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Return Migration: Policies and Practices
Concurrently, new measures were also implemented to encourage legal migration, particularly
through labour migration programmes, as a means of preventing irregular migration and in
acknowledgement of the positive impact such migrants made on the economy. Labour migration
systems were reformed to attract not only highly-skilled migrants but also low skilled migrants
in response to labour market demands.
The effect of these new immigration policies has been a significant reduction in the number of
asylum applications, while migration inflows through legal labour migration channels have
increased. 1
1.2 LEGISLATIVE INSTRUMENTS AND PROVISIONS
The UK’s asylum and immigration legislation is constantly evolving and in the past decade
alone four major immigration Bills have been adopted. One of the earliest legal instruments to
regulate immigration in the UK was the Aliens Act of 1905, whose aim was to prevent “undesirable
aliens” such as paupers, lunatics, vagrants and prostitutes from entering the UK, and control
the number of Jewish settlers fleeing political and economic restrictions in Eastern Europe,
particularly Russia.
It was however the Aliens Restriction Act of 1914, which first gave the Home Secretary powers
to deport non-nationals.
Under the provisions of the Commonwealth and Immigrants Act of 1962, Commonwealth citizens
could also, for the first time, be deported on the recommendation of a criminal court. Provisions
on detention and deportation were significantly expanded in 1971 with the adoption of
the Immigration Act, which was amended to form the basis of subsequent immigration legislation.
Some of the notable immigration legislation since then has included the following:
The Immigration (Carriers’ Liability) Act 1987, which made carriers responsible for ensuring
that their passengers travelled with valid documentation and penalized their owners in the
absence of such documentation.
The 1990 Dublin Convention, which provided for the removal of asylum applicants who had
travelled through other safe third countries (defined as any EU country plus Switzerland,
Norway, Iceland, USA and Canada in the 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act) back to those
countries.
The 1993 Asylum and Immigration Act incorporated into British law a definition of asylum in
terms of the UK’s obligations under the United Nations Convention 1951 and the 1967 Protocol
relating to the Status of Refugees. Furthermore, it introduced measures for asylum seekers and
their dependants to be finger-printed (in order to detect and prevent multiple applications),
reduced the obligation on housing authorities to provide accommodation to asylum seekers, and
introduced a right of appeal for all unsuccessful asylum applicants and an accelerated appeals
procedure.
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