News

Knickers and ready meals - where would we be without Marks & Spencer? Ironic, then, that in this day of anti-asylum seeker sentiments, the founder of one of our most popular high street chains, Michael Marks, was a Russian-born Jewish refugee. Born in 1859, Marks came to England as a young man who could not speak English. By 1884 he was running a stall at Kirkgate market in Leeds and in 1894 he formed a partnership with Tom Spencer. The rest, as they say, is history.

People's sympathy for asylum seekers is certainly fickle. But there are consistent trends. It seems that "spontaneous arrivals" receive a less than enthusiastic reception. Heaven Crawley, migration and equalities programme director at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), says: "It's down to how the government responds to and deals with the situation. If you welcome a group and provide them with the things they need to resettle and provide information to the public about why they need protection, then the attitude to that group reflects that.

"But if they arrive spontaneously and the public is told that they are potentially abusing the system, then people's response reflects that to a certain extent."

While Jewish refugees spontaneously fleeing Nazi Germany in the second world war were viewed suspiciously, Bosnians arriving here in the late 1990s weren't, because they were in a managed resettlement programme and the information given to the public legitimised their arrival.

So, how did we get to this state of affairs and what makes the public accept some asylum seekers but not others? There is a "good refugee, bad refugee mentality" that is cyclic, says Stephen Rylance, spokesperson for Refugee Action. He puts it down to two key factors: the exponential year-on-year growth of asylum applications, which six years ago were a third of the number today, and the media.

"Newspapers have latched on to asylum seeker issues as a useful way of getting more readers. They scapegoat them, and use asylum as a coded way to talk about race," says Rylance. Newspapers during the second world war wrote about Jewish refugees using much the same language as they do about asylum seekers today, he adds. And then in April 1968, there was politician Enoch Powell's infamous "rivers of blood" speech about immigration in which he said: "We must be mad É as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants."

Rylance believes there has been a change in attitude that started before September 11, and a change in the political climate. Liz Fekete, deputy director of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), agrees. She believes that today's situation resembles that after the second world war, when refugees had no choice but to work because there wasn't a welfare system supporting them. The difference is that, unlike during the war, afterwards refugees were welcome because the country needed labourers for reconstruction work.

"Now they are being discouraged from coming here, and when they are here it's like 19th century Poor Laws because they are not entitled to the welfare state, just subsistence," Fekete says.

"Things are worse now than in any period since the second world war because of the attack on asylum seekers' welfare rights and because of the government's attempts to get out of their obligations under the Geneva convention."

She agrees that pro-asylum seeker feelings are being eroded by politicians and the media likening them to illegal immigrants. This increased after September 11, when asylum seekers were equated with criminality and increasingly with terrorism, says Fekete. It is ironic, she adds, that most people come to this country because they are victims of terror themselves.

Britain's dispersal policy is one explanation for the growing hostility towards asylum seekers, says a report from the IRR.¹ It says the UK has failed to learn from the Continent and is repeating the same mistakes: "What we have experienced in the UK is a complete complacency about the corrosive effect that xenophobic language and stereotyping have on public debate."

Fekete says: "Dispersal programmes were carried out on the Continent after politicians repeatedly used anti-asylum seeker issues as an electoral issue. That climate builds up for a year and then asylum seekers are dispersed into it."

Historically, groups of asylum seekers coming to the UK reflect international trouble spots. And although some of the media would have us believe that they are here to take advantage of the benefits system, a recent report from the IPPR says that war, repression and human rights abuses drive more people to seek asylum in the UK than poverty.²

During the Kosovo crisis in 1998-9, the largest group of people seeking asylum in the UK by country were from former Yugoslavia (16 per cent of the total). In 2001, in the war against the Taliban, the highest number of asylum applications came from nationals of Afghanistan (13 per cent of applications). It is thought that when the Taliban asked people to report individuals suspected of opposing its rule, the numbers of Afghans seeking refuge in Europe increased. This increased again after September 11 when people fled because of conflict, drought and a lack of basic services. In 2002, the largest group was from Iraq - 17 per cent.

