Skip to main content
Get Legal Advice
<h1>Our History</h1><p><span style="color: #daedb6;">We&#039;ve been providing immigration advice, support, and hope to people in the North West of England since 1989. This is our story.</span></p>

Our History

We've been providing immigration advice, support, and hope to people in the North West of England since 1989. This is our story.

GMIAU was set up in 1989. We formed out of the anti-deportation campaigns of the 1980s, a time when communities came together to protect their neighbours who were under attack by the Home Office.

Even as GMIAU grew to be the largest, and now the only not-for-profit provider of specialist immigration advice in the North West of England, we remained a community-based organisation, committed to justice in every sense of the word.

Timeline

1970s-80s

In the 1960s and 70s, a series of laws were introduced aimed at restricting migration, particularly from the Commonwealth.

More and more people found themselves facing harsh immigration controls – and communities fought back. Two major campaigns from the 1970s and 1980s are those of Anwar Ditta and Viraj Mendis.

Anwar Ditta had to fight for six years for the Home Office to allow her children to join her in the UK, while they were separated across continents. Viraj, fearing for his life if he was removed to Sri Lanka, took refuge in a Manchester church for 760 days from 1986 to 1989.

Huge community movements rose up to support Anwar and Viraj. Their campaigns involved legal challenges by expert lawyers but also a wider community mobilisation: marches, demonstrations, meetings, leaflets, posters, local media and more.

1989

People involved in these campaigns could see that Greater Manchester was in need of a specialist immigration aid unit as well as the law centres that were then operating. Alongside councillors in Manchester City Council in the mid-1980s, they campaigned for one to be set up. In 1986 the Council agreed to fund the Unit. It took three years to find sufficient funding, but in 1989, GMIAU was founded.

1990s

When GMIAU opened, we had 6 members of staff, who were responsible for legal casework, campaigning, and keeping the organisation running.

In 1990 we opened to the public with an office on Cheetham Hill Road.Through our newsletter, called No One Is Illegal, we kept people updated on our work and on campaigns for justice.

There was more hostile legislation in the 1990s including removing the rights to work and to benefits for people seeking asylum in the UK. This meant a rise in destitution among the people we support.

2000s

In 2000, we moved to our current office in Crumpsall. GMIAU became a registered charity in 2008, which meant we could get funding from a wider range of sources and become more sustainable.

We continued to fight for people and families’ right to stay in the UK. In our archive, lots of newspaper clippings from this time show our winning campaigns to keep families together and stop deportations. It’s clear these campaigns had support from a range of places – schoolteachers, trade unions, local newspapers and churches all got behind their community members who were being threatened with deportation.

2010s

In the 2010s, access to justice came under attack. With cuts to legal aid, including the 2012 Act (LASPO) removing most immigration work entirely from the scope of legal aid, many local and national organisations providing legal advice were forced to shut down. This included the law centres that had previously been working across Greater Manchester.

Mainly due to the difficulties caused by these cuts, GMIAU is now alone in the North West of England providing specialist not-for-profit immigration advice.

The 2010s also saw the ramping up of the Hostile Environment, with the introduction of laws restricting access to healthcare, renting and bank accounts to people with status in the UK and the infamous “Go Home” vans.

These, along with earlier laws, are the policies that led to the Windrush scandal – when these weapons of immigration control were used against people who did in fact have lawful status, but had been targeted due to racism. The harm of these laws goes much further, and the legal structures of the Hostile Environment are still there and causing misery to this day.

We celebrate the fact that we are still here.

From 6 staff in 1989, we now have over 40 members of staff working across our legal team, destitution team, operations team and policy and campaigns team. Our capacity to campaign against immigration injustice is the highest it’s ever been.

We remain a place-based organisation, embedded in our community. We draw strength from those who have gone before us and those we work with now. Looking back reminds us that while things are hard now, they have been hard before, and we have never given up.

For more on where we are now, see our current campaigns below and our Impact section.

Our Impact

Give Hope Today — Help Families 
Find Safety & Security

To remain a strong and sustainable organisation we need people like you. Your support and donations will help us transform the lives of asylum seekers, refugees, children and vulnerable people who are seeking safety in the UK.

Donate now

Sign up to our Newsletter

Get resources, news, events and more directly to your mailbox. You can unsubscribe at anytime.

Exit Site