by Colin Yeo;
There is no attempt whatsoever in all of this to distinguish between a genuine refugee and a bogus one. All these deterrent and security measures affect all refugees, no matter how strong their claim to asylum. It is now basically impossible for a refugee to lawfully reach the United Kingdom to claim asylum. If a refugee wants to make it to Europe or the United Kingdom – perhaps because of historic links, the language, family members or perceived opportunities – then he or she must take high risks to do so.
The one exception to this is the refugee resettlement programme. This was launched by David Blunkett in 2002 as a counterbalance to the general approach of deter and prevent. Initially the numbers involved were very low, with just a few hundred being admitted each year under three different schemes. Blunkett argued that it was legitimate to prevent the irregular entry of asylum seekers; doing so reduced public concern, he said, as many such arrivals were bogus and, in any event, only the fittest and healthiest refugees with access to some resources were capable of making the hazardous journey to the UK. He argued that opening up safe and legal routes for asylum with his programme would reduce demand for the services of people smugglers and traffickers.33 Implicitly, Blunkett suggested the UK could meet its moral and humanitarian obligations, not by allowing refugees irregular entry, but by resettling them from refugee camps.
Offering refugee resettlement is undoubtedly very welcome; safe routes to sanctuary are essential and it is unfair to expect only the neighbours of a refugee-producing country, often poor countries themselves, to host those refugees. There is also truth in the point that the most vulnerable refugees around the world will never make it to the United Kingdom. However, Blunkett’s argument was founded on the assumption that only a limited number of refugees can or should ever be admitted – a premise that was to be made explicit by Theresa May late in 2015. After the circulation of images showing the dead body of toddler Alan Kurdi washed ashore on a Turkish beach, David Cameron was forced to expand the existing programme. To his considerable credit, he pledged to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees over the coming five years. A few weeks later, when giving a speech setting out ‘a new plan for asylum’, then Home Secretary Theresa May explicitly proposed a compassion quota:
What I’m proposing is a deal: the fewer people there are who wrongly claim asylum in Britain, the more generous we can be in helping the most vulnerable people in the world’s most dangerous places. And my message to the immigration campaigners and human rights lawyers is this: you can play your part in making this happen – or you can try to frustrate it. But if you choose to frustrate it, you will have to live with the knowledge that you are depriving people in genuine need of the sanctuary our country can offer. There are people who need our help, and there are people who are abusing our goodwill – and I know whose side I’m on.34
This was consistent with the net migration target; if the target was to be met then it was logical that, if a certain number of refugees were to be allowed in, a certain number would have to be excluded too. I was not sure at the time, and I certainly do not know now, how human rights lawyers like me were supposed to make this happen. Perhaps we should have been out patrolling the coastline, shooting out the bottom of dinghies from those we assessed as wrongly claiming asylum? In any event, Theresa May did nothing to expand the number of resettlement places Cameron had announced once she became Prime Minister.
ROOT CAUSES
What really drives the deterrence when we know that it does not work? And what drives the security apparatus when we know that it does not and cannot discriminate between the genuine and the bogus?
One possibility is that the policies are intended only to reassure the public and assuage concern. This seems to have been the thinking in the early 2000s, when the Labour government legislated on immigration over and over again. Similar thinking also seems to have motivated David Cameron’s increasing focus on immigration from 2010 onwards, at a time when he clearly felt his Conservative Party was under pressure for votes from the Nigel Farage-led UK Independence Party. The idea seems to have been that passing restrictive laws and constantly claiming to be ‘cracking down’ would reduce public anxiety about immigration.
There is no evidence to show that this really works, though. It seems just as likely that forever talking about immigration and passing new immigration laws actually heightens public concern, rather than suppressing it. As the authors of the British Future report ‘How To Talk About Immigration’ put it, the public ‘are regularly told that there is a new crackdown – more evidence that it wasn’t working before – and then nothing seems to change as a result’.35 It does not help that the public are deeply sceptical of official and government information about immigration, meaning that claims of a crackdown usually fall on deaf ears. The more that politicians make ineffective, empty and therefore self-defeating promises, the more the public become sceptical, and even cynical as a result. There certainly seems to be no negative correlation between government law-making on immigration and public concern. Quite the opposite; if anything, the more politicians pontificate, the more anxious the public becomes.
