by Colin Yeo;
How could you afford to buy him presents if you were studying?
In [city] did you have sex with other men?
What do you find attractive about men?
Tell me what you like about men that turns you on?
What is it about the way men walk that turns you on?
What is it about men’s backsides that attracts you?12
I posted this and other extracts from the interview on my website and a journalist at The Observer got in touch. This was long before most journalists were actively looking for immigration stories and I had to send a photocopy of the interview notes before the editors would believe it was genuine. The following Observer story led to questions in Parliament and a fundamental review of the way the Home Office deals with asylum claims based on sexuality.13
The case was by no means an isolated one. In a study published in 2014, the UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group found that inappropriate questions had been asked in multiple cases. For instance, during one tribunal hearing, a Home Office official had asked a series of increasingly explicit questions ‘of no probative value’ that were bordering on the pornographic. The same study revealed that the questions asked in other cases included, ‘Was it loving or rough sex?’, ‘What have you found is the most successful way of pulling men?’, ‘So you had intercourse with him and not just blow jobs?’ and ‘You have never had a relationship with a man. How do you know you are a lesbian?’14 In another case of mine, at around the same time, I visited a client at a detention centre who was claiming asylum on the basis of his sexuality. His case was that he would be persecuted if his family and others found out that he was gay. However, the Home Office denied he was gay at all, citing a previous attempt at a sham marriage to a woman. The fact that his boyfriend was at court with us, and had brought with him a suitcase of printed-out, sometimes explicit social media messages and more, was insufficient to persuade the official to change the government position. Even several years later, when the same case was being re-heard after bouncing up and down the court system for years, another official took the same view. The same boyfriend was present again, and two suitcases were now available. Yet the judge was unimpressed and told us no further evidence was needed on this issue.
On the surface, at least, things have improved since 2014 – due largely to media pressure on this narrow issue of sexuality and asylum, rather than any innate desire at the Home Office to do better – but the success rate for asylum claims based on sexuality remains below the average success rate for asylum claims as a whole.
Other types of asylum claims are decided on the basis of absurd rather than perverse questions. Those claiming to be Christian converts, for example, face a religion-themed pub quiz about the books of the Bible, the names of apostles and the date of Pentecost.15 In fact, sincere converts often have no idea about these things; converting to another religion is much more about emotion, sentiment, identity and overall message than it is about the finer details. One atheist had his claim rejected on the basis that he failed to identify Plato and Aristotle as humanist philosophers, which was taken by the official concerned to mean that his knowledge of humanism was ‘rudimentary at best’. The organisation Humanism UK wrote to then Home Secretary Amber Rudd to point out that neither Plato nor Aristotle were actually humanists.16 Likewise, those claiming to be political activists might be asked obscure questions on the details of policies in a party’s last election manifesto, or the names of party officials. Imagine if supporters of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn were persecuted; if quizzed, how many would be able to explain the details of specific policies or personnel within the party? Similarly, many fervent Brexit supporters would likely be unable to describe exactly how Brexit will make Britain great again. Politics is often about general direction, sentiment and trust, but an asylum seeker’s case will usually turn on obscure and seemingly insignificant details.
It is not just individuals but sometimes whole national groups of asylum seekers who find themselves collectively refused refuge. The worst recent example of this concerned Eritrea, a small country in the Horn of Africa that achieved independence from Ethiopia in 1993. All human rights organisations, and indeed the UK’s own Foreign Office, recognised that by 2015 the Eritrean government was almost uniquely repressive. The authorities closed the borders to those attempting to leave, shot or imprisoned citizens who tried to escape and forced a huge percentage of the population to undertake hazardous and sometimes unending military service. The only real comparator is North Korea. The courts recognised that any Eritrean that did make it to the United Kingdom should almost automatically be considered a refugee.17 And the Home Office agreed, granting asylum to nearly nine out of ten Eritrean asylum seekers.
The numbers of Eritrean refugees had not been huge, but nevertheless an increase in claims led someone at the Home Office to change the official approach in 2015. The premise for the change was a report by the Danish Immigration Service the previous year. The report had been controversial. Amnesty International condemned it as ‘completely absurd’, while Human Rights Watch said it was ‘deeply flawed’. The expert upon whose testimony much of the report was based publicly disassociated himself from it. Two of the three writers of the report also openly criticised the summary section and conclusions drawn by the third (supervising) writer, which were based on their input and research. The Danes backtracked and ceased relying on the report, while here in the United Kingdom, the chief inspector of borders and immigration also criticised it.
None of this deterred the Home Office. Instead of granting asylum to Eritreans promptly on arrival, the department started to refuse almost all applications. This meant that most refused Eritreans then lodged appeals to take their cases to court. The number of appeals brought by Eritrean nationals against rejected claims rose from 224 in the year ending March 2015 to 1,760 in the year to March 2016. And a staggeringly high proportion of them eventually won their cases – the same figure, in fact, of nine out of ten, as had previously been granted by the Home Office – though not before waiting in limbo for many months. In the meantime, the Ministry of Justice had to pay both for the judges’ salaries and the legal aid bills for those concerned, while the Home Office itself had to carry on supporting those pursuing an appeal and pay yet another set of civil servants to defend the appeals.
