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

Refugees: Tightening the Screw 111
Labour MP Diane Abbott related that she had asked the home secretary
whether refugees would have to take their rings off before they could get
support; Straw had said ‘Yes’.
The Labour government, citing the experience of other European
countries, moreover intends to give all asylum seekers only one, ‘no choice’,
offer of accommodation. The scheme disperses asylum seekers away from
London and other ports and airports, specifically banning any consideration
of asylum seekers’ personal preference to be near relatives and friends. If they
refuse this enforced dispersal, they will lose their right even to vouchers. The
policy of dispersal had been tried in the 1980s in the case of Vietnamese ‘boat
people’. A Home Office study, entitled Vietnamese Refugees and published in
1995, concluded that within two years more than half had moved to
London, because of the isolation, unemployment and racism they
experienced in the areas they were assigned to. The government has stated
that it intends to move people to ‘cluster areas’ of refugee or immigrant
settlement. But the reality is likely to be that they are dispersed to available
housing on sink estates and hostels in areas of high unemployment, perhaps
in towns where there are no existing immigrant communities. If so, they are
being set up as targets for racist attack. The new dispersed will probably
return to London boroughs and perhaps elsewhere, where at least there are
support networks, lawyers, communities, friends, and the possibility of being
absorbed into places where there is a relatively high level of tolerance and
diversity. Hackney, for example, will not have fewer refugees. What it will
have is more destitute people, more outcasts, more people who will be forced
to resort to begging, prostitution and crime. They will be the objects, perhaps,
of Jack Straw’s hostility to squeegy merchants, targets for zero tolerance. In
March 2000, in a forestaste of what may be to come, a few Roma women
begging ‘aggressively’ with their children gave rise to a prolonged barrage of
xenophobic front-page headlines and statements by ministers against asylum
seekers in general.
In a further twist of the screw, the Home Office announced in a draft
manual published on 17 February 1999 that asylum seekers would not
receive even this support if they decided to go for judicial review of
Immigration Appeals Tribunal decisions, stating that:
Support will not be provided where Judicial Review is pursued. Apellants should look
to their own community or the voluntary sector for any support. The Immigration
and Nationality Directorate is considering the case for providing grant aid for such
functions.
The announcement followed a successful appeal against deportation by
Mohammed Arif, a teacher. He had fled Kashmir in 1992 after being tortured
in gaol, and had been sentenced in his absence to seven years’ hard labour,
on charges of incitement to murder at a political demonstration against the
then ruling Muslim Convention party. In Britain the Immigration Appeals
Tribunal had ruled in 1996 that as Arif’s party, the PPP, had since returned