A passionate Migrant Voice

I’ve recently done a bit of work with Migrant Voice. If you don’t know them, they are well worthy of a look – and as the name suggests they are all about giving a voice to migrants.

They were contacted last year by a group of international students, who had had their visas cancelled after a Panorama programme had exposed some abuse of the English language tests used by the Home Office.

These students were becoming desperate as they were struggling to get heard, and no-one was taking their concerns seriously. They approached Migrant Voice for help. Now Migrant Voice is a very small organisation and is very dependent on volunteers just to do their own work. And there was no funding available to help these students in their campaign for justice.

Yet nevertheless Migrant Voice could see the blatant injustice and, despite having no resources, just got involved to help support this campaign. You can see here what they then went onto do, and they are having some real impact with this campaign.

Brilliant! At a time when sometimes I fear that campaigning in the charity sector is dominated by the availability of funding, Migrant Voice just got involved in the campaign because it was the right thing to challenge this injustice. This surely is what campaigning is all about – seeing an injustice and wanting to do something to challenge that injustice!