The strengthening of border controls around ‘Fortress Europe’ continues, as European Union (EU) countries discuss joint measures to repel immigration from outside the Fortress. Although Denmark, which will take over EU presidency from Spain later this year, has the strictest immigration policies of any individual European country, it is undoubtedly Britain which is leading the pack of wolves baying for yet more vicious controls to be implemented throughout the EU.
At the Seville summit this June, EU leaders failed to wholeheartedly embrace British and Spanish plans to deprive poor countries of economic aid, unless they signed up to draconian measures to prevent migration. However, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw announced that the EU would nonetheless be adopting a different version of the policy, focussing on the carrot, rather than the stick. While Tony Blair had hoped the EU would agree to actively withhold aid from uncooperative countries, Straw announced that bribery will be used instead, with additional aid being provided to countries that are prepared to provide the required amount of self-policing. To complicate matters further, several of the targeted countries, including Turkey and Poland, are themselves currently attempting to join the EU.
The Seville summit agreed to create a network of immigration liaison officers and speed up negotiations on readmission of refugees who have been refused in one member state and who then attempt to enter another. It also agreed to tighten the terms of the 1990 Dublin Convention, which deals with asylum applications to EU member states, in order to render it legally binding that the state where an asylum seeker first sets foot on EU soil is responsible for handling all that person’s asylum applications.
All talks between EU states on asylum and immigration consist of a mixture of co-operation and competition. All the states are anxious for joint policing of borders and co-operation on exclusion; but when it comes to dealing with refugees already within EU borders, they want to shift as much responsibility as they can onto the other states. Therefore Britain is anxious for the Dublin Convention to be strengthened so it can automatically deport any refugee who arrives from France.
In July, British Home Secretary David Blunkett met his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, to discuss a timetable for the closure of the Red Cross refugee camp at Sangatte, close to the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. Blunkett’s mandate was to tell the French that their policy of ‘tolerated illegal presence’, ie allowing potential asylum seekers to remain temporarily without registering a claim for asylum in France, was intolerable to Britain. With breathtaking chauvinism, Blunkett also told Parliament that he had told Sarkozy that ‘given the wine, the food and the sunshine – and the women – [he] was amazed that anyone would want to leave France to claim asylum anywhere else’.
The tabloids have repeatedly reported sensationalised claims of refugees storming the Channel Tunnel ‘like locusts’ in a desperate attempt to get to Britain, where they will live off our generous welfare state, take our houses, jobs, women etc. These stories have been used to bolster the impression that Britain is Europe’s most desirable destination for asylum seekers and that we are being ‘swamped’. A recent MORI poll discovered that the majority of British people believe that one quarter of the world’s refugees come here, while the true figure is 2%.
All the hysteria aside, there is a problem in northern France, where desperate people from Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Iran and elsewhere do congregate, and do try to enter Britain by any means they can contrive, including through the Channel Tunnel. They live in squalid conditions and they risk their lives. They do not do this for fun. They did not leave their homes for a laugh, and they are not looking for wine, women and sunshine. They are the victims of imperialist orchestrated conflict; the children of the ‘New World Order’; they are homeless and they seek sanctuary, security and stability. France is not offering them these. And neither is Britain.
Of the displaced persons lodged at Sangatte, the largest group are Afghans: victims of years of repression from the CIA-backed, British-trained anti-communist mujaheddin, followed by that of the Taliban, followed by the bombardment of the country by US and ‘Allied’ warplanes. Afghanistan has three million refugees worldwide, the majority in Pakistan and Iran. Last year, just 7,210 Afghans were granted exceptional leave to remain in Britain. The Immigration Minister Beverley Hughes has now announced that Britain will, for the first time since 1995, forcibly deport Afghans whose asylum claims are rejected.
British and European immigration policy is shifting. But not for the better. From 1971 onwards Britain closed down all routes into this country for ‘economic migrants’ other than those who came to marry. Immigration law became such that the only way to enter Britain was as a refugee. Other European countries began doing this later, but by the 1990s it was universal policy. In 1991 John Major attacked those who came to Europe because their standard of living might be improved. Welcoming the construction of Fortress Europe, he said: ‘We cannot open our doors to all comers just because London, Rome and Paris may seem preferable to Bombay or Algiers…We have need of a perimeter fence around Europe’. ‘Economic migrant’ became a term of abuse.
Now, Britain has introduced the ‘Highly Skilled Migrants Programme’ in order to encourage middle class immigrants to come here. There is even talk of a scheme for low-paid workers, akin to the old German gastarbeiter system. Some ‘economic migrants’ have once again become desirable and marketable, and are therefore being praised for their industriousness, culture and contribution to society. Meanwhile, vilification increases against asylum seekers: ‘Summer of fun for asylum seekers on your £1m’ screamed one recent Daily Express attack on summer play projects for refugee children.
But in reality, there are no good or bad refugees, asylum seekers or economic migrants. Political asylum and economic migration cannot be neatly divided. What there are, are rich countries, which exploit and terrorise the inhabitants of poorer ones, either directly or through the financing of despotic regimes and ruthless multinationals. And there are people who seek to escape this exploitation and terrorism, and make a new life somewhere else. People like 12- and 13-year-old Afghan boys, Alamdar and Muntazar Bakhtiari, who escaped from the notorious Woomera detention camp in the Australian outback, and travelled 600 miles to Melbourne, where they sought sanctuary in the British consulate. Acting on the instructions of Jack Straw, the consulate handed them over to the Australian police, who took them back to Woomera.
Nicki Jameson
FRFI 168 August / September 2002
