How do we pick the terrorists out from the crowd?

SOMETHING is happening to our society, and other rich Western societies, which is likely unstoppable.

We are beginning to fear those who come into our countries. The range of feelings we had towards those from poorer regions, usually with darker skins, who came to live here - admiration, friendliness, pity, wariness, or resentment - is now narrowing and congealing into a fear, which will turn to anger.

That two of the men arrested in Wood Green for allegedly developing the poison ricin should be asylum seekers, given a council flat while their cases dragged listlessly through an overburdened legal system, stimulates the inevitable response: why is Britain giving harbour and succour to those who may prove to have been out to kill large numbers of us?

The claiming of asylum on grounds of refugee status was a large issue before 9/11. The Geneva Convention of 1951 enjoins its signatory countries to protect those threatened, among other things, with danger to their lives and security. This Government, humanely inclined and with no far right party of any consequence harassing it on the single issue of immigration, talked relatively tough but acted relatively laxly - considering applications, in 2001, from more asylum seekers than any other large country save, by a tiny margin, the much larger Germany ( double the number of France: eight times the number of Italy and Spain).

THE only people who really suffered were the low-paid workers who faced wage (and housing) competition from immigrants, and then only in some areas. These people tend not to vote.

But the consequences of 9/11, the much larger consequences of a build-up to war in Iraq and, if it comes, of war itself, will be to change this utterly.

Retaliation on us from radical Islamists is bound to escalate. Already, the hatred radical Islamists feel for the West has been evident, and remains so.

Groups of people, either citizens of a country or refugees to it, who hate that country, rejoice in its misfortunes and those of its allies and who may even seek to commit terrorist acts within it, will hugely increase native fear and anger. If this happens - and it seems the more likely of various futures - then the sweeping away of the Geneva Convention is preordained: we will be lucky if it stops there.

Something else is happening beyond our societies, something we could foresee.

We know what happens in times of tyranny, threatened war and war itself: people flee. Wars have taken place in the Balkans throughout the Nineties, and in Afghanistan in 2002: a war is threatened in Iraq, where oppression is hideous. In 1999, the top two countries of origin of asylum seekers coming into the European Union were former Yugoslavia and Iraq: in 2000, Iraq and former Yugoslavia: in 2001, Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have seen and read accounts of desperate Jews trying to gain asylum in the years before the last war: or of desperate Russians being deported back to certain death after it. The unwritten subtext is that we know better now.

To be sure, nothing on that massive scale has happened since (though we have stood indifferently by while several genocides happened after we pledged "never again"). But we are only a little better at coping with desperate people.

Add to this another phenomenon: the particular aspect of globalisation which has shrunk the world into an imaginable and travellable thing for its poorest, as it has been for long for the rich.

They see it on TV, in a way in which the framers of the Geneva Convention could not have imagined. They have networks of information about the possibilities of asylum, or illegal entry. They can beg or borrow or steal enough to pay people smugglers to get them out of hell holes. They want what we have all been told is among our higher aspirations - a better life for themselves and their children.

Faced with these unstoppable, inevitable movements, clashing against each other blindly, we have several choices. We can go the way of Denmark which, having been among the most open and generous in its immigration and asylum policy, has become among the most restrictive of European states - a tendency shared with the Netherlands and Norway.

We can go the way of Canada which sets (high) targets of the numbers of immigrants it takes into its vast spaces, and of the (much lower) numbers of asylum seekers, about 20,000 annually, to whom it gives a home.

The key, in Canada, is economic independence: immigrants cannot settle unless they show they can support themselves for at least six months.

We can seek, through the European Union, a common asylum policy - a search presently in a fairly high gear. Such a project, however, can only be the sum of the nation states' willingness to cope with those seeking asylum. If all feel under threat, and must answer to nervous and angered electorates, then the policy will reflect it.

IF we are to avoid becoming fearful fortresses, we are forced to think and act globally. We have to think of some mechanism like a convention on migration - perhaps, as some scholars have suggested, a General Agreement on the Movement of People, like the old GATT, on trade.

That agreement would recognise the inevitability - and the desirability - of human ambition for betterment. But it might develop ways in which the rich countries more actively assist in creating routes for these ambitions in the native lands of the poor.

A 50-year-old convention which is now being subject to mass abuse is not likely to last. But it cannot simply be replaced by unworkable prohibition.

We no longer have no-cost options. Globalisation has so far been largely a process of making the world one market: a slower parallel movement is creating of the world one society. Extremists who hate liberal societies and wish to destroy them through terror will do so, if they succeed in making us more scared. We must carry the fight to them: but the fight is only in part one of armies. It is also one of taking responsibility to stimulate development and create livable societies from which people don't want to flee, and in which terror no longer finds an easy refuge. If that is called neo-imperialism, it beats neo-isolationism, and is likely to be safer for everyone.

* Simon Jenkins is away

Copyright 2003
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