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

Refugees: Tightening the Screw 105
5,000 a year are granted exceptional leave to remain. But undoubtedly some
thousands have overstayed and simply disappeared.
People who enter clandestinely are all automatically ‘illegal’, and are
generally assumed to be so by public opinion and the media. But an
unknown but certainly large proportion of these people are refugees, many
of them Kurds, Tamils, Kosovans and Algerians. So when immigration
officials report, for example, that the number of people who have been caught
entering clandestinely through Dover has gone up from 850 in the whole of
1997 to 650 in the first four months of 1998, this does not mean that there
has been a big increase in people trying to enter Britain illegally to work. It
may mean that there has been an increase in refugees. Or it may simply
mean that the authorities are spending more money on new devices for
detection. According to the Guardian of 12 May 1998, the Immigration
Service said the number of ‘illegal entrants’ found trying to enter Britain
clandestinely was stable until early 1998, when they suddenly increased
sharply; but officials themselves said this had more to do with sniffer dogs
and better detection techniques than with a new influx: ‘They say that they
now pick up 50 per cent of clandestine entries where before they were only
catching 20 per cent.’ The Home Office minister Mike O’Brien told the House
of Commons on 30 March 1998 that in 1997 ‘14,150 people were traced
and served with illegal entry papers, but many of them may have entered in
previous years.’ Again, many of them may have been refugees; and others
will not have been caught.
What is clear is that the government’s intensification of repressive
measures has not been followed by significant declines in the numbers of
refugees coming to Britain. Moreover the long-drawn-out process of refusing
asylum is not, generally speaking, followed by removal. All it achieves is
suffering.
DESTITUTION
Probably most people who flee to escape persecution take a drop in their
standard of living. Even when they are allowed to work, they usually cannot
obtain employment which fits their skills and qualifications. Doctors and
professors end up as sandwich makers and security guards. University
students cannot continue or start their studies until they get refugee status,
which may take years. For those who cannot get jobs at all, living on welfare
benefits, supposing they are available, is hard, especially without relatives
or friends.
Nevertheless the contradictory myth is perpetrated that refugees come to
sponge off the state and take the locals’ jobs. Therefore, the argument goes,
they must be deprived of even these possibilities. The German and Dutch
governments do not allow asylum seekers to work, either during their appli-