- The Observer, Sunday 14 March 2010
In September 2004, Tony Blair set out a new public sector performance target. By the end of the following year the number of failed asylum seekers being deported each month would exceed the number of new applicants.
This benchmark has come to be known as the asylum "tipping point", the implication being that too many migrants were taking sanctuary in Britain under false pretences and most should be swiftly dispatched to their countries of origin.
The target was missed, but only just, and not for want of trying. Relentless institutional pressure was applied to ship out as many people as possible if it was felt their claim to be refugees was bogus. The numerical imperative – maximum deportation – continues to set the tone in much discussion of asylum policy.
Some of the brutal consequences are now coming to light. An official report last week accused the UK Border Agency of failing to investigate claims of abuse in privately run detention centres for failed asylum seekers. An inquiry was set up in 2008 to investigate allegations that security officers were using excessive force when restraining detainees and that racial and physical abuse were rife.
Baroness O'Loan, the report's author, found that in two of the most serious incidents, detainees' injuries had "no satisfactory explanation". She also said that abuse could not be deemed "systematic", a finding that the Border Agency welcomed as a kind of exoneration.
But the report will not dispel the sense that something is rotten in Britain's asylum system. For the last six weeks a group of women at Yarl's Wood, an "immigration removal centre" in Bedfordshire, have been on hunger strike in protest against their treatment by guards.
Last week a Russian man, his wife and stepson fell to their death from a high-rise Glasgow tower block. They were shortly to have been evicted after their bid for refugee status had failed. Since 2003, there have been six suicides by asylum seekers housed in the same blocks.
Today the Observer reports compelling claims that authorities are failing in their duty to protect genuine refugees. The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, a charity that has conducted independent case analysis, accuses the Home Office of rejecting clinical evidence supporting asylum seekers' claims to have been tortured. Meanwhile, stories of assault, abuse and medical neglect continue to trickle out of Yarl's Wood and other such facilities.
A picture is emerging of a system in crisis, not because it is failing to deliver its objectives but because its zeal in pursuit of those objectives is making it inhumane.
But seen from the government's perspective, asylum policy is a success story. In the last three months of 2009, there were 4,765 new claims, a 30% reduction in the number of applications compared with the previous year and the lowest level since 1992. The fact that fewer people seek refuge in Britain proves, according to Phil Woolas, immigration minister, that "our border has never been stronger".
That might be true, but the boast contains a nasty subtext. The implication is that asylum applications are just another kind of immigration, one of the various channels that foreigners use to acquire the privilege of living in Britain; a breach in the fortress wall to be defended.
By extension, the 200,000 asylum seekers whose cases have yet to be ruled upon are viewed by many officials, and much of the public, as "illegals" in all but name. The task is to expose their lies and throw them overboard.
Around 70% of asylum applications fail. Even if the adjudication process is right every time that still means there are tens of thousands of genuine refugees in Britain in a state of desperate uncertainty. They are forbidden from working and cannot claim benefits while their cases are being processed, a measure designed to prove to the wider public that refugees do not take resources meant for the indigenous population. This too reveals the official assumption that most asylum seekers are really economic migrants.
The distinction is vital. It is Britain's duty under the 1951 UN refugee convention to protect people fleeing persecution. Since that treaty was signed, the world has changed enormously. Its population has become more mobile. It is part of the inevitable momentum of history that people from poorer places move to richer parts in search of new opportunities. That globalisation of labour poses huge challenges to immigration policy. But it must not diminish our sense of moral obligation to give sanctuary to refugees.
It is easier to condemn a broken system than to design a perfect one. There were grounds for the widespread suspicion a few years ago that asylum status was being fraudulently targeted as a shortcut to British residency. That public fear had to be addressed. But it was never proven that Britain was, as the Conservatives liked to allege, a "soft touch". Labour simply swallowed that charge and launched a crackdown.
It is worth pausing to consider what that really means. Who was it that Tony Blair decided should be targeted for expulsion from our shores? People whose lives might have been turned upside down by war. People who might have been tortured, raped, chased from their homes, the sole survivors of families destroyed in genocide. What does Britain now do with these people, including women and children, if their stories of torment and grief are not supported by the right documentation? It puts them in jail.
Tony Blair's targets did not create the culture of callous scorn that seems to have spread through the institutions that police Britain's borders. Both are symptoms of a society that sees asylum seekers as likely frauds. That prejudice is woven routinely into media reports and policy pronouncements.
It should be a source of national pride that Britain is thought a desirable destination by refugees, who have throughout history enriched the countries that welcome them. Instead, people who turn to us for help are vilified and punished for asking. It must also be possible to distinguish humanely between real and false claims to refugee status. The investment required is not financial, but political. It requires a leader who will look at the current system and say plainly what is there: cruelty, injustice and shame throughout.
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