Oppose the start of ID registration

On Wednesday 10th December the registration of non-EEA students and spouses for ID cards will begin in Cardiff. At 12 noon No Borders South Wales will be holding a protest outside the UK Border Agency at 31-33 Newport Road (map) where this registration will happen. We invite all opponents of ID cards to join us.

This is a follow up to the demonstration when ID cards came into force on the 25th November in the same place, which was part of a national day of action by No Borders. Reports of the protests appered in Indymedia, No Borders Nottingham, Ten Percent, Gair Rhydd, SWM Forum, Greenman’s Occasional Organ, Earth First! Action Reports, Freedom for Tooting, and even got a mention in the Guardian.

The different border agency centres around the country are starting to register over a stagered period. Only the Croydon centre started registering on the 25th. There was a blockade of Vulcan House in Sheffield when it started registering on 1st December. It would be likely that protests will happen at the other centres when they start registration too.

The centres where people have to attend for interrogation, photographing and fingerprinting are key aspects of the ‘migration management’ infrastructure. ‘General Building’ at 31-33 Newport Road, Cardiff acts as local reporting centre where those seeking asylum have to ‘sign in’ on a regular basis while their claims are being processed, if applications fail they are taken to a police cell before being transferred to a detention centre. This is also the place where snatch squads leave from to conduct dawn raids on innocent families. 

Whilst some call for anti-ID card campaigners to follow economic rather than libertarian arguments, we continue to concentrate on the repressive nature of this scheme. It is imperitive for No Borders to highlight the way in which the government is bringing the thuggery of the UK Border Agency inland, internalising migration controls. ID cards are but one aspect of a greater level of social control that is being engineered into place by government. To resist the unprecedented rise of the surveillance state, we need to build a movement that is committed to universal freedom and rejects the legitimacy of state interference. Using economic arguments against ID Cards, like using economic arguments for free migration, is short sighted. As we have been made all too aware recently, capitalist economies are not stable places and the prevailing winds can change course at anytime.