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Refugee status: time for a new look?
September 17 2002 Immigration and asylum policy is one of the most difficult areas for a politician to address. Any reference to the subject is guaranteed to have the Islington tendency screaming "Racist" at the top of its lungs, and serious debate is drowned out in the process. Yet anyone who has been out canvassing on the doorstep knows that immigration matters to the average voter, who is frustrated at the inability of politicians to address it rationally. With that disclaimer, let's look at the EU's thinking on the issue. The Dublin Convention, agreed in 1990 and implemented in 1997, made the member-state of first entry responsible for an asylum seeker entering the EU. This replaced a bilateral agreement with France, negotiated by my friend and colleague Timothy Kirkhope, then Immigration Minister in the Major government, now an MEP. Under that agreement, persons entering the UK illegally from France could be returned there. The Dublin Convention has failed spectacularly, for the fairly obvious and predictable reason that when an asylum seeker arrives at Dover, we have no way of knowing which was the country of first entry, so the UK ends up taking responsibility by default. The Commission's 2000 document "Revisiting the Dublin Convention" looked at the practice of "asylum shopping", where asylum seekers look for the most attractive terms. It suggested the knee-jerk EU response to any problem -- more harmonisation. If conditions for asylum seekers were identical in all member states, they said, asylum shopping would be solved. This is an absurd response. It would require quite unacceptable interference with member-states' social, education and health arrangements to achieve equal terms in all countries. And even if this could be done, there are factors like family connections, and above all language, which would still attract a disproportionate number of asylum seekers to the UK. The EU has also proposed the strengthening of EU borders, with a European Corps of Border Guards (Laeken, 2001, and Commission proposal, May 2002). The idea is that with secure external borders, the free movement of peoples within the EU between member-states would create no problems. This too seems doomed to failure. The EU's existing eastern and southern borders are all too permeable, and with ten new countries scheduled to join the EU in 2004, those borders become ever wider and more difficult to police. Buses cross mountain passes in the east, over-laden boats make the short hop across the Mediterranean or the Adriatic. It is difficult to see how the EU's borders could ever be patrolled effectively, even if we were prepared to accept the distasteful concept of a supra-national Border Police Corps. This is why we should never accept an EU immigration and asylum policy. Thank heaven, Britain is an island, and we could perfectly well control immigration if we had the commitment and determination to do so. Currently, we lack that determination, and the action we need to take will cut across efforts to create an EU immigration policy. But our circumstances are different from those of continental states, and our vital interests are at stake. We cannot allow EU meddling to prejudice our future. The 1951 UN Convention on Refugees mandates asylum for anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution. Discussions on asylum are almost always prefaced by a ritual re-affirmation of this point. No one questions that genuine asylum seekers should be allowed to remain. But perhaps now is the time to do so. The policy, it seems to me, is based on two implicit assumptions, neither of which has stood the test of time. The first is that we can actually distinguish between genuine asylum seekers and economic migrants. And the second is that the number of genuine refugees will be manageable. Let's examine each of them. The policy assumes that there is a black and white distinction between genuine and bogus asylum seekers. But in the real world there are grey areas. In UK court cases dealing with recent, local events, it can be difficult, and hugely expensive, to establish the truth. How are we to do so when the alleged events took place in distant countries, possibly long ago, and when no witnesses may be available? We know that the gangs who traffic in migrants and assist them in crossing borders will also school them in the best ways to answer the questions of investigators in the immigration service, giving lurid but ambiguous stories, and vague answers. There is credible anecdotal evidence that some British lawyers will exploit the system to ensure marginal cases are accepted. It takes a very great deal of time and money even to attempt to process these applications fairly -- and even then the results, in their nature, cannot be very reliable. The Home Office budget for processing asylum seekers in 2001 was around £400 million, but in the end the cost was over £1 billion. How long will the British public tolerate this huge expenditure, given the evidence that the majority of claims are fraudulent? And what is the point of identifying fraudulent claims, at great expense, when the great majority of such claimants disappear into the community and never get repatriated? Already we see protest movements against proposed new reception centres for asylum seekers (most of which seem to be sited in Conservative-held constituencies). And Home Secretary David Blunkett is running into serious problems with his plans. For example, for quite understandable reasons he wants to provide education on-site at these centres. Yet the EU's directive clearly states that young asylum seekers "must have access to the education system under the same conditions as nationals". And even these reception centres, with a few hundred inmates in each, will hardly make a dent in the huge flood of new asylum seekers. It comes down to numbers. For a few hundred, or a few thousand, we can make the effort. But it is too much to expect the British people and the British economy to underwrite the processing of tens or hundreds of thousands. Which brings us to the second point. The UN has estimated that 23 million people globally might qualify as genuine refugees. New flash-points -- Afghanistan, Iraq -- add to the potential numbers. If they all arrived at Dover on the same day, we should have a catastrophe. Now clearly they will not all arrive together, but the point stands: our capacity to absorb new citizens in an orderly way is not infinite, and the numbers now arriving are arguably beyond our capacity to cope without unacceptable disruption. A further problem: the definition of "refugee" is constantly being widened. Originally the intention was to protect persons persecuted by organs of the state, and this definition still applies in France and Germany. But in other EU countries including the UK, we include persecution by non-state bodies. This could include tribal, political or religious groups. The Commission proposal of Sept 12th 2001 attempts to create a common definition of a refugee, and includes "persons who have undergone rape". Now rape is a dreadful crime, but should it confer refugee status? Should British rape victims be able to claim refugee status in the USA, for example? Should we include other serious crimes against the person, like GBH? Many millions are victims of crime. If we continue to broaden the definition of a refugee, we shall reach the point where a high proportion of the population is included, and the term is almost meaningless. The European parliament's Women's Committee -- a by-word for politically-correct clap-trap -- proposed that refugee status should be extended to all women who have been subjected to female circumcision, no matter how long ago. This could include, say, a woman of 65 in Central Africa, who might now be living in perfectly acceptable conditions, but who had been subjected to female circumcision fifty years ago. It is estimated that this proposal would increase the number of potential refugees by between five and ten million, mostly in Central and Southern Africa. In my view, female circumcision is a revolting and reprehensible infringement of human rights. But should it be a free ticket to enter and reside in the UK? Is the British tax-payer to write a blank cheque for literally millions of people in Africa, most of whom may no longer be suffering any form of persecution? We cannot accurately distinguish the genuine asylum seeker from the economic migrant, we are failing to repatriate economic migrants, the numbers are too great and the costs are out of control. It's time for a radical new look. A rational immigration policy The key points I should like to see in a rational immigration policy would include:
At present we have a free-for-all where huge numbers of immigrants arrive, and most stay, legally or not, regardless of the outcome of any investigation. This cannot be allowed to continue. We must agree how many we can cope with, and then put policies in place to see that those admitted are properly integrated to British society, and those not admitted sent back immediately. I was listening recently to Caroline Spellman MP, Shadow Minister for International Development, who argued that the long-term solution must be to promote sustainable development in poor countries so that their people will no longer need or want to migrate to Western countries. Of course she is absolutely right -- but hers is a long-term solution, while the problem is immediate, and requires an immediate policy response. |