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

66 Open Borders
Similarly, Home Office immigration minister Charles Wardle, in a letter to
John Patten MP in response to a letter from one of his constituents, dated 15
April 1994, said the following:
The number of asylum seekers entering the United Kingdom rose sharply from some
4,000 in 1988 to a peak of 45,000 in 1991. Following the introduction of new
screening procedures, the number of applications fell to about 25,000 in 1992 but
this was still some six times higher than in 1988. Significantly, the proportion of
applicants found to be genuine refugees as defined by the 1951 UN Convention
relating to the Status of Refugees decreased from about 60 per cent in the early 1980s
to 25 per cent in 1990; and to only about 5 per cent in 1992. Against this background
I am afraid that it would fly in the face of reality to deny that asylum has been claimed
by a huge number of individuals in order to circumvent the immigration control and
obtain settlement here.
This does not mean that the claims are without foundation, but merely that
governments turn down claims which should not be turned down. A Home
Office-appointed special adjudicator, charged with determining appeals
against refusals, spent the first half of an interview with the author in 1994
asserting that claims were always dealt with on their individual merits; a
little later he said that the numbers of asylum claims were increasing so fast
that ‘something had to be done to bring them down’. The rates at which
people are recognised as refugees have declined over time and vary between
countries. Thus, according to Danièle Joly’s book Refugees: Asylum in Europe?,
the acceptance rate for applicants in Europe was nearly half in 1984; ten
years later it was less than one in ten. The 1998 Statistical Overview of the
UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) gives an average recognition
rate for asylum applicants in Europe over the period 1989–98 of 9.1 per cent;
the lowest rate was 6.1 per cent in 1993. In 1998 the average for Europe
was 9.2 per cent. In Britain it was 16.9 per cent, up from 5.7 per cent in
1996; in 1999 the initial recognition rate in the UK increased to 54 per cent.
In Germany it was 7.7 per cent, in France 17.5 per cent, in Italy 29.6 per
cent, and in Canada 43.8 per cent. In the Czech Republic it was 100 per cent
in 1990 and 2.8 per cent in 1998, a pattern common to east European states.
In Portugal it was 46.3 per cent in 1989 and 1.6 per cent in 1998. In
general, the process of applying for asylum is fraught with arbitrariness and
bitter injustice.
Clearly, since virtually all legal possibilities for migrating from the Third
World for economic betterment have now been closed off, there is likely to be
some increase in migration by clandestine means, and also in claims for
political asylum by people who would otherwise have migrated legally as
workers. Thus, for example, many of the people claiming asylum in West
Germany, after the German government stopped recruiting guestworkers in
the 1970s, were Turkish and Kurdish, as were the guestworkers. This may
not, however, mean that the refugees were not in reality refugees, but rather
that many of the Turkish and Kurdish workers were also refugees. Much the