In Father’s Memory, Fighting to Stay in Britain

CLAPHAM, England — The boy was 13 when a dawn immigration raid abruptly ended his father’s four-year quest for political asylum in Britain. By nightfall of that day in 2005, father and son were hundreds of miles from home, locked in the privately run Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Center here, scheduled for deportation to their native Angola in the morning.

Instead, shortly after midnight, the despondent father, Manuel Bravo, 35, walked to a stairwell with a bed sheet and hanged himself. The note he left said why: so that his orphaned boy could stay in Britain.

Indeed, the law did not allow immigration authorities to deport an orphan who had no one waiting for him. A British family the Bravos knew through church took the boy, Antonio, home to Armley, the working-class suburb of Leeds where they had settled in 2001.

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Antonio’s story is emblematic of one nation’s escalating efforts to repel unwanted migration, through an enforcement system partly run by private contractors.

Like governments throughout the Western world, Britain’s has come under increasing pressure to increase expulsions, cut immigration and restrict citizenship. At stake for officials is “managed migration,” a way to maintain an influx of the most desirable settlers and genuine refugees by forcibly excluding the rejected — in an effort to rein in the hostility toward foreigners that is mounting from Australia and the United States to Norway and France.

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Over the past decade, public targets of crackdowns have shifted from “bogus asylum-seekers” to “criminal aliens” and now to “unsustainable net immigration,” a term that includes perfectly legal settlers, noted Mary Bosworth, a criminologist at the University of Oxford who has tracked the expansion of immigration jails like Yarl’s Wood.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/world/europe/21antonio.html?pagewanted=all