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

Refugees: Tightening the Screw 67
same can be said about workers/asylum seekers from the Indian Punjab.
People fleeing persecution in the Punjab came to Britain as workers or
dependents while they could, and began to claim asylum when that became
the only way of achieving protection. On the other hand most of those who
come to Britain to seek asylum come from different parts of the world from
those who migrated in search of work in the 1950s and 1960s. Few Africans
are in the latter category, and virtually no Caribbeans in the former. Asian
workers came to Britain mainly from Gujarat, from what is now Bangladesh,
and from the parts of Punjab which are in Pakistan, as well as from the
Indian Punjab (see p. 18). The people from the Indian subcontinent who now
seek asylum in Britain are nearly all from Sri Lanka, Kashmir, and the Indian
Punjab. Thus they, like other refugees, are overwhelmingly from countries
and regions with repressive regimes or in which there are civil wars and
armed conflicts, for which the governments of the rich industrialised
countries moreover bear much responsibility (see Introduction). In the mid-
1970s, after the Vietnam war, there were mass flights from Vietnam,
Kampuchea and Laos. The United States has allowed free entry for Cubans,
while closing its borders against Haitians. The killings and torture by
dictatorial regimes in Argentina and Chile (after the socialist government
had been overthrown with CIA involvement) created more refugees. In the
1970s people also fled from the Lebanon, Afghanistan, Zaire, Uganda,
Namibia and South Africa. Most of the recent refugees are from repressive
regimes in Nigeria, Zaire, Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire), Kenya, Iraq, Iran,
China, Turkey, Pakistan and eastern Europe, and from civil wars and
conflicts in Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Somalia, Algeria, Angola, Sierra Leone,
Liberia, Kashmir, Colombia and the former Yugoslavia. The UNHCR records
in its 1998 Statistical Overview that the ten countries from which most
asylum seekers came to Europe over the period 1989–98 were, in the
following order, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Romania, Turkey, Iraq,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sri Lanka, Bulgaria, Iran, Somalia and Democratic
Republic of the Congo (former Zaire). Between them, these ten accounted for
61 per cent of all asylum applications to 17 European countries.
The treatment and admission of refugees is surrounded by a rhetoric of
humanitarianism and altruism. Thus for example a 1967 resolution of the
Council of Europe on Asylum to Persons in Danger of Persecution stated that
governments should ‘act in a particularly liberal and humanitarian spirit in
relation to persons who seek asylum on their territory’. This attitude towards
refugees is presumably based on some sympathy with the plight of people
who are forced to flee from imprisonment, torture or death, as opposed to
others who are sometimes referred to as ‘economic refugees’ but are
considered to have more choice. It may also have something to do with class
affinities. The political refugees who have succeeded in reaching European
countries have tended to be educated, middle-class democrats and liberals,
whereas those who migrate in search of work may do so because they are
poor, or are assumed to be so. Nearly half of all refugees settling in Britain in