Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

76 Open Borders
European governments, moreover, find it difficult to deport people whose
claims they have rejected, often after years of delayed appeals and sometimes
after they have spent months in detention. This may be because the asylum
seekers’ governments will not provide them with papers, or perhaps because
the longer they stay, the more compassionate reasons there are for not
deporting them, or sometimes presumably because the difficulty and expense
of finding and deporting them is too great. In Britain it is estimated that less
than a third of asylum seekers whose claims have been turned down have
left. Amnesty International says that between 1992 and 1995, 54,000
asylum seekers in Britain reached the end of the legal process, but in the same
period fewer than 8,000 were deported. The Home Office estimates that there
are at least 30,000 ‘illegals’ who should have left the country but who have
disappeared; others put the number at 100,000. In Germany and the
Netherlands officials say, with chagrin, that the great majority of failed
asylum seekers cannot be deported.
LEGISLATION AND LEGAL PROCESSES IN BRITAIN
In 1987 the British Conservative Party’s general election manifesto said that
tackling the ‘problem’ of ‘fraudulent’ asylum seekers was one of its main
priorities. Conservative governments introduced three new bills aimed
mainly at asylum seekers: the Immigration (Carriers’ Liability) Act in 1987,
the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act in 1993 and the Asylum and
Immigration Act in 1996. The Carriers’ Liability Act made airlines and
shipping companies act in effect as an arm of British immigration control,
imposing fines of £1,000 (increased to £2,000 in 1991) for each passenger
carried without the required documentation. By 1999 £75 million had been
levied in such charges, although according to the Home Office only £62
million had been collected. The 1993 Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act
extended the right of appeal to all asylum seekers but subjected what it called
‘vexatious or frivolous cases’, and the cases of people who had travelled
through third countries, to ‘fast-track procedures’ with short time scales and
no appeal to the Immigration Appeals Tribunal if appeal to an adjudicator
failed (see p. 90). Ministers claimed that, by speeding up procedures in cases
which were found to be without foundation, they would improve the
situation for ‘genuine refugees’, who had ‘nothing to fear’ from the new
measures. The act was followed by an unprecedented increase in rates of
refusal, from 14 per cent in the six months before the act to 72 per cent after
it, while the granting of Exceptional Leave to Remain (ELR; temporary status
on compassionate grounds) fell from 76 per cent to 22 per cent of decisions.
Thus, while the Home Office claimed that it treated all applications on their
merits, 2,365 Sri Lankans were granted ELR in the six months before the act
and only 55 in the six months after it, even though the situation in Sri Lanka
had not improved. Michael Howard, the home secretary, was reported in the