It could be that this opposite is actually intended, and perhaps the policies are supposed to manufacture public concern for political gain. In the populist age of Donald Trump, this degree of cynicism is far from implausible. Cameron was no Trump, but he certainly used some of the same techniques to bolster his political position. As discussed in Chapter 2, there is evidence that Cameron increasingly focused on immigration from 2010 onwards, in the belief that immigration was an issue that favoured the Conservative Party. Many have argued that blaming migrants for difficulties in the employment market, shortages of housing and pressure on public services was a distraction from the real cause: the government policy of austerity.36 Theresa May followed Cameron’s example, although some might suspect she believed rather more in what she was doing than her always opportunistic predecessor. This blaming of refugees and migrants, though, can be carried out much more effectively by proper populists and outright racists, who are not constrained by the need to actually govern and to therefore implement their own policies. A mainstream politician trying to beat the populists at their own game is, in the end, always going to lose that ever-escalating arms race.
A more subtle possibility is that the policies are indeed political but are aimed not so much at the public as at other politicians and perhaps sections of the media. Every political party is home to a range of different political perspectives and one of the jobs of a leader is to try to keep that coalition together. For David Cameron, who came from the liberal wing of the Conservative Party, this meant keeping right-wingers such as the European Research Group inside his tent. Veteran Member of Parliament Ken Clarke once said of Cameron’s strategy for managing this faction, ‘If you want to go feeding crocodiles then you’d better not run out of buns.’ Restrictive, harsh asylum policies can be seen as the buns to feed the right, supposedly balancing out the more socially liberal policies some right-wingers hated, such as gay marriage, prison reform or environmental policies. Again, there is some evidence to support this thesis. In 2012, David Laws, schools minister during the coalition government, drew on a similar metaphor. He noted that Cameron saw the hostile environment policy as ‘red meat’ to feed the right-wing of the Conservative Party, as well as being a way of countering the rise of UKIP.37
Finally, it is also possible there was no ulterior motive nor purpose behind all this at all. Perhaps it was just politicians doing what politicians do: a messy, uncoordinated, pragmatic combination of what they genuinely think is needed for the good of the country, with, at the very least, half an eye on how they think their political base – whether in the wider electorate or the political party selectorate – will respond. Blair, Blunkett and the Labour government of 1997 to 2010 may well have genuinely thought that there were too many refugees seeking sanctuary in the United Kingdom, that too many were ingenuine refugees and that legislating repeatedly would both solve this
‘problem’ and position the party better with the electorate. Cameron and May might likewise have thought it right to restrict immigration, as well as believing that doing so would work to their political advantage both within their party and for their party. Politics is a messy business and outcomes like the deter and prevent approach to asylum were no doubt a mix of intentions both noble – if arguably ignorant – and ignoble.
INTEGRATION AND INGRATITUDE
Public opinion seems to be particularly sensitive to increases in refugee arrivals compared to other forms of migration. When asked, people are less resistant to the idea of skilled migrants, students, those who speak English, those who stick to the rules and migrants from certain countries.38 Migrants with these characteristics are perceived as being more capable of ‘integrating’ – a loaded word and one that for good or ill plays an important role in discourse about immigration. Race certainly plays a role here, and Rob Ford has written about the ‘ethnic hierarchy’ in attitudes to migration.39 In one survey, 10 per cent of respondents said no Australians should be allowed to come and live in the United Kingdom, compared to 37 per cent of respondents saying likewise about Nigerians. This may in part be due to a perceived difference in income and skills, but it would be naive to suggest that skin colour is irrelevant. And refugees, rightly or wrongly, are identified as scoring poorly by all these measures, meaning that attitudes towards them are often particularly negative.40
Refugees are also unpopular because they are often perceived as being fakes and because some members of the public perceive them as a security risk. Some believe that those arriving as refugees are not, in fact, in danger in their own countries, but have instead travelled to the UK for quite different reasons. In global studies conducted in 2016 and 2017, the opinion research company Ipsos MORI found that well over half of respondents agree with the following statements: ‘Most foreigners who want to get into my country as a refugee really aren’t refugees. They just want to come here for economic reasons, or to take advantage of our welfare services’ and ‘There are terrorists pretending to be refugees who will enter my country to cause violence and destruction.’ In contrast, less than half agreed with this statement: ‘I’m confident that most refugees who come to my country will successfully integrate into their new society.’41
The public’s differentiated approach was instinctively understood by Labour politicians like David Blunkett in the early 2000s. In 2003, he told The Guardian that new asylum legislation would encourage people to come to Britain to work legally, while being ‘as tough as old boots’ on those who abused the system. As Don Flynn argued in his far-sighted pamphlet based on these words, this came to typify government policy under Labour.42 Some migration routes were expanded and promoted – those for skilled workers and international students for example – while others were relentlessly clamped down on. Asylum seekers were perceived as abusers of the immigration system. The fact that many of those seeking asylum came from countries where there was civil war and well-documented persecution of minorities – Bosnia, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Somalia and, later, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Iraq – seemed to be irrelevant.
The narrative of the ‘bogus asylum seeker’ – the idea that asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq and Zimbabwe, amongst other places, were liars who did not need or deserve our protection – was allowed to develop or perhaps even encouraged. This enabled politicians to feign concern for the genuine refugees, while simultaneously doing everything possible to deter and prevent their arrival. The majority of asylum claims in this climate were assumed to be fraudulent and that assertion was seemingly supported by their low success rate. But it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, a classic example of circular logic: the low rate of success was a result of the culture of disbelief, and the culture of disbelief was itself founded on that same low success rate. Cynicism directed at asylum seekers also ignored the reasons that at least some were being refused asylum. When claims failed, it was often for legal reasons rather than because the asylum seeker was thought to be lying. For example, it might be said that there was still a safe area in their country of origin, that they had travelled through a safe country to reach the UK or that the Refugee Convention did not apply to them.
But it is not all doom and gloom. The refusal rate has gradually fallen over time and many of the palpably perverse decisions I have highlighted are not recent ones. In the early 1980s, when the number of asylum claims was running at around 3,000 per year, the success rate was as high as 87 per cent.43 A decade later, after a dramatic increase, there were around 30,000 asylum claims made in the United Kingdom per year and the success rate was just 4 per cent.44 Yet, today, with the numbers having shot up in the early 2000s but then fallen back to between 20,000 to 30,000 over the past ten years, the Home Office grants status in 38 per cent of initial decisions. Once appeal outcomes are taken into account the total is around 55 per cent.45
This is a sign of a gradual and welcome change in culture at the Home Office. There is a lot more to be done, of course. The single biggest improvement would be for officials to discard the whole concept of the ‘stock narrative’ of being a refugee.46 Politicians and officials expect refugees to behave in certain preordained or ‘stock’ ways. In truth, these expectations are all about how they would like refugees to behave, rather than about how they actually do. For example, it is commonplace to say that genuine refugees claim asylum in the first safe country they reach. There is no evidence base at all to support this assertion; many genuine refugees who would be persecuted if they returned to their home countries decide not to remain in refugee camps and instead try to build a better future for themselves and their families by moving on. They are still refugees as defined by the Refugee Convention.
It is also often assumed that a genuine refugee will take decisive action to flee in response to a specific trigger event that discloses a certain level of risk. For many real refugees, though, the decision to leave their home, job, family and friends is a very difficult one and so may well be reached gradually. The unfounded belief that a genuine refugee will claim asylum at the first opportunity on or after arrival seems to be widespread. But, like the decision to leave in the first place, a decision to claim asylum can also be a hard one to make. Many refugees know little or nothing about the asylum system and many are (arguably rightly) afraid of both the authorities and the process itself.
This wishful thinking about how a real refugee is supposed to behave is not just deeply ingrained at an unconscious cultural level with officials and judges, it is also embedded in rules and legislation. Politicians have actually passed laws based on these stock narratives, in effect describing how real refugees are expected to behave. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the general tenor is that real refugees should claim asylum somewhere else and not come to the UK at all.47 Much of the training that has been given to civil servants in recent years to help them to decide sensitive claims (those based on sexuality or religion, for instance) has been about widening or adjusting the stock narrative. For example, in one recent interview for a claim made by a gay man I represented, the official repeatedly quizzed him about his emotional journey through the discovery of his sexuality. Officials have been (rightly) instructed in recent years not to quiz asylum seekers about sex, after all. The line of questioning was well-intentioned, but the official was clearly stumped when the man replied that he found his roommate sexually attractive, and the claim was refused. One stock narrative – that gay men have lots of sex and can be expected to talk about it – had been replaced by another: that gay men experience a gradual emotional journey of coming out. The whole idea of stock narratives needs to be comprehensively abandoned.
As we have seen previously, most of the asylum seekers who do manage to reach the United Kingdom are actually genuine refugees. But you would not know this from the pronouncements of politicians or from more general public attitudes. The rhetoric surrounding the relatively small numbers of Channel crossings is a case in point. Around 1,900 asylum
seekers made this dangerous crossing in 2019 and most were reported to be Iranian nationals. Iran is ruled by a repressive regime that treats political dissidents and ethnic and religious minorities with brutality. ‘We will send you back,’ was the response of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. ‘If you come illegally, you are an illegal migrant and, I’m afraid, the law will treat you as such.’ None of this is true. Refugees are protected from prosecution for illegal entry by Article 31 of the Refugee Convention and by Section 31 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. The reality is that 63 per cent of Iranian asylum seekers are granted refuge in initial decisions by the Home Office, and many more win their appeals against refusal. Most are genuine refugees and only a tiny percentage are sent back either to France or to Iran.48 And actually, with the UK’s departure after Brexit from the Common European Asylum System, the set of laws that enables the UK to remove asylum seekers to other EU countries, future returns to France or other EU countries will become virtually impossible.49
There is one other example of a self-perpetuating myth to which I want to draw attention as a conclusion to this chapter. One of the major reasons that refugees are perceived negatively by the public – and probably therefore also by officials – is their supposed inability to ‘integrate’. Where this is founded on simple racism, there is nothing to be done other than continue the hard slog of gradually shifting public attitudes towards race. But where such negativity is based on assumptions that the culture, religion, language, poverty and lack of skills of refugees makes adaptation into their new host society harder, these potentially self-fulfilling assumptions are not necessarily well-founded.
Studies have shown that Somali refugees in the United States and Canada end up far better integrated into the workforce, and with far better economic outcomes in terms of wages, than those in the United Kingdom.50 There is something that the UK is doing, or perhaps not doing, that actually holds back refugees and prevents them from integrating. For plain reasons of geography, most refugees in the US and Canada are resettled there rather than being spontaneous arrivals. They therefore do not experience the deliberately inflicted indignities of the asylum process in their new country. The same is true of refugees arriving through resettlement schemes in the UK, who are welcomed with comprehensive and ongoing assistance in finding accommodation and employment and accessing local services like a doctor and a school. This support stands in stark contrast to those refugees who arrive irregularly without prior permission. The asylum procedure itself is incomprehensible, prolonged and degrading. It gets little better once refugee status is granted. Children cannot be joined by their parents even once they are recognised as refugees, forcing them into local authority care. The handover from Home Office support as an asylum seeker to local authority support as a recognised refugee is virtually non-existent. Housing and welfare support is simply withdrawn by the Home Office with twenty-eight days’ notice; the refugee is expected to fend for him- or herself and, if without resources, work out how to access local authority assistance alone. Many are made homeless as a result.51