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

30 Open Borders
If there [sic] brown knock them down.
If there black send them back.
Other persistent public campaigns by parents and relatives, for example over
the murders of Ricky Reel and Michael Menson, have forced the police to
reopen cases which they had dismissed as suicide or accidents. Many more
certainly go unreported, and uninvestigated, partly because victims of racist
attacks have found they are more likely to be arrested than helped by the
police. Roma refugees in Dover have been particularly under attack: among
many recent incidents, a woman was assaulted by her next-door neighbour;
a 14-year-old asylum seeker was in intensive care after an attack by four
young men who kicked his head ‘like a football’ when he was travelling on
the Ramsgate to Dover train with his ten-year-old brother; and so on.
The media, however, more typically report crime committed by black
people than crimes committed against them. Even the Guardian, on 28
September 1999, put prominently on its front page a story about a black
rapist which blamed the Home Office for failing to deport him after a previous
offence. Some newspapers consciously use the reporting of crime to promote
opposition to immigration. The Daily Mail of November 1998 under a frontpage
banner headline ‘BRUTAL CRIMES OF THE ASYLUM SEEKERS’,
claimed to have uncovered ‘the devastating impact of serious crime by
asylum seekers’, and produced photographs of assorted black criminals, some
of whom were asylum seekers. In October 1998 the Daily Mail published an
article entitled ‘The Good Life on Asylum Alley: The Mail’ s investigation into
Britain’s immigration crisis reveals the shocking ease with which refugees
play the benefit system’. In a three-day period in September 1998, the
November 1998 issue of the Refugee Council’s magazine iNexile picked up
the following headlines:
Refugees in Hospital Riot.
Refugee Crime Wave in London.
Refugee Disaster.
Asylum Seekers ‘Threat to System’.
We’re Being Swamped by Crimewaves of Migrants.
Refugee Flood Looks Set to Hit a New High.
Why Britain is Still a Soft Touch.
Nick Hudson, former editor of Sunday Sport and then (later sacked) editor of
the Folkestone Herald and Dover Express, wrote an editorial in October 1998
in the latter bemoaning the invasion of ‘illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers,
bootleggers, drug-dealers, the scum of the Earth ... We are left with the
backdraft of a nation of human sewage, and no cash to wash it down the
drain.’ Later the paper claimed that a Roma woman sold herself for a potato,
thus undercutting local business, that people were terrified to walk in the