The EC and asylum-seekrs
01 January 1991
The EC and asylum-seekrs
artdoc August=1992
At the European Summit of heads of state in Luxembourg in June,
John Major spoke of the need for European governments to curtail
immigration and to establish a strong `perimeter fence' around
Europe to keep out bogus asylum-seekers who were, he maintained,
little more than economic migrants. In July, French prime
minister Edith Cresson was praised by the National Front when she
promised to fight illegal immigration by chartering special
planes to fly out unwanted immigrants. This, commented Bruno
Megret, deputy leader of the FN, proved what Le Pen had been
saying all along.
The Euro-Fascists may well congratulate themselves as they see
their anti-immigrant rhetoric bear fruit in terms of government
policy. The language of Major, Chirac and Cresson smacks of
Powellism - a new `numbers'game'. But whereas Powell's use of the
numbers' argument was linked to an earlier stage of immigration
of Asian and Caribbean people from the ex-colonies, whose labour
was needed to meet Britain's post-war economic needs (hence
controls were brought in when labour was no longer required),
today's numbers' game takes place in a period where there is no
longer immigration to the UK, and those coming to the West are
refugees from the Third World, forced to flee here for political
reasons.
To play the numbers' game with refugees' lives makes a mockery
of the 1951 United Nations convention on the status of refugees.
For a just asylum policy can only be based on one criteria, the
criteria of need. And need is heedless of numbers. To link asylum
policy to numbers is to look at need in a numerical way, to
transform justice into a macabre game of Russian roulette.
John Major states that asylum applications to Britain are now
running at 1,000 per week - and this is the proof that
restrictions need to be brought in. But a rational interpretation
of these figures would lead him to different conclusions. For,
if we receive 100 applications from, say Somalia, in one week,
surely this speaks volumes as to the situation in that country:
greater numbers point to increased persecution and are not
evidence of bogus claims. The idea that if numbers go past a
certain limit, refugees cease to be refugees and are somehow
magically transmogrified into economic migrants lacks
credibility.
The background to today's refugee crisis that the politicians
fail to consider is that if the West really wants to do something
about the refugee problem it must examine its relationship to the
Third World. Western governments could, for example, cease to
give arms to authoritarian regimes; they could desist from
propping up governments whose only virtue is that they serve
western interests and from destabilising regimes (to the cost of
$50 billion in the case of the Frontline states) which they don't
like. They could end the system of debt and dependency
institutionalised by the IMF and GATT, which are presently
calling for the removal of government subsidies on food
production in Third World countries and which are bringing in new
regulations to protect transnational corporations.
The debate around refugees is doubly hypocritical today, as it
is taking place at a time when the West has created a new refugee
problem in the Middle East. Liberal commentators may talk about
global migration in an abstract sense, but imperialist
interventions in the Middle East have not only created new
refugees, but displaced old ones - the Filipinos, Tamils,
Palestinians and Indians,who had gone to the Gulf region to find
refuge and work.
In such a scenario, where the poor South is kept in hock to the
rich West, the distinction between an economic and a political
refugee does become blurred - but not in the terms outlined by
John Major. How can you distinguish between political and
economic refugees in countries where occupation, war and
destabilisation makes it impossible even to eke