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

70 Open Borders
a year later as an enemy alien! All the arguments used then are being used now and
they are the reason people like us are demonstrating against detention.
During his internment my partner, like many of his fellow refugees, was imprisoned
with members of the Nazi party, the Home Office policy being, then as now, ‘Collar
the lot’. ...
Fleeing Hitler’s Germany was seen as ‘suspect’ even in 1939, which is why my
husband is the sole survivor of his family, all sent to Auschwitz.
European governments’ current frenzied attempts to keep out refugees are a
result of a rapid growth in their numbers, but from low levels. According to
a 1991 report of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), about 13,000 people sought asylum in western Europe
in 1972. By 1989, according to UNHCR’s 1998 Statistical Overview, the
numbers applying in Europe as a whole had increased to 311,770. By 1992
they had doubled again, to 692,760. 1992, however, was the peak year.
They then declined until 1996, and rose again, to 457,600, in 1999. In
1999, asylum applications from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were
over half of all asylum applications to Europe; 90 per cent of these were
Kosovo Albanians. Over the period 1989–98, around half of these asylum
applications were in Germany. Applications to Britain were about one-sixth
of those to Germany, slightly lower than those to France, and slightly higher
than those to the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. In 1998 Britain was ninth
out of 13 European countries in the rate of asylum seekers per 100,000
population, even though its share was higher than it was in the early 1990s.
According to the UNHCR, asylum applications in Britain in the 1990s were
as shown in Table 3.1.
Table 3.1 Asylum applications in Britain in the 1990s.
1990 26,205
1991 44,840
1992 24,605
1993 22,370
1994 32,830
1995 43,965
1996 29,640
1997 32,500
1998 46,015
1999 89,701
Source: UNHCR Statistical Overview
The big increase in 1999, raising Britain’s share of applications in Europe
from 15.6 per cent to 20 per cent, was partly the result of recalculation by
the UNHCR, in a report published in February 2000, to include dependants.
But, as in the rest of Europe, it was mainly the result of the war in Kosovo.
At the beginning of 2000 the rate of applications was declining. In the world