Special report: Asylum: A strange sort of sanctuary

Date: 15/03/03

As the West contemplates another war and more refugees, are current policies on asylum the best way to help them?

THE prize is tremendous. A passport that will take you across most of the world's borders, without the need for a visa or a humiliating wrangle at a foreign embassy. A new life in a society offering jobs, opportunities and safety from crime and civil unrest. A permanent home for your family. Free education, and probably welfare benefits if you lose your job or can't cope. All these are yours if you successfully claim asylum in one of the world's wealthy countries. No wonder a system once intended to protect the vulnerable has become a beacon to the frustrated in the 120 or so countries around the world where governance is a mess and opportunity scarce.

Now the rich world's governments are alarmed by this back door for immigration. Already, Iraqis are the largest single category of refugees, accounting for 11.2% of all European asylum-seekers in the first nine months of 2002, and a war would swell the flow. At the same time, asylum-seekers have been picked up as security threats in several countries. Nothing makes governments twitchier than the confusion of asylum and terrorism. America drastically tightened its asylum laws after an asylum-seeker tried to blow up the World Trade Centre in 1993.

Europe is in any case more nervous about immigration than the countries whose populations have been built by immigrants. The annual number of asylum-seekers, which rose sharply in the early 1990s, has been fairly stable for some years, although the flow has switched among countries as one door after another has closed a bit more. Currently the fuss is greatest in Britain, for the simple reason that it is now the leading destination - receiving a quarter of all applications, according to John Salt of University College London. But asylum-seekers are unpopular elsewhere, too. In Switzerland last November, voters rejected by a mere 3,000 votes a referendum asking whether more asylum-seekers should be kept out. A year earlier, the Danes voted for a politician who promised (and has delivered) drastic cuts in asylum-seekers.

As asylum-seekers come back into the spotlight, governments are more conscious of the cost of handling them. Fifteen countries make up the Inter-Governmental Consultations on Asylum, Refugee and Migration Policies in Europe, North America and Australia (IGC). The IGC'S published estimate of the cost to taxpayers of the 450,000-500,000 people who apply for asylum each year in the 15 countries is $10 billion a year. The true figure may now be at least a couple of billion dollars more; all countries downplay the numbers.

Much of this money goes not directly to asylum-seekers themselves, but to the bureaucrats who process them, the lawyers who represent them and the people who support them. Moreover, even the lowest estimate dwarfs the annual budget of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which looks after some 20m people, many in refugee camps. Last year UNHCR did not meet its planned budget, which had to be cut to $710m. That is less than a quarter of the annual sum that Britain alone spends on processing and supporting asylum-seekers. No wonder Ruud Lubbers, the former Dutch prime minister who now heads UNHCR, complains that the West has largely forgotten the plight of the people in the world's refugee camps.

What has gone wrong? In the wake of the second world war, countries adopted the 1951 Refugee Convention, covering those in Europe who had already fled persecution. This was extended in a 1967 protocol to cover all refugees, giving everyone the right to seek asylum and refugees the right not to be sent to a place where they would be persecuted or tortured.

The convention and the subsequent protocol were adopted when there were few refugees, mostly from communist regimes. However, these well-meaning pieces of international law have become almost the only channel through which most immigrants can hope to enter most rich countries. Few European governments allow any immigration of people who merely want to work, unless they have specific skills; even more permissive countries, such as America, Australia and Canada, rarely allow in unskilled workers.

An elaborate legal process has evolved to determine whether an immigrant who claims the right to asylum really merits it under the terms of the convention. In recent years, the answer has usually been no. Only 12% of applicants in IGC countries in 1992-2000 won asylum status (plus a few more on subsequent appeal), and a further 6% were granted some other humanitarian ranking. In other words, 80% of those who pass through the elaborate and expensive screening process of the rich world are not considered genuine.

Does that mean countries are being too harsh? Undoubtedly, some deserving cases are turned down. But alternative routes are so few and the prize for success so great that there is an immense incentive to break the rules.

For example, a war encourages the rich countries to be generous. There is, after all, no likelihood that a refugee will be returned to a country at war. So in any bout of civil unrest, some of those who claim to come from the war-torn land may actually hail from somewhere else. During the war in Kosovo, generous countries freely admitted refugees, some of whom undoubtedly came from neighbouring (peaceful but poor) Albania. No doubt some of today's “Iraqi” refugees really come from other unpleasant places.

