LONDON, 20 March 2003 — Last December in the middle of a furor about asylum seekers trying to reach Britain through the Channel Tunnel, the British and French government made a deal: France would close down the Sangatte Refugee Camp outside Calais which Britain saw as a magnet for illegal immigrants heading for the UK. In return Britain would accept a large share of its residents. One Thousand Iraqi Kurds were brought to the UK on four-year work permits.
Three months later some of the Iraqi Kurds who before the deal tried night after freezing night to jump on board the freight trains bound for the UK, sit in a bed and breakfast hotel lounge in London amid vases of artificial flowers and broken promises. The Home Office has just delivered a letter to the 60 residents telling them that they have to leave the hotel next week. The Department of Work and Pensions has arranged a job interview for 15 of them in a bakery in Manchester tomorrow where there are jobs for 10 people who speak English.
This is not what the Iraqi Kurds expected when they left Sangatte. They were under the impression that they would get training and help to find a job. This support turned out to be directions to the nearest job center. “We go to the job center every day but only one person found a job, in a supermarket — he was an engineer in Iraq and speaks good English,” says one of the men. While everyone seems happy to take any job to escape the semi-institutionalized existence imposed on them, £10 cash a week and set meal times leave little scope for job and house-hunting. They emphasize that their political not economic situation forced them to leave Iraq: “We are political men, asylum seekers first, not jobseekers.”
And this is where the confusion starts. Government policy forces some refugees fleeing the world’s trouble spots to come to the country as economic migrants while some migrants fleeing poverty are forced to use the asylum process as all legal routes are closed to them. The government portrays asylum seekers as the new brand of illegal immigrant who slips into Britain by deceit. New laws and European level agreements back up this view with practical measures to stop them, for example, the hasty closure of the Sangatte center or British immigration controls placed on French soil.
If the Iraqi Kurds from Sangatte had got into the country clandestinely and claimed asylum from inside the UK, they would have been caught between two recent laws. Section 55 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, in force since January 2003, would have prevented them from receiving state financial support while awaiting their asylum claim. An earlier section of the Act introduced in July 2002 would have prohibited them from working legally, leaving no lawful means of survival. One Iraqi Kurd, not part of the Sangatte deal, fell into this trap in January. Homeless and penniless, he used a telephone box under a tunnel to shelter from the winter night’s cold.
The government’s justification for such harsh measures is shot through with contradictions. It claims that large numbers of asylum seekers are swamping the country. Latest figures show that 110,700 people claimed asylum last year. But if a poor country like Guinea can support over 420,000 refugees, surely the fifth richest nation in the world can accommodate a far smaller number. It seems particularly mean-spirited given that the UK is desperately looking for foreign migrant labor — the building trade alone is short of 200,000 workers.
The government translates a few minor gains for the British National Party in local elections as proof of the need to clamp down on asylum seekers. It is so fearful of the public’s reaction to an inflated perception of numbers that it cannot see there is no widespread hatred of asylum seekers but rather a pervasive disillusionment with mainstream politics. When the new head of the commission for racial equality Trevor Phillips went to Yorkshire where the BNP had won a by-election by the skin of its teeth, he found apathy and anger with the mainstream parties, not passion and rage against asylum seekers. Only 37 percent bothered to vote. The government says that most asylum seekers are bogus. Yet figures tell a different story. Almost 60 percent of last year’s asylum claims were successful despite the Home Office’s exceptionally narrow criteria. This is hardly surprising given that most current asylum seekers come from countries in turmoil, like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Zimbabwe.
Even if all 110,700 asylum seekers were illegal immigrants, that would be a small proportion compared to the numbers of illegals the government turns a blind eye to. Far more people come into the country from the USA and Australia on tourist, student or working holidaymakers’ visas and overstay. Abroad, Britain excels in illegal immigration too — UK nationals make up the largest number of illegals in Australia.
So why has the government focused its attention on asylum seekers? There is an element of racism, of course, but it is blended with something new. Asylum seekers have become a symbol of the government’s fear of losing control. Britain operates immigration controls outside UK; it deploys officers at airports in 20 countries to check passengers’ documentation to stop them traveling fraudulently and it slaps visa restrictions on countries the minute large numbers of their people start to claim asylum here. Inside UK, it polices asylum seekers from the moment they arrive, fingerprinting them, issuing them with biometric smart cards, introducing a regular reporting regime and increasing places in detention centers.
And still it fails to keep them from coming and working. Instead it fosters the very category of people it fears, those it cannot control because they are beyond the boundaries of the law.
In the White Paper, “Secure Borders, Safe Haven”, forerunner to the new immigration and asylum Act, Home Secretary David Blunkett says “It requires us to tackle illegal working, ending exploitation in the shadow economy.” But it is the government which forces people underground.
“We came here to work, we want to do it in the normal way, paying taxes. We do not want to work in the shadows,” says one ex-Sangatte Iraqi Kurd.
If the government had the courage to let people into the country whether they were escaping persecution or looking for a better life, and if they had the courage to let them work, pay taxes, find decent housing where they chose, then no one would have to live a lawless existence. Nor would a group of mainly young men have their lives put on hold because they came to UK under the Home Office’s “Sangatte Program,” a half-baked plan which leaves them in limbo, supported and abandoned at the same time. As one man comments: “I feel like a victim of Britain and France’s politics. I wonder what else they are cooking for us, what else they will add to the recipe.”