This was all for nothing. The Home Office reversed its position again in 2016 after losing a major court case. It was a colossal abuse of public money, as well as an appalling abuse of vulnerable refugees. In a system that functions well, genuine refugees will quickly be recognised as such and then given the maximum help to get themselves established in their new country. If they are going to be allowed to stay, then better to let them get on with it and give them the best possible chance of making a success of their new life. Instead, Eritreans destined to win their cases were refused, were kept waiting for months in squalid poverty, were put through the stress of court and were thoroughly alienated by the whole system – all before eventually being allowed to stay anyway.18
There is no real doubt that asylum decision-making is dysfunctional. It is possible that the ‘right’ people are being refused but, if so, the reasons given being so nonsensical, this is surely a matter of coincidence rather than competence. The big question is why the Home Office behaves in this way and has done so for decades, since the numbers of asylum claims started to rise in the 1990s.
SECURE BORDERS, INACCESSIBLE HAVEN
To make themselves see reasonable and compassionate, politicians like to distinguish between ‘genuine’ and ‘bogus’ – or deserving and undeserving – refugees. Genuine refugees are supposedly to be welcomed and given sanctuary, whereas the bogus ones are to be prevented from arriving in the first place, or otherwise promptly expelled if they do somehow sneak in. In reality, politicians do everything possible to exclude all refugees from entering the United Kingdom, no matter how much they need protection. There were two main strands to the policy: deterrence and preven
tion.
The essence of the policy of deterrence is to make life as miserable as possible for the refugees who do reach the UK, in the hope that this will somehow deter others from following suit. The idea is to eliminate the ‘pull’ factors that attract asylum seekers to come to the UK in preference over other countries, as evidenced by the build-up of migrants and refugees at Calais and along the French side of the English Channel. Asylum seekers were stripped of the right to claim mainstream benefits or housing back in the 1990s, a food voucher system was briefly introduced in 1999, and even though this was scrapped after a campaign led by trade union leader Bill Morris, the meagre support available has been essentially frozen for years. The current level of support at the time of writing is £37.75 per migrant per week. The system of ‘dispersing’ asylum seekers around the country was also introduced in 1999 and continues to this day. Accommodation is provided by private contractors, is sometimes squalid and is located far away from established communities of compatriots.
Asylum seekers are also banned from working or studying or even undertaking voluntary work, and yet their cases are put on hold – sometimes for years. The benefits of the status granted to recognised refugees have also been repeatedly downgraded with, for example, the legal status granted to refugees being made less and less secure. Family reunion is prevented for children and is made as difficult as possible for adults, with government funding for DNA tests withdrawn in 2012. Almost overnight, the refusal rate for Somali family reunion applications shot from just 17 per cent to 80 per cent, with the refusal rates for Eritrean, Sudanese, Syrian and Iranian applications all trebling.19 A system of accelerated ‘fast track’ asylum decision-making was introduced, with asylum seekers detained in the initial and sometimes even the appeal stages of their claims. A massive building programme for immigration detention centres was launched (see Chapter 11). Legislation was also introduced to criminalise asylum seekers who were thought to have destroyed their documents, and to encourage judges to reject claims based on ill-founded stereotypes of how a ‘genuine’ refugee might be expected to behave, a point to which I return at the end of this chapter.20 Eventually, as discussed in Chapter 3, the whole hostile environment policy was developed, with the declared intention of making Britain a less welcoming destination for unauthorised migrants.
Perhaps the single most stark example of deterrence came with the refugee crisis that was sparked by the civil war in Syria. Baroness Anelay, who was minister of state for foreign and Commonwealth affairs in 2014, stated in Parliament, on behalf of the government, ‘We do not support planned search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean. We believe that they create an unintended “pull factor”, encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing and thereby leading to more tragic and unnecessary deaths.’
This was the ‘let them drown’ policy. The UK soon relented and did end up assisting with search and rescue, sending boats to help in the operation, but the first instinct of the government had been to deter some refugees from setting out in boats by letting others of them drown.
If the purpose of deterrence was to dissuade refugees from coming to the UK, this was all an epic failure of evidence-based policy-making. It focused on the ‘pull’ factors supposedly attracting refugees to the United Kingdom but ignored the ‘push’ factors that cause them to leave their own war-torn countries in the first place. As poet Warsan Shire puts it, ‘No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark / no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than the land.’ Even aside from this fundamental flaw, there was never any evidence base to suggest that the supposed pull factors really influenced refugees in the first place. None of the available research suggests that refugees decide which country to come to on the basis of how they are treated when they arrive, or even what dangers they might face along the way.
