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Almost every day now we hear about “asylum seekers” and “detention centres” on the news. People who seek asylum in this country are invariably portrayed as “bogus” and a threat to the people of this country; as a group who come here only to sponge off our over-generous state system or perhaps even to steal our jobs.
It is always easy to be swept along by the tide of public opinion, the media and even politicians, but have you ever stopped to consider just who these people are, why they are here and what they have gone through to get here? What would it take for you to leave all your possessions, your family, your friends, your job, your security, to go to another country where you don't even speak the language let alone know anyone there?
Fact: every year 55 million people are made refugees throughout the world; they don't want to move, they want to stay where they were, but due to war, political situations and other life threatening reasons they are forced to leave their homes. We see them all the time on the TV as refugees. They often stay in neighbouring countries, which are often poor anyway and cannot afford to cope with such numbers. Sure, we all give donations to the Mozambique refugee appeals (or whatever this month's cause is), but the heart of the matter is that 54 million refugees are taken in each year by the world's poorest countries.
When we see refugees on TV we want to help and great effort is made to raise money and awareness of their problems. We drive trucks across Europe to the Balkans, send planes to Africa and boats to Bangladesh. Why don't we associate the word “refugee” with the phrase “asylum seeker”? Is it so much easier to deal with them when they are en masse and far away?
Out of the 1 million refugees worldwide who look to move to Western countries — the countries with the best resources for looking after refugees — only 50,000 choose Britain. So what do we do with them once they arrive? One of the new initiatives which seems to be becoming increasingly popular in Britain is the detaining of asylum seekers. In 1995, there were 600 asylum seekers being detained, yet by January 2000 this had risen to almost 1000. UN guidelines state that detainees should not be held in conventional prisons, yet on 1st October 1996, there were 343 people being held in conventional prisons and 25 in police cells and this practice still continues. The Methodist Conference Report on Immigration and Asylum states that the detention of asylum seekers should not normally take place.
A reason commonly given for the detention of asylum seekers is to improve race relations in Britain. Surely a move which would do far more for race relations would be for the media to stop showing asylum seekers in a bad light and playing on people's racial fears and mistrust. We are also told that asylum seekers must be detained as a deterrent to others. This too is blatantly untrue, the only way we are going to solve the problem of asylum seekers once and for all, is to solve the problems in their own countries which they are trying to escape when they come here. For people who have already undergone persecution and endured much hardship and suffering, imprisonment is just additional trauma they can well do without. I ask you consider this next time you see asylum seekers on the evening news, and to pray for those unjustly imprisoned in this country, just for wanting to escape persecution in their own.
References: All facts, figures and quotes were taken from “Crucifixion to Crucifixion”, an (as yet) unpublished account by Indarjit Bhogal, President of the Methodist Conference, about his pilgrimages to raise awareness about asylum seekers and the issues surrounding them.
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Last modified: 25th November 2005
![["Fortress Europe" cartoon]](asylum.gif)