"Knock, Knock."
"Who's there?"
If the answer is: "An asylum seeker," more often than not there will be no punch-line. The door will simply close again. Western nations, perceiving the influx of asylum seekers as a "flood," do not want to face them as individuals in need of help. The easiest way to avoid facing them is to deny them entry in the first place.
The international standards governing refugee protection obligate nations not to return persons to countries where their lives or freedom would be threatened. However, those same standards do not obligate governments to admit the refugee or asylum seeker who harbors such fears.
Therefore, the notion seems to be gaining ground that not admitting refugees is the most convenient and economical way of handling the problem. Governments do not have to consider granting asylum to people who are never admitted. Increasingly, this has resulted in erection of legal, even physical, barriers to block access of would-be asylum seekers.
While the factors causing forced migration--wars, famine, civil strife, and persecution--have not eased in the 1980s, new communication and transportation technologies have reached the Third World in a way that has had a startling impact on refugee movements. For the first time, significant numbers have begun to travel spontaneously, to seek safety far from the scene of conflict and misery.
Before 1975, the United States received about 200 asylum applications per year; in 1985, the number had grown to more than 16,000. West Germany saw a jump from 9,494 applications in 1975 to 107,818 in 1980. Many of these asylum seekers have bypassed established channels for "processing" limited numbers of refugees from overseas; they often arrive at a port of entry without formal documentation or permission, claiming to flee political violence or the threat of persecution, and asking for refuge.
Borders blocked
In last year's World Refugee Survey, Philip Rudge, secretary of the European Consultation on Refugees and Exiles, wrote of the growing restrictiveness towards asylum seekers in what he termed "Fortress Europe." He said, "Increasingly, refugees are presented not as people in need of help, but as people who constitute a threat to the order of things; they do not have problems, they are the problem."
If anything, the response of European governments has grown more restrictive since he wrote those words. In February 1987, 12 European governments held informal consultations in Geneva purportedly to discuss harmonizing their refugee practices. The meeting was closed to the media and to nongovernmental organizations. A press statement issued when the meeting ended revealed that a shared humanitarian response to refugees had not been its goal; rather, "at the center of the discussions stood measures to ensure a better control of irregular migration to and within Europe." The approach of the European governments was to treat asylum seekers through immigration control. The view, shared by immigration services on this side of the Atlantic, is that aliens entering
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