PAPERS FOR ALL

Payday works with Global Women Against Deportations (GWAD) against deportation, detention and other attacks on immigrants. We support the international demands of undocumented immigrants for Papers for All. Increasingly, war, poverty and devastation of the soil and water brought on by the Global North have led to mass immigration in the Global South. And as the All African Women’s Group says: “We have every right to be here because Britain has stolen us so much wealth from Africa and the Global South over centuries.”

In 1996, Payday and Women of Colour Global Women’s Strike (WoC GWS)* met with undocumented immigrants in France who had started to call themselves ‘Sans-Papiers’ (people without papers). They had put forward a demand and a perspective to bring together all immigrants regardless of their immigration status or countries of origin. The movement for ‘Papers for all’ was born.

Since, many Sans-Papiers collectives have formed in France and elsewhere, and this demand has spread in many countries, under different designations – Papers for all, Regularization, Status for all, Right to be here – but with the same aspiration to unite all immigrants and win the same rights as the nationals of the country they live. In 2020, we endorse a Manifesto signed by over 280 organisations in 20 countries demanding ‘immediate, permanent and unconditional regularization for all migrants and refugees’.

*formerly Black Women for Wages for Housework