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

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
This book was written thanks to a grant from the Joseph Rowntree
Charitable Trust, for which I am extremely grateful. The trust accepted my
proposal to take a radical look at immigration controls. The Joint Council for
the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) very kindly supported my application and
gave me freedom to express my opinions. I am particularly grateful for the
help and support of Don Flynn.
The book is also based on over six years of campaigning against
Campsfield immigration detention centre, as a member of the Campaign to
Close Campsfield. A good many of my examples of the mistreatment of
refugees are taken from the experiences of those who are or have been locked
up in Campsfield. I believe that Campsfield exemplifies this mistreatment,
and that it is not extreme or untypical. I can report on it from first-hand
experience. Nine of us were outside Campsfield with placards when it opened
on 26 November 1993, and I have been to nearly all the monthly demonstrations
ever since. I have had the great good fortune to meet many
refugees, both inside and outside Campsfield, and of course am indebted to
them for much that is in this book. I hope they approve. I have visited
refugees not just in Campsfield but also in Winson Green, Rochester,
Blakenhurst and Bullingdon prisons and at Harmondsworth detention
centre. I have been to several appeals and bail hearings in Birmingham and
London and talked to many lawyers. Eleven asylum seekers have stayed in
our East Oxford house, for periods ranging from a few days to over two years,
and have been unfailingly considerate and good to have around. I do not
accept the moral distinction between political refugees and those who cross
frontiers in search of work. But, for what it is worth, my experience is the
reverse of that of the Home Secretary Jack Straw, who told The Economist,as
it reported on 14 February 1998, that ‘Of all the asylum applications I have
dealt with in my constituency, only one was genuine.’ Of the many asylum
seekers I have met, only two were not refugees in the narrow political sense.
One, who entertained us in our house for several months, was straightforwardly
trying to improve his life. The other was a young and very distressed
Peruvian. As soon as he started talking to us in Campsfield, he told us he was
not in fact a member of Sendero Luminoso, but the oldest of six children
looked after by their mother. She had raised the money to send him to Britain
vii