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

Refugees: Tightening the Screw 85
documents before embarkation. And, say paragraphs 5.15 and 5.16 of the
white paper, these measures to ‘stem migratory pressures’ have become
inadequate:
their effectiveness has been undermined in recent years by racketeers and organised
crime exploiting and facilitating economic migration by people who are not entitled
to enter the UK. More sophisticated forgeries, an increasing trend for people to
impersonate others, and increasing numbers of passengers destroying their
documents just before their arrival in the UK, are all combining to counter the
responsible attitude and diligent efforts by most carriers to prevent the carriage of
inadequately documented passengers.
The Government intends to take a tougher approach to deterring and preventing
the arrival of inadmissible passengers.
The act therefore makes it a criminal offence for asylum seekers to try to enter
or remain Britain using ‘deception’ and for their representatives to
‘knowingly’ make false statements on their behalf, although it does also
create, in its section 31, an ‘Article 31 defence’ (see p. 175). In order to catch
more of the people who do not have their own documents, the government
is to recruit more airlport liaison officers (ALOs). ALOs operate abroad and,
according to the white paper, have cooperated successfully with ‘authorities,
carriers and the Immigration Services of other countries’ in stopping ‘large
groups of inadequately documented passengers from reaching Western
Europe and North America’; ‘120 were returned to their point of departure
by the Cambodian authorities, 50 by the authorities in Lesotho’; ‘As a result
of their work, around 1,800 inadequately documented passengers will have
been denied boarding to the UK over the past year’, and presumably left to
the mercy of the authorities they are fleeing from.
Within Britain, the government apparently intends to move further
towards a continental system of internal identity checks. They will affect
those who are considered suspicious and look foreign, in other words mainly
blacks. The checks on immigration status at work are to remain, in spite of
Labour’s manifesto commitment to repeal clause 8 of the 1996 act. The
‘primary purpose rule’ has in theory been abolished, another manifesto
commitment, but there are checks for ‘bogus marriages’ by registrars.
Immigration officers are to have increased powers of arrest and forcible
restraint. This apparently is to relieve police officers of the damage to
community relations incurred from breaking into people’s houses and
violently removing them from their families and friends. According to Diane
Abbott, the local MP, a Hackney police superintendent had said he was
unwilling to continue to carry out ‘fishing raids’ for illegal immigrants.
Entrusting such tasks to immigration officials, many of whom appear to
relish their job but who have no training and were, before an amendment
to the Act, not to be subject to the external checks under which police
operate, is likely to result in more injuries and perhaps deaths.