our immigration service, O, 21.5.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1779858,00.html

5pm

UK migration figures up 50%

Thursday April 20, 2006
Staff and agencies
Guardian Unlimited

Net migration to Britain rose nearly 50% in just one year, official figures showed today.

An estimated 223,000 more people came to the UK in 2004 than left to live overseas, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

The figure - up 72,000 on the previous year - was the highest net migration since the present count began in 1991, the ONS said.

The rise was recorded despite the highest-ever level of British citizens leaving for a new life abroad: an estimated 120,000.

Arrivals of Commonwealth residents increased by 45% between 2003 and 2004.

Migration from Pakistan leapt from 9,000 in 2003 to 25,000 in 2004. Arrivals from Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka also jumped from 38,000 to 54,000 in the same period.

Last month the Home Office revealed that more than 345,000 migrants from eastern Europe registered to work in Britain since the expansion of the European Union in May 2004.

The figures showed that 345,410 people from Poland and the other new EU states signed up to the special work registration scheme between the May 2004 enlargement and December 2005.

The Conservative party's immigration spokesman, Damian Green, said today that the new ONS figures showed how unreliable government forecasts on migration were.

"The government is planning for net immigration of 145,000 a year but these figures show this to be yet another Home Office figure of dubious value.

"If we are going to have much more long-term immigration than the government is planning this will have clear implications for the economy and public services. The government should sort its forecasts out as a matter of urgency."

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of right-wing pressure group MigrationWatch, said: "The government claim that the present massive levels of immigration are necessary for economic reasons. But in 2004, only one in four immigrants gave work as their reason for coming."

At the same time as migration is increasing, the most recent asylum figures show that those seeking refugee status in Britain fell by nearly a quarter to 25,720 new applicants in 2005 - the lowest level for more than a decade.

    UK migration figures up 50%, G, 20.4.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1757862,00.html

All together now

London can claim to be the most multicultural place in the world, its population drawn from every race, nation and religion on earth. But what about the rest of Britain? How many new immigrants move here, who are they and where do they settle? As a follow-up to last year's award-winning issue charting immigrant communities in the capital, Leo Benedictus set out on an even bigger task: to meet these populations across the whole country. The result, which ranges from the century-old population of Cardiff Somalis to the much newer Portuguese in Lincolnshire, is a snapshot of the extraordinary cultural richness of the UK today

Wednesday January 25, 2006
The Guardian
Leo Benedictus

This is Britain's second great age of immigration. It seems to be passing with much less fanfare than the first one. For the past decade, a wave of incomers has been sweeping across the country, scattering new cultures, languages and religions into almost every town and village. In 1997, a total of 63,000 work permit holders and their dependants came to Britain. In 2003, it was 119,000. Altogether, between 1991 and 2001, the UK population increased by 2.2 million, some 1.14 million of whom were born abroad. And all this was before EU enlargement in May 2004, which pulled in 130,000 more people from the new member states in its first year alone. The last time this country saw immigration on this scale, in the 1950s and 60s, there were white riots in the streets. Why are there none today?
Clearly Britain has mellowed somewhat since then. The first immigration age was a painful process, particularly for the immigrants themselves, but it helped give the country more of a taste for its second helping. In public life, at least, it is plainly no longer acceptable to dislike people simply for their foreignness. This is good and helpful, but it has left those who dislike the idea of immigration with little room for manoeuvre. Which is why the figure of the fraudulent asylum seeker spinning tales of woe so he can help himself to a piece of our economy - or even our benefits - has become such a popular target for the instinctive xenophobe. In some parts of Britain, the word "Kosovan" is now more likely to be shouted in the street than the word "Paki", even when the accused is Portuguese.

Asylum seekers and refugees (people who have been granted asylum) may also have served as a distraction from the general immigration boom. They certainly need more support from the state than migrant workers, and their numbers did indeed rise worldwide in the late 1990s. Nevertheless, they remain just a fraction of the immigration picture in Britain. In 2003, when the asylum panic was at its height, there were 1.4 million overseas workers in the UK and just 49,370 asylum seekers. Now, thanks to some extremely tough government love, the total seeking asylum is closer to 10,000.

