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

74 Open Borders
wrote a letter to his visitor (quoted in the Autumn 1999 Newsletter of Asylum
Welcome, a charity in Oxford) as follows:
I was locked up when I arrived in Nigeria until my police friend bailed me out with
40,000 naira after all the beating and torture. ... I try to see if I can go to Cotonou [in
Benin] but they have tightened their border ... many of my cousins has been tortured
to death, even the so-called conflict is worse now than when I left. ... I am still
surviving because of my police friend ... this country is still not safe for me.
Many are simply not heard of again. Their friends in Britain assume the
worst.
European governments now attempt to deter refugees from applying in
the first place, in particular by locking them up in prisons and detention
centres and imposing harsh material conditions, including the denial of
welfare benefits. Governments have not formally repudiated international
refugee conventions, but they are undermining them, in an underhand way,
and they are contravening certainly their spirit, if not their letter. Rather
than smoothing refugees’ access to a safe haven, they impose harsher and
harsher obstacles, in the hope that news will travel back to the countries
from which refugees might flee. They are thus, in effect, punishing refugees
and asylum seekers not for anything they themselves have done, but in the
hope that their treatment will deter others from coming, as The Economist,
in a leader on 14 February 1998, recognised: ‘The illogicality of punishing
those who are here in an effort to deter those who might come should always
have been obvious.’ There is little evidence, moreover, that the competition
to be the least attractive destination has much effect, beyond adding to the
suffering of many innocent people. Many refugees have little choice or even
knowledge of their destination, but are in the hands of agents who may make
their decisions on the grounds of convenience and profitability to themselves.
The refugees who find themselves confined in prisons and detention centres
on arrival in Europe express surprise and shock at having their expectations
of humane treatment according to democratic norms dashed. The oftenrepeated
claim that, for example, Britain is a ‘soft touch’ is a myth: Denmark,
Finland, Luxemburg, Norway and Ireland all offer more support than Britain;
Germany, Switzerland and Sweden offer only slightly less. The rise and fall
in applications in one country tend to mirror those elsewhere. It is likely that
numbers are far more affected by political situations abroad than they are
by ‘deterrence’ in receiving countries. The British government admitted as
much when, in response to a rise in officially recorded asylum applications
to 71,000 in 1999, the Guardian reported that:
Downing Street blamed the rise on the conflict in Kosovo and said the increase in
asylum seekers was ‘not a problem unique to Britain’.
Barbara Roche, the new immigration minister, nevertheless claimed that ‘a
move to a “cashless” voucher system would tackle the problem’ (see below).