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

3 REFUGEES: TIGHTENING THE SCREW
THE DEBASING OF REFUGEE RIGHTS
Nearly all migrants, apart from refugees, seeking to live in the rich industrialised
countries are now excluded. Migration for economic betterment,
rather than being considered, as it should be and as it was when Europeans
did it, a sign of enterprise and courage, is now regarded as criminal and
somehow shameful. European Union nationals can travel to work and settle
in other countries of the EU. For the rest, work permits are issued only for
specified jobs to people whose skills are desired. In Britain this means they
are issued almost entirely to nationals from the United States, Japan and one
or two other countries, rather than to nationals of the Third World or eastern
Europe. The exceptions are the continued issue of permits for domestic
servants, which are available to Filipinas and others as they were to Jewish
women fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s; the employment of east
Europeans and north Africans on seasonal visas to work on farms, mainly in
East Anglia; and the association agreements with some east European
countries, including the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania, which allow
their nationals to set up businesses, including small ones such as window
cleaning, provided they are self-supporting. In addition an unknown number
of people, some of them asylum seekers whose claims have been rejected, are
working in Britain and other industrialised countries illegally. They provide
an extremely vulnerable and highly exploitable workforce.
Refugees are increasingly lumped together with ‘illegal immigrants’ as
people whose presence is unwelcome. Nevertheless, in theory, a distinction
is made between refugees (or ‘asylum seekers’, as people who have asked for
refugee status but have not yet been granted or refused it are officially
termed) and other migrants. The current orthodoxy is that refugees are a
good thing and that other migrants, usually defined as economic migrants,
are bad. Refugees can still in theory enter European countries legally and
they can, if they win refugee status, settle and acquire much the same rights
as EU nationals. But because of the existence of immigration controls, they
are forced to undergo examination to determine whether they are accepted
as refugees. Even now, when the main objective of governments’
immigration policy and legislation seems to be to keep refugees out, or at
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