On Friday 3 March 2023, Right to Remain had the opportunity to run a workshop in Halifax for our fantastic These Walls Must Fall campaigners South and West Yorkshire in surrounding areas.

These Walls Must Fall (TWMF) is a community organising network of refugee and migrant campaigners for migration justice. Right to Remain supports the network to organise with allies and supporters from across all communities.

This was the second of our Toolkit workshops hosted for our campaigners. You can read about the first one, which took place in Manchester in January 2023, in our update blog here.

Training our campaigners

We believe that to achieve radical change in the immigration system we need to come together and fight for an alternative society, rather than tinkering with the policies and procedures of a racist, oppressive system. This will be a long struggle, and in the meantime, we need to fight to defend and extend our rights within the current system. We need to understand the system, in order to fight against it.

So, although TWMF focuses on community organising and campaigning, we aim to support people to understand and survive the immigration system. Our training and skill-share workshops help our campaigners to fight for their rights against the oppression of the immigration system – for example by teaching them about the law, how to gather evidence, and how to find and build community support.

Our campaigners are also ambassadors for Right to Remain. It is important for them to understand how to use and share our resources with our extended community – because knowledge is power.

What happened during the workshop?

In this workshop, we covered the same topics as in our Manchester workshop so that our campaigners across the country would be provided with the same opportunity and level of knowledge.

This included:

• a lesson on how best to access and use the Toolkit using our brand new flyers (which you can order by email – click here!)

• an overview of the asylum system and a deep dive into each of the stages

• a lesson on the definitions and differences between providing legal advice and legal support

Throughout the workshop, we had discussions and debates about the current state of the asylum and immigration system in the UK, and fear-mongering headlines about things like the Rwanda plan and the Home Office’s new streamlined asylum processing questionnaire.

Our campaigners shared information about good/bad legal support (or even legal advice!) that they have received during the course of their own claims. It was an honour to create a safe space for them to share these stories with us.

Feedback

At the end of the session, our campaigners provided us with some handwritten feedback. We love this exercise because it means that people are able to share their thoughts with us anonymously, and while they are still fresh!