Leave to remain for all migrants is integral to an effective coronavirus public health response

Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

Friday 29 May 2020 14:41 BST
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Nigel Farage travels to Dover to claim that UK border force have captured migrants coming to Britain

Hassan Akkad’s video plea shamed the prime minister into abandoning the exclusion of low-paid NHS workers from coronavirus bereavement funds. Public outrage at the growing number of workers with insecure immigration status who, having saved lives and comforted the dying, have then died themselves, compelled the Home Office to extend the indefinite leave to remain status to their bereaved families and dependents. But there is another group of migrant people without leave to remain who have been and are dying of destitution or Covid-19 because, without secure status, they are prevented from safely accessing the healthcare, housing or food they need.

On 27th March, our Status Now open letter to the prime minister set out why leave to remain for all migrants is integral to an effective Covid-19 public health response. Our letter remains unacknowledged. A growing Status Now network shares multiple stories about workers, some of whom have died, like Elvis, who feared accessing healthcare because of his undocumented immigration status and others, like Rose, who currently looks after British elders in care homes.

Covid-19 pandemic management will only work if everyone comes forward and receives help when they need it. This includes offering undocumented people a clear and secure route out of the shadows and includes access to essential PPE, social distance environments, and test, track, trace and quarantine processes like everyone else. Continuing to ignore and exclude this group consigns any plan to inevitable failure. Every person who died before having leave to remain is one too many. How many more people will remain without leave and die as a result? 
Susan Cueva, Kanlungan Filipino Consortium
Fizza Qureshi, Migrants’ Rights Network
Dr Rhetta Moran, Refugee and Asylum Participatory Action Research (RAPAR)

Give teachers a break

I do wish that certain sections of the media would refrain from criticising teachers who are hesitant about returning to classrooms. Your own paper’s Mary Dejevsky wrote almost in passing that the “reluctance” of certain teachers to return to work was “not doing the profession any favours”. This is profoundly unfair, not least because so many teachers have never actually stopped working throughout this crisis.

I know several teachers who have done their level best to keep children’s education moving, through Zoom calls, the creation of online content and even exchanging letters with their pupils. Many of these are children who, without this small link to their normal life, would undoubtedly be left feeling isolated and distressed. Teachers’ reluctance to enter classrooms stems from genuine concern for the safety of the pupils and their families, as well as for themselves. This pandemic is hard for everyone. Let’s try to be kind.

Rob Buxton
Bromley

Speak up!

I am absolutely disgusted by the prime minister and some of his senior MPs defending the indefensible! Dominic Cummings stated that he drove from London to Durham with his family out of wanting and feeling the need to protect them but then admitted to driving them on a 60-mile round trip to Barnard Castle with the most absurd excuse “to test his eyesight to see if he could then undertake a longer drive” – this “eyesight test drive” putting his family, the very ones he’s implying he’s trying to protect, in very real danger!

If anyone believes or tries to defend this pathetic excuse, they are treating anyone who has lost relatives to the disease, people who died alone because loved ones were abiding to the strict guidelines, and the whole of the British public, with the utmost disrespect, disregard and contempt.

Ashley Freeman
Darlington

Silence equals complicity

Dominic Cummings has set an example that too many people might emulate, possibly resulting in an increase of Covid-19 infections and more deaths. Boris Johnson persists in refusing to sack, or even criticise, his badly-behaved special adviser. We must assume that this is either because the PM feels that he cannot manage without him or that he has something to fear from him. This must worry us all. Having so much power in the hands of a single, unelected, person (not even a member of the party he seems to control) sounds as if it could be a first small step towards dictatorship.

I don’t suggest that Dominic Cummings is evil – he is probably the sad victim of his genes or his life experiences, as are we all. But the effect he is having on our society undoubtedly has evil potential. And all that is necessary for evil to prevail in this case is that good MPs and government ministers do nothing.

The Independent’s editorial suggests that Matt Hancock has reservations about Cummings but, perhaps recalling the purge of the party’s upper echelons leading up to Brexit, is unable to express them. It’s very likely that a significant number of Conservative MPs (half the majority of 80) tend towards this view. If they remain silent, they will be complicit in whatever outcome awaits us.

Susan Alexander
South Gloucestershire

Un-joined-up thinking

My husband and I are 73 and 67 years old respectively. I have a lung condition and my husband is not only over 70 but also Bame and hypertensive. We are both retired very senior health professionals and consider ourselves fairly intelligent and pretty clued up regarding understanding the facts and figures being spilled out daily from the so-called scientific experts/advisers and various other university professors adding their tuppenceworth of advice into the pot.

I am therefore rather dismayed that, having spent three months away from our three grandchildren, who have been isolating strictly between two households as allowed under the rules due to split relationships, and are at their safest as far as being infected with Covid-19 virus is concerned, we are not allowed to see them until Monday when the eldest will be back at school amongst children and/or teachers possibly infected.

We are certainly not the only people in this situation and, like many other grandparents, we cannot understand why we are put in the position of risking seeing them after they have returned to school, or like us think is wiser not to, even with social distancing.

Why on earth did none of the experts think of at least allowing some space between easing the lockdown and returning children to school so that we feel safer seeing our grandchildren now?

I long for some joined-up thinking on these unlocking decisions as I for one have little faith in how things have been handled.

Name withheld
London

More deaths to come

The government has announced that, from Monday in England, people can meet up with up to six people. On the same day, Boris Johnson prevented journalists from asking the scientific and medical advisors beside him their views on the Cummings saga. They were, simply, gagged.

Both actions underline what we already knew; that is, the British government is acting in a manner that will inevitably drive the death rate further up – and that, frankly, the leaders of this nation detest and will continue to try to stop journalists and others from holding them to account for their actions. It’s Trumpian, it’s wrong and it cannot be forgiven.

Sebastian Monblat
Sutton

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