Examination of Witnesses (Questions 660
- 679)
TUESDAY 9 SEPTEMBER 2003
MR MOHAMMAD
FAHIM AKBARI,
MR ZEMMARAI
SHOHABI AND
MR HASHMATULLAH
ZARABI
Q660 David Winnick: Perhaps you might
apply for a Home Office job doing that.
Mr Shohabi: I wish I could.
Q661 Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you
very, very much indeed. We have another witness, so we need to
press on, but I think the whole Committee appreciates the frankness
and the openness with which you have answered questions. Thank
you very much indeed.
Mr Shohabi: Thank you.
Mr Akbari: We appreciate your
questions and thank you very much.
Witness: Dr Heaven Crawley, Director
of the Migration and Equalities Programme, Institute for Public
Policy Research (IPPR), examined.
Q662 Chairman: Dr Crawley, thank
you very much indeed for coming. For the record, could you just
introduce yourself and your position.
Dr Crawley: My name is Dr Heaven
Crawley. I am Director of the Migration and Equalities Programme
at the Institute for Public Policy Research where we have undertaken
a range of different projects, looking at research evidence which
might inform the development of policy in this area.
9 SEPTEMBER 2003 DR
HEAVEN CRAWLEY
Q663 Chairman: And you were previously
at the Home Office.
Dr Crawley: I was indeed at the
Home Office where, until September last year, I was responsible
for running that part of the research programme which looks at
asylum procedures, immigration procedures and why people come
to the UK and what is happening in Europe.
Q664 Chairman: In the work you have
published recently you argue that ". . . indicators of conflict
are far more significant than indicators of development as explanatory
factors for flows of asylum seekers to the EU". You certainly
seem to show that extreme poverty and deprivation do not correlate
particularly with asylum seekers. Would you agree though, that
that does not necessarily mean that most individual asylum seekers
are necessarily fleeing conflict rather than seeking to improve
their economic position?
Dr Crawley: Before I directly
answer that question I think it would be worth saying something
about the context of this particular piece of work. What we did
was look at asylum seeking in Europe over a ten-year period between
1990 and 2000 and we took a fairly global perspective on this.
We were not interested in individual cases, we were interested
in the numbers of flows and where they were coming from, therefore
trying to identify what it was that was driving those people to
leave or that could be used as explanatory factors as to what
was causing those movements. Just to put some caveats around the
research, the data have limitations around their usefulness; there
are problems with the data. We are aware that the research also
makes generalisations across countries but also, of course, across
a ten-year period, which in terms of individual fluctuation is
quite significant and that some of the questions we set out to
answer in relation to particular policies, we did not in fact
manage to answer as fully as we should have liked. We also accept
in the report that just because we have taken this overarching
view of asylum flows does not mean that everybody in each of those
categories is genuinely in need of protection. What we are trying
to do is to step back from the detail of individual cases and
say "Hang on a minute. If you look at flows into Europe over
a ten-year period, are there factors in common to those groups
of individuals which might begin to explain what is going on here?".
Part of the reason for doing that is a very simple fact, which
is that 60% of all asylum applications over that ten-year period
came from ten countries. So it seemed to us that if we could identify
what was going on in those ten countries, that would start to
give us some sense of what the underlying bigger factors were,
even if the individuals within that had different individual motivations
for their decision to move.
Q665 Chairman: Could I just explore
some possible limitations to that? You were here in the previous
session and heard the Afghan witnesses acknowledge that a substantial
number of people claiming asylum as Afghans were not Afghans at
all; at least they suspected there were substantial numbers of
people from Pakistan, or indeed other countries, who presented
themselves here as asylum seekers from Afghanistan. Does that
throw any doubts on a fundamental part of your research saying
that most asylum seekers come from ten countries? Is it possible,
once it actually becomes known that if you present yourself as
coming from Somalia or Iraq, or wherever, you would have a better
chance of getting in, that other people would do that?
Dr Crawley: I did not hear them
say "substantial". I certainly heard them acknowledge
that there were issues around nationality and some people claimed
to be a nationality other than their own. The difficulty, of course,
is that this is a problem and it is an issue and we know that
this happens. Even if you accept that a certain proportion of
applicants might be going down that route, nonetheless the numbers
are so substantial over a ten-year period that statistically I
do not think it would be significant. In fact the very fact that
people claim to be one nationality when they are not, hooks them
into countries where there are underlying conflicts. If those
conflicts did not exist, or that underlying issue did not exist
in that country, then arguably even that group would not want
to tie themselves to that category. I take your point and I think
there is an issue about nationality testing, but in the overall
scheme of looking, as we did, not just at forced migration to
the UK, but to Europe over a ten-year period, the themes and the
issues are so strong and dominant that it would not be enough
just to undermine the overall finding.
