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

80 Open Borders
Similarly, after a spate of tabloid headlines on ‘aggressive’ begging by a few
asylum seekers, Barbara Roche, immigration minister, said their cases would
be ‘fast-tracked’. Ann Widdecombe said they should be imprisoned and then
deported. When, in April 2000, the Conservatives embarked on the base
tactic of putting in a by-election manifesto that Britain was ‘a soft touch for
the organized asylum racketeers who are flooding the country with bogus
asylum seekers’, and William Hague said that if the flood was not stopped
there would be more National Front marches in the streets, Straw, finally,
was moved to retort, according to the Guardian of 1 May 2000, that:
pandering to the National Front and other such groups is no way to oppose them. Mr
Hague has fed the anxieties which can lead to extremism by grossly exaggerating the
position on asylum.
He added, however, that Hague was also ‘irresponsibly opposing our sensible
measures like the new civil penalty on hauliers’, which imposes heavy fines
on lorry drivers providing one of the few remaining ways for refugees to
escape to Britain. For ‘sensible’ read ‘savage’.
The government’s white paper did announce measures to clear part of the
backlog of 70,000 unresolved asylum cases which were stuck in the chaos
of Home Office failure to deal with them. Applications for asylum which dated
from before 1995 and which had not received an initial decision from the
Home Office were to be dealt with in two categories. Those who first applied
before the 1993 Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act came into force in
July 1993, about 10,000 people, were to be given indefinite leave to enter or
remain, unless they had committed a serious criminal offence or had applied
for asylum after a removal or deportation process had started. For a further
20,000 who applied between July 1993 and December 1995, there would
be no automatic granting of Exceptional Leave to Remain (ELR), but compassionate
or exceptional factors such as the presence of children at school
or a record of local community work might weigh in their favour. But these
people would be granted only ELR, and possibly lose their right to full refugee
status. And the 20,000 who were waiting for appeals to be heard against a
Home Office refusal, some of whom had waited for many years, and a further
20,000 who had applied for asylum after 1995 and were waiting for initial
decisions by the Home Office, were unaffected by the measures.
The government resisted any use of the word ‘amnesty’ and was said to be
extremely nervous about the effect of such a policy on public opinion and
the tabloids. And indeed the Mail on Sunday of 15 March 1998 carried a
front-page headline saying ‘OPEN DOOR FOR BOGUS REFUGEES’; its leader
made the following unsubstantiated assertions:
It didn’t take long for the Government to throw in the towel.
Less than a year in office and they are allowing 55,000 bogus asylum seekers and
illegal immigrants to stay in Britain in what amounts to an outrageous amnesty for
lawbreakers.