In ‘Deciding Where to go: Policies, People and Perceptions Shaping Destination Preferences’, researchers Heaven Crawley and Jessica Hagen-Zanker write that ‘destination preferences’, as they put it, are rarely shaped by the deterrent or other migration policies of receiving countries. Rather, they found that decision-making is shaped by a wide range of factors including ‘access to protection and family reunification, the availability/accuracy of information, the overall economic environment and social networks’. The Home Office already knew this, having commissioned a piece of research back in 2002 entitled ‘Understanding the Decision-Making of Asylum Seekers’, which reached similar findings.21 The researchers found that there was ‘very little evidence that the sample respondents had a detailed knowledge of: UK immigration or asylum procedures; entitlements to benefits in the UK; or the availability of work in the UK’.
It is true that some refugees, once they are on the move, seek prosperous countries in which to settle and rebuild their lives. It is possible to be both a genuine refugee and also an economic migrant at the same time. In fact, though, the majority of refugees stay close to the homes from which they have fled. There are around thirty million refugees in the world today and 80 per cent of them live in refugee camps in countries neighbouring their own.22 There is little to do in these camps and some do not want to subsist only on handouts from the UN High Commission for Refugees. This takes us to the second strand in the attempt to reduce numbers: preventing physical entry. Deterrent policies are very unlikely to succeed, at least in their overt, declared aim of discouraging arrivals. Migrants and refugees will keep moving, whether driven by push or pull factors. As Bridget Anderson writes, ‘No set of border controls has ever worked to contain fully people’s desire and need to move. But when migrants and refugees do move, they now encounter unprecedented physical and bureaucratic barriers to entry.’23
The UK border has been, wherever possible, pushed abroad, so that asylum seekers have no opportunity even to reach British soil and claim asylum. Immigration ‘liaison’ officers were introduced at foreign airports from which asylum seekers might try to embark for the UK. They carried out racial sifting, picking out and preventing the boarding of ethnic minorities, such as Roma from Eastern Europe, who were deemed more likely to claim asylum on arrival.24 The Le Touquet Treaty was signed in 2003 to enable British immigration officials to operate in France, with the UK agreeing to fund high levels of security around the Channel ports, to scan lorries and prevent clandestine arrivals. Miles and miles of five-metre-high security fencing and razor wire and thousands of security staff, including riot police armed with guns, batons, body armour and dogs, now prevent migrants from climbing aboard lorries and trains bound for Britain. Security cameras are everywhere. Heat sensors are used to detect live bodies, carbon dioxide sensors detect breathing and X-rays and heartbeat monitors are also utilised.
The Red Cross centre at Sangatte near Calais was shut down in 2003 and the informal camps that sprang up instead were cleared periodically thereafter. Also in 2003, Tony Blair pledged to halve the numbers of asylum seekers arriving in the UK and proposed ‘regional protection zones’ outside the European Union, where refugees would be held while their asylum claims were decided. The ‘Dublin’ system of removals within the European Union, named after the Dublin Convention that was the legal basis for the system, then came into effect, enabling the removal of asylum seekers from destination countries to their point of entry into the EU.
In contrast to the deterrent policies, the securitisation of the border has been effective at keeping people out. But the cost of that success in human lives has been heavy. The fences, scanners and dogs do not prevent people setting out on their journeys of hope, but, due to our geography as an island, they do undoubtedly make it harder to reach the UK. Some still try, and the level of security is such that extreme risks must now be taken by those who do. Journalists and charities who have met with the migrants camped on the French side of the Channel report that injuries from razor wire, moving lorries and brutal French police are commonplace. Some survive the journey to the United Kingdom, but others do not.
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br /> The body of Mohammed Ayaz was found in the car park of a branch of Homebase in Richmond in 2001, having fallen from a plane landing at Heathrow.25 Jose Matada similarly died falling from the undercarriage of a flight from Angola onto a street in Mortlake in London in 2012.26 Then, there was Carlito Vale, an orphan who stowed away in a plane’s wheel well for an 8,000-mile journey in 2016. He was alive when he started to fall and died on impact.27 A man thought to be an airport worker earning £2.25 per day in Nairobi, tentatively identified as Paul Manyasi, likewise stowed away, froze and then fell over 1,000 metres, creating a crater in a back garden in south London in 2019.28 Masoud Niknam attempted to swim to the UK all the way from Dunkirk late in 2019 and died in the attempt.29 Some now set out across one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world in inflatable dinghies. Mitra Mehrad, reported to have a PhD in psychology, died in the attempt, also in late 2019.30
As I was writing this book, tragic confirmation of the risks some are willing to take has been evidenced by the deaths by suffocation of thirty-nine migrants in the back of a sealed, refrigerated lorry. The incident echoed one at the very start of my career when fifty-eight migrants perished in similar circumstances in 2000. Yet even these tragedies are dwarfed by the number of deaths by drowning in the Mediterranean as refugees seek their escape from home. Deaths per year peaked at just over 5,000 in 2016, but even in 2019 well over 1,000 people died trying to cross that sea. At the time of writing, a total of 20,040 have drowned in the Mediterranean since 2014, a number which will have increased substantially by the time you read this.31 The situation is so awful, with so many unidentified bodies washing up on the beaches and so many families not knowing what has happened to their loved ones, that two friends of mine founded a new charity, called Last Rights. They campaign for dignity in death and work to identify the dead, then inform their families. It is grim but important work.32