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

Border Controls 31
streets for fear of attack by asylum seekers, and that Dover Marks & Spencer
had to close at midday because of a spate of shoplifting by asylum seekers.
Even the police worried about the provocation caused by such reports.
According to an article in the Observer of 22 August 1999, ‘Kent police asked
Hudson to correct his newspaper’s impression that the refugees were
responsible for a crime wave.’ The Guardian of February 20 1999 reported
that John Grieve, the policeman appointed to deal with racism in the Metropolitan
Police after the Lawrence Inquiry, had said that: ‘Some press
coverage of asylum-seekers, portraying them as ungrateful scroungers at
the least and violent criminals at worst, was “dangerous, risky stuff”.’
Politicians who wanted ammunition for immigration controls sought
support from various committees and reports on the supposed proneness of
immigrants to crime. They did not get far. An Interdepartmental Working
Party on Coloured Immigration to the UK, re-established in 1953, asked the
police for information on immigrant crime and was informed that black
immigrants were not responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime,
although 56 black men had been convicted for the possession of hemp, and
some were living off the ‘immoral earnings’ of white women. In 1971 an
investigation into police–immigrant relations was carried out by the House
of Commons Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration; its report,
published in 1972, stated that: ‘Of all the police forces from whom we took
evidence not one had found that crime committed by black people was proportionately
greater than that by the rest of the population. Indeed in many
places it was somewhat less.’ But, the report said, police officers often believed
that black people were more involved in crime, possibly because they are
forced to live in high crime areas. In 1994 an international study on youth
and crime, the British research for which was carried out by the Home Office
research department, published in the Netherlands but not in Britain (but
reported in the Guardian of 6 July 1994), concluded that, ‘contrary to the
over-representation in police statistics of young black offenders, the English
research showed that there was either no difference or lower offending rates
for ethnic minorities with [sic] their white counterparts in property crimes or
violent offences’; and ‘The English study found one drug user in four among
white youth, one in eight amongst blacks and one in 12 among Asians.’
Although black people are over-represented in prisons, this is evidence of
racial discrimination in arrests and sentencing rather than of high participation
in crime.
Most unjustly, black people were blamed for the riots of the Thatcher
years. The age of Thatcherism was the age of the riot. In the succession of
uprisings or ‘riots’ which took place in London, Liverpool, Manchester,
Bristol, Birmingham, Newcastle and elsewhere in the 1980s and early 1990s
there was no general racial pattern or cause, although the riots were
sometimes triggered by or developed into racial attacks, for example by white
youths against Asian shopkeepers, or by the police against Caribbeans. The
main generalisations to be made about the participants are that they lived in