How hard to be fair

Most countries' asylum policies struggle to disentangle humanitarian concern from immigration control. Two particular problems arise. One is how to process people fairly but quickly; the other, what to do with those who are rejected.

Both tasks are made harder by the difficulty of knowing with any certainty where a refugee comes from. Only 20% of those who claim asylum arrive with identity papers. Some destroy their passports en route; others hand them to the smugglers who have brought them. Several countries have special language-analysis units to help with the job. Of asylum-seekers interviewed by Switzerland's language-analysis unit, 70% promptly go into hiding. Of those whose application is rejected and who then go home, 80% return to the country that the unit has judged they come from.

In designing an effective way to process applicants, some countries take the view that it is pointless to subject to an expensive legal process those who are likely to remain in the country anyway. Most of the countries of southern Europe have relatively few asylum-seekers because they are more willing to turn a blind eye to illegal or semi-legal migration.

Canada, by contrast, has an unusually high level of acceptances of asylum claims partly because it has a more generous definition of eligibility than most other countries. However, says David Matas, a senior migration lawyer, Canada also does not waste time putting through an elaborate legal rigmarole people who are unlikely to be returned to their country. Elspeth Guild, a British immigration lawyer, believes this principle should be extended. “What is the point of putting Iraqi Kurds through the asylum system?” she demands. “You aren't going to send them back.”

In other countries, the legal process can be interminable. The longer it lasts, the harder it is to keep asylum-seekers in some sort of detention and the greater the likelihood that they will find work, legal or not, and otherwise become integrated into their new country. In 1994-95 the United States reformed its process, depriving applicants of permission to work while waiting for their cases to be settled, as long as that took no more than six months. Applicants also received no welfare benefits. When the reform was under discussion, immigrant-support groups did a survey and found that most asylum-claimants were helped by their family or community. The removal of work permits dramatically reduced asylum claims but, says Susan Martin of Georgetown University, approval rates also rose sharply.

While they wait for their cases to be determined, asylum-seekers in most European countries can get welfare benefits more easily than they can get permission to work. Not only does that send out unfortunate signals to immigrants, who may not have come across welfare before and are disproportionately likely to be dependent on it in the more generous parts of Europe; it also makes taxpayers cross.

Australia has tackled the processing of refugees in a quite different way. Its policy of managed migration includes accepting a generous share of refugees from UNHCR camps each year, as well as a number of other asylum-seekers who apply in third countries outside Australia. But those who arrive without visas and lodge a claim are detained, together with others who do not have visas, while their claim is heard. The policy is expensive and makes liberal Australians uneasy. But, together with the country's geography, it seems to have been remarkably successful in keeping away boatloads of would-be refugees.

However fast and fair a country's processing system, it will be pointless if those who are rejected do not go home. However, once people are in a country, it is hard to make them budge. Governments everywhere hate bundling handcuffed immigrants on to aircraft; and, alarmingly often, deportees get killed. In January three French police officers were suspended after a Somali immigrant died while being deported; in December four French officers manhandled a Malian television crew who filmed them restraining a Malian illegal immigrant on a flight from Paris.

Even if an immigrant agrees to go, the country he says he comes from may refuse to accept him. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, caused ructions when he suggested that foreign-aid policy might be tied to a country's willingness to take back its wandering citizens. A European Union delegation has begun talks with China, which is particularly stubborn about accepting returned migrants. Switzerland has recently opened an office in West Africa to try to determine where its rejected African asylum-seekers come from.

Because of such difficulties, countries try harder and harder to stop asylum-seekers ever reaching their shores. America intercepts fleeing Haitians and Cubans at sea and returns them (although Cubans who make it to Florida generally get permission to stay, as political refugees). Ms Martin worries that the Coast Guard rarely bothers to ask those on Haitian boats whether they are seeking asylum before dumping them back. In January, seven vessels from Spain, Britain, France, Portugal and Italy set sail from Gibraltar to patrol the southern Mediterranean, in a first step towards a common European border guard.

