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

96 Open Borders
Group on Immigration. The link was continued recently at the European
summit in October 1999 at Tampere in Finland, which discussed common
policing plans to deal with asylum, illegal immigration and cross-European
crime.
The criminalisation of refugees and migrants has the effect, deliberately
or otherwise, of creating a group of people who are subject to extreme forms
of exploitation as ‘illegal’ workers. It also feeds racist prejudice. The
government uses language about refugees which differs little from that of
the gutter press. Its attacks on abusive, fraudulent, bogus asylum seekers
have given the media a field day. It is then a small step, encouraged at times
by the selective release of crime statistics and the results of government investigations
into international crime rings, to accuse asylum seekers of cheating
on social security, scavenging tube tickets and other rackets. No wonder a
local freesheet such as the Oxford Journal carries a banner headline saying
‘ILLEGAL ALIENS ON THE INCREASE’ and proceeds to allege that:
Oxfordshire is being plagued by an influx of illegal immigrants who are making their
way into the country by hitch-hiking on lorries. ... The pair, who claimed to be brother
and sister, were fleeing the Serbian trouble-zone of Kosovo and are believed to have
sneaked on to the lorry in France or Belgium.
The reality is different. Recently Asylum Welcome, a charity in Oxford, was
looking for emergency accommodation for an Iraqi Kurd. He was a nurse
and an activist for women’s rights and socialism who had been threatened
by the Kurdish Democracy Party, who he says are supported and armed by
the US and Turkish governments. He had had to flee across Europe, partly on
foot and partly in lorries, with the hope of finding refuge in Sweden where he
had contacts. He was put onto a lorry by the ‘mafia’ and spent 24 hours
without food or water, and in extreme cold, in the casing of the spare tyre
under the lorry. In the middle of the night the lorry stopped and the driver
said ‘Out’, the only word he spoke to him. He was left on a motorway, and
realised he must be in Britain rather than in Sweden ‘because the cars were
driving on the left’. He went towards lights in a service station and asked to
be directed to the nearest police station. The police came for him and he was
given food and spent the rest of the night in relative comfort in a police cell.
In the morning the police told him to go to the Immigration and Nationality
Directorate in Croydon. But he had no money to get there, so eventually he
was directed to Asylum Welcome, who made an appointment for him to see
someone from Oxfordshire’s social services department and found him a
lawyer to help him claim asylum. He will not receive benefits, because he is
categorised as an ‘in-country claimant’ and an ‘illegal immigrant’, and he is
not allowed to work for six months. Such people risk being treated as though
they were criminals. Governments spend large amounts of money in the
attempt to catch them. As the barrister Frances Webber related in a 1995
speech later published under the title Crimes of Arrival, sniffer dogs discovered