Q666 Chairman: You just used the
phrase "forced migrant", which you do consistently in
your research. What do you mean by the phrase "forced migrant",
given that there are many other people from the same countries
who do not leave? There must be some element of choice or of opportunity
involved. What is the basis for saying "forced migrant"?
Dr Crawley: The research we have
done, and indeed the research the Home Office has done, acknowledges
that how people behave in these situations is a reflection both
of the situation in their countries of origin and a whole range
of other intervening factors, both to do with their personality
and their personal experiences, their context, but also information
they have about the world outside of that immediate context. So
we accept that there are "pull" factors of one kind
or another as well as "push" factors. We also accept—and
I think the report specifies it—that there is really a continuum
often between what you might define as a legitimate refugee fleeing
persecution at one end of the spectrum and an economic migrant
at the other. In fact, partly because human experience is very
complicated, often those things become inter-related, but also,
because conflict and underdevelopment are often very much inter-related,
because underdevelopment can be associated quite closely with
human rights abuse, making that distinction is often very difficult.
What we are talking about for the purposes of the book is looking
at asylum seekers, so they are a legal category in the European
context, and that was our start point, but we accept entirely
that people are pushed as well as pulled. The premise is that
by definition an asylum seeker would claim that he or she is pushed.
By definition, a whole range of other factors would determine
where he or she might turn up.
Q667 Chairman: That is very clear;
thank you. The research deals with the EU as a whole. Are there
any significant differences about the UK's experience which might
lead us into false conclusions if we just took the EU position
as a whole?
Dr Crawley: It is noticeable that
one of the things we did, as well as the top ten refugee producing
countries, was to extend that analysis into the top 20 refugee
producing countries. In actual fact, in virtually every EU country,
including the UK, you will find that at least seven or eight of
the top 15 European countries are then in the top ten. There are
some differences in terms of which particular nationalities go
to which particular countries at particular moments in time, but
overall the top ten or 15 countries which produce asylum seekers
tend to be fairly evenly distributed over that ten-year period.
There are individual explanatory factors as to why one nationality
might choose to come to the UK because of linguistic factors,
because of historical links, over another country but ultimately
it is more or less the same mix of asylum seekers in Europe and
that mix shifts around in different countries, often depending
on changes in visa regimes, changes in country conditions etcetera.
It is essentially the same groups or nationalities of people;
it is just that the actual composition, in terms of who comes
one, two, three, four, five down the list in order of magnitude,
moves about.
Q668 Chairman: Were you able to sort
out those factors in more detail? You will have heard in the earlier
session some quite strong personal anecdotal examples as to why
people ended up applying for asylum in the UK rather than in France
and Italy from one witness this morning, though you cannot generalise.
Was your research also able to say what the shifts were in individual
European countries which led in one particular year over a period
of time to certain countries getting more of a certain group of
asylum seekers?
Dr Crawley: This particular piece
of work does not, but if it is okay with you, I should like to
go back to another couple of pieces of work in which I have been
involved, which do directly touch upon that issue. One is a piece
of work that the Home Office undertook on the decision making
of asylum applicants, exactly the question you were looking at
with the earlier witnesses. Why it is that certain individuals
seemingly choose the UK over and above any other European country.
That evidence actually coincided very strongly with the discussion
this morning, in terms of people making choices within a set number
of constraints. So people have really very limited information,
both personally but also in terms of perceptions. Perceptions
play a critical role in all of this; people perceive that things
will be better in X, Y, Z country. That tallies very strongly.
The other thing is that the research which was undertaken by the
Home Office on the impact of asylum policies in Europe shows that
as asylum policy in Europe toughened up, for want of better word,
during the course of the 1990s, there were some obvious impacts,
where a toughening up in Germany, for example, led to an obvious
and almost immediate decrease in the number of applications, but
that actually what that did meant that other countries received
more applications over the same period. What has happened is that
you have different countries introducing rafts of policy in this
area, which have become increasingly complicated and often it
is hard to distinguish which bit of the policy is having which
impact because there are so many different factors involved. We
know from the existing research that it is hard to say that one
particular factor has this particular impact on applications.
More often it is a whole range of different factors introduced
at the same time which may or may not have an impact on applications.
Q669 Mr Prosser: You have just given
the Committee some of the context under which people move from
one country to another, especially from countries where there
is a strong, in your words, "push" factor and forced
migration. You talked about personal experiences, knowledge of
the world, etcetera, but is not an essential element that it is
largely the sons of very wealthy families who succeed in leaving
those countries?
