What we do 2

Our work focuses on 4 core areas

Information, Advice & Guidance

Migrant Action is a welcoming, safe and confidential space. We provide information, impartial advice and guidance to migrants including new and vulnerable arrivals enabling them to make informed and positive choices. Our focus on early interventions and prevention strategies enable migrants to confidently engage and navigate the complex migration pathways and process. Our approach offers a proactive alternative to vulnerability and crisis management which characterizes large part of migration responses.

We do not provide legal/immigration advice but signpost to regulated specialist advisers.

Access to justice

Migration is complex, obtaining good legal/immigration advice from the onset of their migration journey is essential. The government’s policy of withdrawing legal aid for people with immigration matters systematically denies access to justice for the majority of vulnerable migrants who can not afford to pay for good quality legal advice and representation. As a consequence of policy, migrants are forced into a web of poverty, exploitaion and criminalisation. We work to prevent this by facilitating access to justice through signposting and referrals to credible legal services.

Advocacy

We enable and support migrants access fully their rights and entitlements. Our advocacy work prevents the most vulnerable from exploitation, discrimination and other forms of social injustice thereby reducing inequalities and fostering equality of access. We also work with mainstream services to enhance capacity and competency in dealing with migration issues so as to reduce the effects of vulnerability and insure meaningful integration.

Integration

Migrant Action works in collaboration with other organisations in helping new migrants find positive pathways to integration by facilitating awareness and access to employment, volunteering, education etc. Through our work, we challenge structural injustice and prevent vulnerability thereby increasing social integration and economic empowerment of migrants.

Migrant Action was established in 2016 as an Advocacy and Rights based organisation providing information, guidance, advocacy support and direct practical assistance to ‘vulnerable’ migrants. Migrant Action works with migrants who have fallen through the cracks of the immigration system including (but not restricted to) stateless people, those who have been unable to regularise their status and those on temporary visas. We work to ensure equity of rights and justice for migrants, and although the primary focus of our work is not with asylum seekers and refugees, we do signpost them to appropriate agencies

Service provision for non-asylum seekers is undefined and limited. In Leeds, migrants seeking information, guidance, advice, advocacy and integration support struggle to find where to go to for help. Many vulnerable migrants are confined to the ‘edges’ of society and face daily, the real risk of exploitation, destitution, child poverty, detention, forced removal and deportations without access to justice. Vulnerable migrants with entrenched complex needs encounter restricted access to service provision which has far reaching implications for their health and well being. Migrant Action is set up in response to this gap in service provision working with other vulnerable migrants who are not asylum seekers.

By delivering early and proactive interventions, we aim to reduce vulnerability across categories of migrants and navigate positive pathways to integration. Through the support we offer, we combat and help to reduce the effects of the government’s increasingly ‘hostile’ policies on the people subject to these policies. Working in partnership with other agencies, we ensure positive choices and pathways for migrants, better access to justice, reduce vulnerability and exploitation, increase integration and contribute to wider system and social change.

Overall, Migrant Action is working to help create an environment whereby migrants feel welcome, equal and able to thrive. Although only established 3 years ago, our work as a case-work and advocacy organisation ensures that we are at the cutting edge of efforts to mitigate directly and combat in more long-lasting ways the harmful impacts of immigration policy. In doing so, our work by necessity cuts across, for example, issues relating to employment protections, social and racial justice, welfare support, access to legal justice, criminalisation and healthcare policies.

How do we do this?

We adopt an early intervention, prevention and proactive in our work with migrants.

Provide a welcoming and safe space
Provide information and guidance to help migrants make informed choices
Help migrants to navigate and access good legal/immigration services
Provide advocacy support and facilitate access to mainstream services
Support integration- help migrants navigate community and social networks, training, volunteering, employment and other pathways for social integration
Activism- Working with other agencies to advocate and influence policy and social change

Who do we work with

Vulnerable migrants (victims of trafficking & modern slavery, People on temporary visas, unaccompanied minors, visa over stayers, undocumented/irregular migrants, people with insecure immigration status and anyone who is unsure of their immigration status
New migrants ( EU and Non-EU migrants)