But liberal attitudes and the asylum distraction are not the only things that make this second boom different from the first one. For a start, as the maps on the following pages show, immigration is no longer something that only happens in big cities. Most towns of any size now have at least one established community from overseas, and scarcely a corner of the country remains that has not been touched by the process, painting a pattern too complex and changeable to depict in detail. Researching this issue, we would often hear rumours of garden centres in Devon that were staffed entirely by Poles, or bands of itinerant Portuguese working on farms in the Scottish borders, but a map of all these micro-communities would simply be impossible to draw.

The immigrants themselves are also far more diverse now than they were in the 1950s. All the significant immigrant and immigrant descended communities in Britain, are still dominated by the traditional groups of Caribbeans, Chinese, south Asians and Irish. But the new arrivals of the past decade are as likely to come from Zimbabwe, eastern Europe, the Middle East or the Philippines.

The trends of the second immigration age may be clearest in London, but a separate story is also developing outside the capital, where it is now commonplace for employers to find staff through agencies that recruit abroad, often through the internet. This applies as much to large organisations such as the NHS, which has brought in many thousands of health professionals from overseas in the past decade, as it does to farmers in Norfolk or hotels in the Isles of Scilly.

The arrival of immigrants in smaller groups than before, and from a greater variety of places, is probably another reason why they have caused fewer shockwaves, and substantial improvements in legislation and policing have certainly helped. But the main root of our comparative harmony - the theme that emerged most strongly from the hundreds of interviews conducted for this issue - is that we have simply become more accepting of difference.

The great neglected truth of British multiculturalism is that every day, millions of different people across the country are actually getting along very nicely, while the bad news gets all the attention. Last year's Home Office figures show Cumbria to have the highest rate of racially aggravated incidents in England and Wales, with 6.2% of the county's non-white population reporting some form of racial abuse in 2004. Few people would be happy about this, and yet the other side of the picture is worth considering: 93.8% of non-white people living in Britain's most intolerant area were left in peace.

On many occasions, researching this issue, we asked people if they had had any problems with the locals. Sometimes they had, but far more frequently they hadn't, and said so with a look on their faces that seemed to ask, "Is that all you journalists want to know about?" Immigration is a subject, like air travel or life in Africa, that we only hear about when it is making someone miserable. This vastly inflates the extreme fringes of the immigrant experience, while the fact that most immigrants and their families just lead normal lives gets forgotten.

On the whole, Britain today is one of the most tolerant and multicultural societies there has ever been - in fact it is the country's multiculturalism that is making it more tolerant. The same Home Office figures show us that immigration is not the cause of racism; it is its cure. Racist incidents are diminishing fastest where immigrants and their families are most established, while it is the parts of Britain with least experience of immigration - the rural areas, on the whole - that are the most hostile.

The fact that reported incidents have risen substantially in Cumbria, Northumbria, Devon and Cornwall, most of Wales, Durham and Cleveland since 2001 reflects the fact that, because of this second immigration boom, many of the people who live there are rubbing shoulders with foreigners for the first time. It is a new experience, which some are not comfortable with. But they, or their children, will get used to it. When white Londoners found themselves living next to Afro-Caribbeans in the 1950s, they rioted in their thousands, but by 2004, less than 1% of London's 1.9m non-white people were reporting any racial abuse.

In time, integration and acceptance are inevitable. No matter how disadvantaged they were when they arrived, every community seems to settle and prosper in the end. The only variable is the speed at which this happens, and it is happening far more quickly than it used to.

    All together now, G, 23.1.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0,,1692836,00.html

The Guardian > Special Report > Immigration, Asylum and Refugees
http://www.guardian.co.uk/immigration/0,,1397447,00.html