Time to stop fudging the asylum crisis

INSIDE a fire is blazing. Whatever the storm outside, there is meat and drink on the tables and a hubbub of voices. Not until the tapping on the door and windows becomes a hammering are voices stilled and uneasy glances exchanged. Is there no room in the inn?

Off the north-west coast of Australia, 460 Afghan refugees have spent eight days stranded on the cargo ship Tampa, waiting for a country to take them in.

Every week people drown trying to swim the last few hundred yards across the Strait of Gibraltar. Under cover of night by speedboats and fishing boats, or hiding in trucks or under freight trains, they breach Europe's defences. The enduring image of them is of sallow young men in camps on the northern tip of Africa, staring hungrily towards Europe from behind wire fences - fences they are determined will not hold them in.

These migrants are not poor, relatively speaking.

Nearly all are young and ambitious, with the money to pay gangs to transport them, or the drive and initiative to make their own way to the frontiers of Europe.

The real poor, tens of thousands of them, are in refugee camps on the borders of countries such as Kenya and Pakistan, lacking means to travel further or better themselves.

Mass migration is becoming an issue of such significance that it will determine the very nature of the 21st century. Britain is in the firing line because it is now the preferred destination of migrants who reach the borders of the EU.

One reason is that Germany and France have recently tightened their immigration policies.

Germany now excludes all asylum-seekers who cannot claim to be fleeing from state-subsidised terrorism; (they refuse to accept Afghans, for example, because the Taliban control only part of Afghanistan).

All EU member states adhering to the Schengen Convention are required to expel illegal immigrants beyond the borders of Schengen signatory states.

Britain did not sign up to the Convention, so bordering EU nations are fully entitled to channel refugees through to us.

They would come anyway because Britain, almost uniquely in the industrialised West, fulfils the aspirations of the UN Convention on Human Rights by offering everybody who reaches our shores and claims asylum an immediate package of rights to benefits and housing, without the need for identity cards or any other restrictions on entering the illegal jobs market.

In Britain, as the smugglers' phrase goes: "You stay, they pay."

BRITAIN has a long and honourable tradition of taking in refugees. With their fresh ideas and work ethic they have helped transform our society; the number of immigrant British Nobel Prize winners is evidence enough of that.

People who argue that Britain would decline if we closed the door on all who come here uninvited are surely right. But the number of refugees reaching Europe has increased astoundingly in the course of the past five years.

Some 40,000 migrants are believed to have crossed Europe to Calais alone during-the last 18 months, which is why the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, last week requested his French opposite number to close the huge refugee camp at Sangatte.

Before we decide whether to welcome every asylumseeker who sets foot here, as Bill Morris of the TGWU and other campaigners would have us do, we should at least be given some reliable figures on which to base a discussion on whether it is possible, or necessary, to distinguish between political asylum-seekers and economic migrants, or between those whose skills are needed and the rest.

This is the theme of Harriet Sergeant's engrossing new report* for the Centre for Policy Studies, which shows in chilling detail the extent to which this Government has lost control of immigration.

It illustrates the sheer fatuity of the Home Office's argument for keeping food vouchers - that they discourage illegal immigrants from coming here.

Immigration officials concur that the Government has no idea how many illegal immigrants arrive each year. Some of them reckon that the official statistic of 97,000 migrants claiming asylum in 2000 needs to be multiplied at least twice.

Other EU countries check immigrants at the border. In Britain, once immigrants claim asylum, the police and Immigration Service have no choice but to direct them to the nearest reception centre.

At this point they can go to ground, if they have money or contacts.

Otherwise, they are left at the mercy of criminal gangs, or forced into prostitution, slave labour or months of demoralising inertia, in wretched conditions, while awaiting the outcome of residency appeals which can take months or years to work through. Even if their appeal fails, only about one in 40 illegal immigrants are actually deported.

According to the CfPS report, the Home Office centre in Croydon that deals with asylum claims is in total chaos, following the collapse of its computerised database. Immigration officials are discouraged from being too intrusive in case they escalate the crisis. One result of this inertia is to create an industry of people traffickers "who prey on immigrants and spread corruption".

THE present system is loaded towards criminalising the asylumseeker and enriching a fistful of lawyers and racketeers. It could be improved if immigration officials were given the right to turn back at port of entry those who arrive with forged documents, whether or not they claim asylum. But the larger question - of how many refugees Britain has room for - simply cannot be answered without information about who enters and leaves the country, and in what numbers, and what they do when they get here.

The Home Office avoids such a debate by continually fudging and massaging its statistics to give the impression it is in control - meanwhile taking in an unlimited number of refugees and then treating them badly or pretending they do not exist.

Immigration control will be the biggest test of David Blunkett's Home Secretaryship, and one which, so far, he shows no sign of confronting.

* Welcome to the Asylum (CfPS).

Copyright 2001
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