The COVID 19 pandemic and how the current crisis affects undocumented people

Call for legalisation and solidarity

“We are all going through a very difficult economic moment, because we depend on our daily work to pay for our room and to support ourselves, and in my case also to feed my daughter. I can only find one or two jobs per week. So we are very worried because we don't have papers. We are illegalized people. We have no other way to make money. It's frustrating for us. We don't know how long the virus will last. We are worried because we are all taking risks”. (Testimony from an affected person)

More testimonies follow: http://www.respectberlin.org/wordpress/

Many people live illegally in Germany. The reasons are manifold: Many of them were refused political asylum. For fear of repression in their countries, they decided to go underground. Others came as tourists and decided to stay here to work and support their families in their countries of origin.
The cause of this situation is the inequality between the Global South and North. Just as many Europeans have emigrated to Latin America in times of crisis, people today are emigrating in search of a better life or flee from oppression.

Some activists of Afrique-Europe-Interact have participated writhing these theses

With the following text we – activists from different networks involved in questions of flight and migration – want to bring up for discussion some reflections on the Italian naval operation “Mare Nostrum” and therefore on the current situation in the central Mediterranean. Because here in the past months, the combination of boat people who persistently risk the crossing and public criticism has forced the EU migration regime onto the defensive. The rescue of each and every person – and this thousands and thousands of times – is great news which moreover allows us a glimpse of the future: the end of the mass grave in the Mediterranean. Because we ought to call again and again to mind, that it is only since 1993 that due to political decisions all these deadly mechanisms of control- and exclusion have been established and that they could disappear overnight again. That this can only be forced through by resistance from below, is an central assumption of the following seven theses, the last of which therefore being a sketch of some of the goals of action for the upcoming months.

Lampedusa in Hamburg – Right to Stay! Appeal to the Hamburger Senat (Government of Hamburg) to give the group ‘Lampedusa in Hamburg’ the right to stay by § 23 Residence Law or any other construction which allows a group solution.

“What Europe does not understand is that migrants’ movements do not depend on them. Only the conditions of those movements depend on them.” (Coordinamento Migranti)

To Mr. Olaf Scholz, Mayor of Hamburg and the government of Hamburg

Since the early spring of 2013 about 300 African refugees who had escaped the Libyan Civil War and its escalation through the military intervention of NATO-states and subsequently made their way via Lampedusa to Italy, have been living in Hamburg.