Last week the government announced their ‘Illegal’ Migration Bill. An unworkable piece of legislation in response to the arrival of asylum seekers by small boats across the Channel. It tells a woman whose been trafficked to the UK for sexual exploitation or an Afghan interpreter or a family from Syria that their cases won’t even be heard.  

As your MP I strongly oppose this proposed new law and at every stage I will urge the government to take a different approach to honour our commitment to refugees, stop these dangerous crossings that are putting their lives at risk, deal with the backlog of asylum applications, improve the safe and legal routes such as family reunion and resettlement schemes, crack down on criminal smuggler gangs and tackle humanitarian crises at source. 

The overwhelming majority of the millions of people worldwide fleeing war and persecution remain displaced in their own country or living in refugee camps in neighbouring countries. The much smaller proportion who make their way to the UK often do so because they have a link to our country.  

As a City of Sanctuary, we in Bristol are proud of welcoming asylum seekers and refugees. Community groups, individuals and faith groups such as yourselves play a huge part in this. 

Please sign this petition if you oppose the Bill and circulate it amongst others in Bristol West. It’s important that this petition gets as many signatures as possible. You can either circulate the online version to your contacts or print this version, collect physical signatures and send a scanned copy back to me in an email.

If responding by email, please include your full name, address and the name of any community or faith group you have circulated the petition around. 

As the Bill will be debated on Monday 13th March and then again during week beginning 27th March please fill the survey or return copies by Wednesday 22nd March to thangam.debbonaire.mp@parliament.uk or by post (which will take longer to get through to me) to: Thangam Debbonaire MP, House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA.