They cannot go back to their homelands, where they could expect far harsher treatment than at the high-security jail at Belmarsh, where most are held.They also have the right to appeal against the Home Secretary’s decision to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission. By no rational argument could they be called a threat to the welfare state, but in a political culture which can barely distinguish between legitimate migrant workers, illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers and welfare recipients, a rational argument will not be easy to sustain That is why nerves in the Cabinet are on edge.. Most of the new arrivals will be young, fit, and keen to speak English, and if government policy works effectively, they will contribute to the welfare state by paying tax, taking little from it in return. It may become harder for the gypsies to continue to continue claiming refugee status in Britain when their countries of origins are full members of the EU, but their presence appears to have misled some tabloid headline writers into thinking that all East European migrants are gypsies, or draw benefits.Blunkett is expected to announce tomorrow changes to the benefits system, so that migrant workers from East Europe will, for a long period, be ineligible to claim.
Slovenia is wealthier than Greece or Portugal, and will quickly become a net contributor to EU funds. The poorest new arrival is Latvia, whose economic output per capita is about a third of the UK’s, but even there, more than a quarter of the population own cars and mobile phones, and its economy has been growing at a rate far above the EU average.The number of asylum-seekers from these countries is negligible, apart from a well known exception: several thousand Romany gypsies who arrived in the UK to escape racial harassment As asylum applicants, they received benefits. All applications, he said, should be handled in reception centres abroad. It is also still Conservative policy that any applicants who manage to slip in would be immediately removed to an unspecified island until their cases have been dealt with.It is not only on the hard right that Third World immigration is seen as a dilemma. The current edition of Prospect, which straddles the party divide, includes a long essay by its editor David Goodhart, which poses the question that Britain may already be “too diverse”.
He argues: “If welfare states demand that we pay into a common fund on which we can all draw at times of need, it is important that we feel that most people have made the same effort to be self-supporting and will not take advantage. We need to be reassured that strangers, especially those from other countries, have the same idea of reciprocity.”The political left will argue about whether Goodhart has a point or whether – as the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips has suggested – his article simply proves that “nice people do racism too.”Whatever the outcome, that is irrelevant to the issue of whether people from the 10 “accession” countries of the EU should be allowed free entry into the UK or whether, as Howard demands, they should have to apply for work permits The new EU members are not poor by world standards. The immigration service, based in Croydon, was so clogged up that it soon had a backlog of 60,000 cases. The numbers of applicants took another upward leap to more than 91,000 in 1999, and rose until October 2002 when there were 8,770 in one month.In January 2003, Blair startled the House of Commons by promising to halve the number of asylum applications by the following September. He proposed last week that no one should be allowed to claim political asylum in Britain. For a variety of reasons, including the closure of the refugee camp at Sangatte, the figure did indeed go below 4,500 a month, and Thursday’s announcement will probably show another fall.Even so, the laws covering asylum-seekers are about to become harsher, with jail sentences for applicants who delay proceedings by destroying their documents – but still not harsh enough for Howard. The Government is now negotiating to send back huge numbers of Afghans and Sri Lankans.Asylum-seekers first surfaced as an issue in 1991, when the number of applications trebled in a single year to 45,000.
At one time, it was almost automatic that a Kosovan Albanian could obtain permission to stay in Britain, but in two years, some 20,000 were told that their applications had now been rejected. They have fled from some of the poorest and most violent places on the planet: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sri Lanka. They do not work while they are waiting for their applications to be processed because it is illegal, and, contrary to the impression given by the tabloids, their chances of being allowed to stay are slim.During 2002, the authorities gave 28,400 applicants permission to stay, and rejected more than 55,000 applications. Most asylum-seekers are desperately poor by western standards They come from different cultural and religious backgrounds Many do not speak English. Ministers and their Conservative opponents agree that there has been a problem for years with “bogus” asylum-seekers.The difference between them is that Labour claims that the Government is getting the problem under control, whereas the Tories say that only they would be tough enough to deal with it.Asylum-seekers and East European economic migrants have two things in common: they come from abroad, and they are nearly all under 35 There the similarity ends.