Dr Crawley: It is certainly true
that those who are wealthier and more educated are more likely
to have both the economic resources and the networking and the
other knowledge which is needed to make this happen. You are right,
they are often sons, because in those countries often gender relationships
mean that women are in a much more difficult position when it
comes to getting out. In that sense, the whole debate around why
asylum seekers come to the UK, or to Europe indeed, is quite interesting.
On the one hand we are talking about asylum seekers potentially
being economic migrants: on the other hand they are potentially
some of the better off within the countries from which they originate,
the more skilled, the more entrepreneurial you might argue. That
is why I am saying that the relationship between poverty and asylum
is less clear than you might imagine, in fact many of the countries
we are looking at in terms of the top ten for applications are
in what you might call middle income countries, they are not the
poorest of the poor. Indeed within those countries it is the better
off who will have the capacity to migrate and that is why we often
see something called a "migration hump" in developing
countries, where often the human rights situation, the conflict
situation does not particularly improve but the economics might,
so more people are in a position to make choices about how they
respond to that human rights abuse.
Q670 Mr Prosser: Returning now to
the European context, how useful are the EU action plans for tackling
the causes of forced migration in specific countries? Can you
suggest ways they might be improved and made more effective?
Dr Crawley: You will probably
have gathered from the report that we are quite critical of the
failure of European countries individually, but this research
is talking more about at the Commission level, to respond appropriately
to what we see as being quite strong evidence about the causes
of forced migration. On paper at least the Commission and individual
Member States have a commitment to tackling the causes of forced
migration. It has been there since 1992, it is reiterated in practical
terms in the High Level Working Group and that group has produced
action plans with regard to six countries to try to look at what
is going on on the ground and how the conditions in those countries
might be improved so that people did not feel they wanted to leave.
The problem is partly that there are only six countries which
have been selected for the action plans, of which four are top
ten producing countries for asylum seekers, the others, Albania
and Morocco, are mostly producers of economic migrants not asylum
seekers. Those action plans have been quite widely criticised
for saying quite a lot on paper, but, in terms of the practical
implementation of policy, being really quite superficial. They
will talk about the need to improve human rights abuse in Iraq
in this particular instance, but they will not say how you might
do it, what policies might lead to that and how you might measure
the success. By contrast, arguably, some of the other policies
which have been developed at the European Commission level around,
for example, border controls, irregular migration, illegal working,
etcetera are much more detailed in what specific policies might
be put in place to tackle that problem. It seems to us—and
I think it is reflected in the report—that that suggests
really quite a short-term perspective on the asylum problem in
Europe. I say "problem" because that is how it is perceived.
Most of the measures and the policy effort is going into an immediate,
"How do we stop people coming here? How do we make sure that
procedures here are sufficiently robust?", whereas what we
are suggesting is needed is a much more long-term view which looks
at development, human rights abuse, how we invest, the use of
trade as a tool as a lever for making change happen.
Q671 Mr Prosser: You are very critical
about that in your report, but do the two things not go hand in
hand? Is there not a clear linkage? Do you not have a link? Do
you not have to look ahead and take away the causes of forced
migration and conflict but at the same time keep your borders
secure and resist illegal movements?
Dr Crawley: Absolutely. I could
not agree with you more. The problem is that at both the European
level and at the national level there is not that balance between
the two. What there is, is very much a short-term immediate issue
and not a long-term prognosis and that is reflected in some of
the proposals which are on the table in terms of how you might
address asylum. Even, to be honest, the report which came out
yesterday, the Kirkhope Commission report, which is trying to
look at how you might go beyond this, suggests that you withdraw,
you finance a new system by withdrawing all of the overseas development
aid from the European Commission budget in order to finance our
asylum system here. That to me seems fundamentally at odds with
what we know from the evidence is leading to flows in the first
place. You can put all your resources into tackling the problem
here but if you take away your resources and your political energy
and effort from addressing the causes of forced migration, tackling
development, working out what is going on with trade and investment,
then all you are doing is stocking up your problems for an ongoing,
very costly procedure, which is not beneficial to us nor, arguably,
the individual asylum seekers who are involved in it.
Q672 Mr Prosser: You also opposed
a linkage between economic aid and readmission. Why is that?
Dr Crawley: We do not oppose the
linkage between looking at migration and development, in fact
that is exactly what the report says we should be trying to do.