Crawley says: "September 11 legitimised an existing anti-Islamic feeling. Despite knowing for years what's been going on in Iraq, the government has refused asylum to Iraqis for some time, so there has been no general sympathy towards them.

"People's sympathy isn't a reflection of what groups of refugees go through. It's very much a reflection of how government deals with asylum arrivals, and how they sit with the undercurrents of concern around the broader political agenda.

"The public needs proper information about the conditions from which many asylum seekers originate so they can respond appropriately to the increase in numbers and do not feel that their hospitality is being abused."


The Vietnamese are one group of refugees who in general were viewed sympathetically when they arrived here. "Their plight was high-profile at the time, and it was portrayed in compassionate terms," says Rylance. "There was a universal understanding of what happened in Vietnam. Today there are so many localised conflicts and most people don't understand the complexities. There's a feeling of 'can we be responsible for what happens everywhere?'."

More than 1.6 million Vietnamese have settled in new countries since 1975. Most used small wooden boats to cross the South China Sea - hence the well-known term "Vietnamese boat people". The last major exodus was a result of post-war political and economic upheaval in the 1980s and 1990s. Some refugees came to the UK under the family reunion programme sponsored by relatives already living here. This started in 1976 and continues today.

It is estimated that more than a third of those attempting to escape died on their way. About half the refugees fled to neighbouring countries in south east Asia. In May 1979, then prime minister Margaret Thatcher proposed to the secretary-general of the UN that an international conference be convened to help with the problem. Sixty-five governments agreed to accept a quota of refugees to ease the burden on neighbouring countries. The UK accepted 10,000 of these "enterprising people", as Thatcher called them. Another quota followed in the early 1980s.

Vietnamese refugees arrived at reception areas all over the UK, generally staying there for several months before being allocated housing - often on a no-choice basis. Refugee Action grew out of one of these reception projects. Although some Vietnamese people were housed in cities, many were dispersed to remote rural areas in Scotland and Wales. Many moved on to bigger cities where there was a larger Vietnamese community, such as London.

Refugee Action has recently launched the Vietnamese oral history project to preserve the stories of refugees who have settled in this country. Testimonies reveal a common thread of prejudice, though less charged and politicised than it is now. "Refugee wasn't a dirty word then," says Rylance.

Many found the early stages of resettlement, which was similar to the current dispersal system, difficult. Rylance says that they felt being scattered was a setback and it took them years to resettle into communities. "The lesson we learned was that refugees need sustainable communities and to be able to help themselves. We trained some as social workers so they could help their own community.

"The first generation of refugees found it much harder to adjust to life here. Many people felt quite cut off from mainstream British society for many years, and looked to their children to be the success stories."

The public's perception of asylum seekers is taken from what the government tells it, says Crawley. "I don't think it's even as crude as race. The way eastern Europeans are treated now shows that being white doesn't necessarily save you from hostility. In a way, history is repeating itself."

¹ Institute of Race Relations, The Dispersal of Xenophobia, IRR, 2000

² S Castles, H Crawley and S Loghna, States of Conflict: Causes and Patterns of Forced Migration to the EU and Policy Responses, IPPR, 2003

Where do refugees arrive from?

According to Home Office estimates, refugee groups coming to the UK since the second world war include:

• 250,000 Polish nationals (1940s and 1950s) 
• 50,000 other eastern Europeans (1940s and 1950s) 
• 17,000 Hungarian nationals (1956) 
• 5,000 Czech nationals (1968) 
• 3,000 Chileans (1970s) 
• 19,000 south east Asians (1970s) 
• 40,000 people from more than 50 countries who sought asylum on an individual basis  Since the 1980s, the government has also accepted these refugee groups as part of government programmes: 
• 5,820 south east Asians (1985-95) 
• 2,500 Bosnians (1992-7) 
• 4,345 Kosovars (1999)

What is a refugee?

Under international law - the 1951 UN Convention Relating to Refugees - the term "refugee" is defined as someone who: 

• has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion; 
• is outside the country they belong to or normally reside in, and  
• is unable or unwilling to return home for fear of persecution. 

At first, the convention applied only to European nationals, as it was drawn up in response to the millions of refugees in post-second world war Europe. But in 1967, the UN extended it to cover anybody in the world at any time.