Countries often hope that a reputation for a tough approach will keep the hopefuls away. In fact, surveys of asylum-seekers tend to find that they know little, when they set out, about immigration policy in the countries they end up in. But some learn on the way, and those who smuggle them are extremely well informed. Khalid Koser of University College London, who has studied smugglers and their passengers, reports that the payment system has altered: smugglers now receive part of their pay after the immigrant has arrived. That gives them a strong incentive to take people to countries where they are likely to arrive safely, be allowed to stay and be able to get a job to pay their debts.

Get out and stay out

Policy on asylum-seekers in recent years has emphasised two issues. One is simply keeping people at bay; the other is to collaborate more. When one country puts up barriers, the one next door comes under more pressure. At present, few can agree even on who is a refugee. Some countries, such as Canada, accept women fleeing abusive husbands or the threat of genital mutilation; many do not accept as refugees those who claim to be escaping civil unrest rather than persecution at the hands of government, to the dismay of fleeing Sri Lankans and Algerians.

However, in Europe, says Kay Hailbronner of Konstanz University in Germany, a common regime has begun to emerge. In January, the members of the European Union, with Norway and Iceland, launched Eurodac, a system to fingerprint all asylum-claimants and share the information throughout the region. The EU is also trying to hammer out a common definition of asylum-seekers and common standards for dealing with them. That could discourage asylum-shopping, but would also frustrate the desire of individual countries to control this politically delicate issue directly.

Everywhere, too, countries hope to send back asylum-seekers who have passed through a safe third country on their way to refuge. Canada has recently negotiated such an agreement with the United States (through which any asylum-seeker travelling by land must obviously pass). The countries of the EU are taking advantage of the desire of their eastern neighbours for closer economic ties to negotiate such agreements with them. Refugees who would once have ended up in Germany now get stuck in Poland, Hungary or the Czech Republic.

But such buck-passing raises a bigger issue. Does asylum policy protect the people who are most in need? Nicholas Van Hear of the Centre for Development Research in Copenhagen has looked at Somali refugees and at Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka. In an unpublished paper, he argues that asylum migration is mainly the preserve of the well-to-do: at a cost of more than $10,000 for a passage from Sri Lanka to the West, and about $5,000 for one from Somalia, it is beyond the financial reach of everyone else. The middling well-off migrate to more prosperous and stable nearby countries (the Gulf in the case of Sri Lanka); the poor stay put.

In addition to being disproportionately well-off, asylum-seekers tend to be mainly male: more mobile, more willing to take risks. Refugee camps, by contrast, typically house large numbers of women and children. So the vast sums of money spent on asylum-seekers in the West go to those who least need help.

A better way

This suggests an alternative strategy. Should governments separate the concept of protecting asylum-seekers, to which the refugee convention binds them, from that of admitting them to the country they want to go to? As the International Organisation for Migration points out in its annual report, published last month, it would be consistent with a state's obligations under international law to send a refugee to a third country, provided there are safeguards in place to ensure that he would not be sent on to a country where he might be persecuted or tortured.

This possibility is now widely discussed. Mr Lubbers, UNHCR's astute head, sees the danger that perversion of the asylum route might one day lead infuriated recipient countries to back out of the refugee convention entirely. He also has far too little money and far too many refugees to care for. So he proposes what he calls “Convention Plus”. Do not dismantle the refugee convention, but redirect it. Why not, he asks, shift the emphasis from protecting a few in rich countries to protecting many nearer to their homes? People who flee to developing countries (as many Afghanis fled to Pakistan, for instance) are far more likely to return than those who reach the fleshpots of Hamburg or London.

Meanwhile the British government is exploring the possibility of copying the Australians (article). It could remove those who turn up and request asylum, either to established refugee camps where their claims would be processed along with those of other refugees, or to special processing centres on the perimeter of the European Union. At a UNHCR meeting on March 7th, Mr Lubbers appeared to favour the British proposals. His ideas for Convention Plus will now be refined by a forum of interested parties, starting in June.

There are plenty of possible problems. Judges might not allow the removal of asylum-seekers to be processed elsewhere; countries might refuse to accept would-be asylum-seekers into their camps; locals might grumble that refugees were being pampered.

Even if a plan of this sort succeeds, and flows of asylum-seekers dry up, no rich country should imagine that illegal immigration will stop. The tax burden of paying for the asylum process will go. But the pressure will remain for migrants to leave the world's ill-governed countries and head for the ones where demand for cheap labour flourishes. If the rich world does not allow immigrants in legally, they will continue to come through the back door.

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