6000 dead and nothing said: 'Of a total 37,000 migrants who in 2006 tried to reach Spain's Canary Islands from Africa, an estimated 6,000 died on the perilous sea voyage, making the death toll close to one in six, according to Spanish officials. Immigration services say they recovered 600 bodies but reckon the actual death toll is ten times higher. A total 31,000 migrants survived the journey, the officials said'. More details here.

Mexican border dead remembered: 'Migrants’ rights groups in Tijuana are replacing the 1,000 wooden crosses they’ve affixed to the U.S. Mexico border fence during the last eleven years. The crosses which represent migrants who’ve died crossing the California Mexico border are rotting due to sun and rain... Aproximately 4,000 migrants have died crossing the U.S. Mexico border in the last 11 years'. More here

DEMONSTRATE OUTSIDE HARMONSDWORTH AND COLNBROOK DETENTION CENTRES

11.30 am SATURDAY 10 FEBRUARY 2007

They are moving. They are crossing mountains, rivers and oceans. Risking their lives in leaving their homes, crossing borders and in entering the UK. Asking for a place to exist and to live with dignity. Yet people who flee poverty, war and injustice throughout the world are deemed illegal – forced to work for low wages in precarious conditions and locked in detention centres, deprived of their freedom to move.

There will be a demonstration at Harmondsworth & Colnbrook Detention Centres (they are next door to each other) on Saturday 10th February. The call for this has come from London No Borders, but we want to make it a huge event. We have already started approach other organisations about this.

There isn't a huge amount of time once the festive season is over, so we have called a Planning Meeting on Saturday 6th January to plan and organise this successfully. This will be at the Transport and General Workers Union Offices, 128 Theobalds Road, London WC1X 8TN at 3pm. 5 minutes from Holborn Tube Station.

Report from UFCW Union:

United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) members working in Swift and Company meatpacking plants are reporting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents marched into plants Thursday morning with military weapons, herding, segregating, and terrorizing workers. Plants and plant gates were locked down.

"The display of force by ICE agents is totally outrageous," said Mark Lauritsen, International Vice President and Director of the Food Processing, Packing, and Manufacturing division of the UFCW. "We believe they are victims of wholesale violations of worker rights. In effect, ICE is criminalizing people for going to work."

No Borders London has called another demonstration at the headquarters of Kalyx, the private company that runs Harmondsworth immigration detention centre. We will be demanding that closure of the centre and supporting the detainees who demonstrated in defence of their freedom in late November.

Details: Monday 18th December, 4:30 - 5:30pm at Kalyx, 25 Chapel Street, NW1 5DH (Edgware Road Tube Station).

Extracts from What really happenened at Harmondsworth? - article in the Guardian this week:

'Millions of pounds' damage was caused as fires were lit, windows smashed, walls knocked down and security cameras wrenched from the walls. All four wings of the privately run facility - through which more than 2,000 failed asylum seekers and illegal migrants pass each year - were affected

We received this report yesterday of a protest at Oakington detention centre in Cambridgeshire:

Detainees in Oakington Reception Centre have been protesting through out the day, numbers of them assembled outside the canteen and refused to enter for meals and there was apparently a stand off between detainees and guards. Problems the long term detainees say have been exacerbated by sudden overcrowding with detainees being moved from Campsfield to make room for detainees from Harmondsworth.

25 Turkish detainees barricaded themselves into one of the recreation rooms about midmorning. Complaints are that staff are herding the detainees about like cattle. Detainees are forced out of their beds every morning at 7.00am, then have to spend the rest of the day with nothing to do. There is no education, no access to computers, none of the normal regime that many now in Oakington were used to at Campsfield.

Excellent article by Steve Cohen of No One is Illegal

Whatever the merits of Tony Blair's recent retrospective apology for Britain's leading role in the slave trade it would be less hypocritical if his government was not developing a modern system of slavery and the reintroduction of sweated labour through the reshaping of immigration controls.

The mechanisms of immigration control are changing. They are locating themselves in the workplace and on the factory floor. The agents and enforcers of controls are becoming employers. They are the managers of New Labours "managed migration".