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

Refugees: Tightening the Screw 97
51 illegal immigrants in the back of a lorry in July 1995; they had come from
India, Pakistan, China and Turkey, and:
As well as the sniffer dogs, the Home Office has teams of immigration officers equipped
with night vision equipment trawling the lay-bys and petrol stations near Dover and
other ports seeking evidence of people being transferred from containers to cars.
Germany uses helicopters, patrol boats and three kinds of heat-seeking equipment
to detect illegal immigrants along its border with Poland, operated by military
personnel in police uniforms. ...
Vast amounts of money and time are devoted to improving the technology of
control. Millions are spent on detection of forged passports and travel documents. A
sub-group of the Ad Hoc Group on Immigration ... holds bi-monthly seminars on
detecting forged travel documents. Western Europe’s junior partners, particularly
Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, which have been recruited as buffer states
and act increasingly as the frontline of immigration control, are being supplied
urgently with equipment such as automated travel document scanners, UV-IR lamps,
security laminate verifiers and video-spectral comparators. And biometric controls
are being developed, which could do away with the need for passports. Digital
fingerprinting and electronic scanning of the iris of the eye are being explored, and
there are already pilot hand-scanners in use at JFK and Frankfurt airports. ...
Those whom Europe’s interior and justice ministers have called on to develop
European immigration and asylum policy behind closed doors are policemen, security
officials, immigration officers and civil servants. It is no wonder that what they
produce smacks of a European police state, in which refugees are described as
‘disorderly movements’ and measures designed to combat them.
All asylum seekers and illegal entrants to Britain are fingerprinted, in part so
that their fingerprints can be held on the Schengen information system (SIS),
a central European electronic database to deter ‘asylum shopping’.
The attempt to stop refugees begins well before they arrive at European
borders. The only way of becoming a refugee outside the country of asylum
is through the UNHCR resettlement programme, but its provisions are
restrictive, and only 27,000 refugees were resettled by the UNHCR in 1997;
61 of these were resettled in Britain, where they had close family ties. In
1999 Britain eventually accepted a few hundred Kosovans under this
programme; by April 1999 it had accepted 330 Kosovans out of a UNHCRprogramme
total of 22,253, of whom 9,974 were in Germany and 2,000 in
France. Most refugees therefore have three main possibilities: to apply for a
visitor’s, student’s or business visa at a British embassy or high commission,
to buy a (very expensive) forged visa, or to stow away or be smuggled (the
latter, again, at great expense). Approaching a British diplomatic post can
itself be extremely dangerous, because of security guards outside and local
employees inside. To get a visitor’s or other visa requires proof of the
possession of money and contacts; any mention of asylum will lead to
immediate refusal, although there are a few cases of embassy officials
befriending a refugee. Immigration officials appear to recognise that refugees
are unlikely to be able to travel on their own documents. A Nigerian detainee