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

102 Open Borders
The more measures governments introduce to detect and punish asylum
seekers and other migrants, the more elaborate, ingenious and expensive
the countermeasures by refugees have to become. Their only alternative to
this is to stay where they are and face possible imprisonment, torture and
death. And the more the dangers and the controls, the greater the potential
for exploitation. There are of course examples of friends and family members
organising escapes. Some of the agents who organise the procurement of
false passports and other aspects of escape may act more like travel agents
than criminals, even possibly with humanitarian purpose. Jeremy Harding
in his London Review of Books article ‘The Uninvited’ (now a book) describes
with admiration the exploits of the scafisti or boatmen who evade
coastguards to land refugees and migrants safely in Italy. But refugees are
often forced to put their lives in the hands of unscrupulous people, most of
whom act for profit. One estimate of the total annual income derived by those
who profit from organising escape and migration, quoted by John Morrison
in The Cost of Survival, is that it is between US$5 and US$7 billion a year. The
British authorities triggered this industry in the 1950s, when their attempts
to persuade the Indian government not to issue passports to intending
migrants resulted in the creation of forged passports, which were sold in
Indian villages. Governments are themselves responsible for the growth of
the international criminal networks which they condemn. These in turn
exploit people desperate to flee, and sometimes cause extreme hardship for
them.
One of the consequences is a growth in media stories which, while
exposing scandals, also have the effect of further feeding prejudice against
migrants and asylum seekers. The Daily Mail of 24 November 1998 carried
an article on a ‘Briton, “the Godfather of human smuggling”’, alleging that
he had smuggled 12,000 Indians into the United States and ‘netted £133
million in just three years’. Their journeys ‘often took months or even years’;
‘Once inside America they were kept in houses until relatives paid the
£17,500 smuggling fee. Those who failed to pay were expected to work off
their debt. The [US Immigration and Nationality Service] said it had a list of
1,000 US employers who used the illegal immigrants as a form of cheap
labour.’ The Guardian of 12 October 1999 reported that four members of a
Chinese gang were convicted of taking part in an extortion racket in which
immigrants were kept prisoner and beaten in order to extract money from
their relatives in Chinese villages, although they had already paid up to
£18,750 to be brought to Britain. The Guardian of 18 May 1999 carried a
full-page article entitled ‘Highway robbery’, which described the ‘sinister
effect’ of lorry drivers’ financial problems: ‘they are causing a boom in the
secret trade in contraband and refugees from mainland Europe’. Some lorry
drivers, the article said, stick to ‘beer and baccy’; but others are tempted by
the larger sums available for smuggling drugs and people. A random 3 per
cent of incoming lorries are diverted to ‘the pride and joy of Eurotunnel
security, Britain’s biggest X-ray machine’. If the drivers get caught, even if