We should be ensuring that development initiatives have positive
impacts in terms of people's propensity to migrate, that is they
reduce it. What we are concerned about—and it is set in
this overall context of having a relatively short-term perspective
on policy making—is that if all you do is—and I am
not saying this is all people have done, but if your solution
to some of this problem is—to say "We will want you
to take people back whom we have decided to return and if you
do not take those people back, we will remove our development
aid", if you know that what is going on within that country
is often under-development which is tied into human rights and
conflict, then one consequence of that, we suggest, might be that
the fundamental factor leading to those people leaving in the
first place is actually exacerbated, that is the stuff which might
make that situation improve is taken away. It is very difficult,
because often when conflicts occur internationally the first thing
the international community does is say "Let's stop sending
development aid", but to me that is quite a reactive process
in terms of what that means for long-term migration flows into
Europe.
Q673 Chairman: How realistic is it
to have these action plans? Take Iraq, which has been a major
source of asylum seekers, could there have been any action plan
which would have reduced the number of Iraqi asylum seekers short
of regime change, which appears, to some of us at least, not all
of us, around the table to bring its own problems in terms of
an action plan for what is happening there at the moment. It is
all very well to say we should have action plans, but when you
are dealing with somewhere like Iraq, what actually could have
been done by the EU which would have minimised the number of Iraqi
asylum seekers?
Dr Crawley: I really do not want
to get into the detail of Iraq, because I do not think it would
be very helpful to the discussion. It is very difficult to look
back retrospectively in any situation and see what we could have
done differently, which would have made that situation different.
I am not saying either that action plans are a solution, because
you can have all sorts of things on paper which do not translate
into practice. What there is not at the European level, and it
is true also at the national level, is a real thought process
between what we do in terms of foreign policy, what we do in terms
of trade, development and then the consequences of that in terms
of migration. If we know—and this is a very specific example
and it is to do with Iraq—historically, because we have
the benefit of hindsight, that there were certain things going
on in terms of the sale of certain types of equipment to Iraq
by the countries of Europe which in the end was used to produce
the weapons for chemical attacks on the Kurdish people. This arguably
had an impact on the ability of the Kurds to resist what was going
on in Northern Iraq in terms of Halabja and other towns. It is
easy to say this with retrospect, but we knew at that time that
there was a particular regime in place and because of our economic
interests, our trade interests, our foreign policy interests,
we did things which arguably might have contributed to that outcome.
What I am saying is that that applies to any other country with
which we are engaged and of course we are engaged with very many
countries in terms of trade, foreign policy, international development.
We need to think through what the consequences of those actions
might be ultimately in terms of people then coming to us seeking
protection from the very regime we have intentionally or otherwise—and
often I am afraid it is unintentionally—leant support to.
Q674 Mrs Dean: Do you think that
the use of overseas asylum processing centres would be a helpful
means of "internationalising" the asylum problems?
Dr Crawley: This is going to sound
as though I am skirting the question, but it is not intentional.
I think it depends what you mean by an overseas processing centre.
I say that, because we know that in the current discussions, both
within the Government, within the Conservative Party in terms
of their proposals, at the European level, within the UNHCR, within
the voluntary sector, the NGOs, all of those different constituencies
are talking about overseas processing centres, zones of protection,
regional processing centres and I am not always convinced that
we are all talking about the same thing. That is the caveat. If
what we are talking about is that we put more of our resources,
more of our political energy into solving situations at the point
of origin and with that the resources to provide safety to people
within their immediate neighbouring environment so that they do
not have to go to the travel centre which was talked about this
morning, but they can go to the equivalent of Pakistan in that
particular case and get protection in a zone there and be re-settled
if it is appropriate and be allowed to return if not, with all
the mechanisms which go with that, I think very many people would
think that was a good thing. We know that Pakistan has two million
refugees and when we talk about what we have here that is a very
different kettle of fish. We know that Pakistan does not have
the resources to deal with those two million people so, as in
the evidence given this morning, people who might want to return
to Afghanistan still cannot because the resources are not in place
to make sure they have a safe return. If that is what you are
talking about, then yes, most definitely. If what is being talked
about on the other hand is somewhere not in Europe where we might
send asylum seekers who turn up in Europe in order for their applications
to be processed, then I think practically that is very problematic,
legally it is very difficult and ethically I have quite significant
problems with it. We already know that the UK is 32nd in the list
of countries in the world in terms of its share of the so-called
refugee burden. To then insist that those people return to countries
which do not have the resources adequately to deal with them,
I would not agree that would be a solution.
Q675 Mrs Dean: How do you respond
to the Shadow Home Secretary's proposal to institute a quota-based
system for refugees? That would include a full resettlement package
being offered to those in the quota and with applicants who are
not part of the quota being removed to an offshore processing
centre.
Dr Crawley: The idea of us having
a comprehensive resettlement programme, with a quota in the region
of 20,000, would be a very significant improvement on what we
currently have in place in terms of providing protection to people
who we know are genuinely in need of it. At the moment, in terms
of the resettlement programme, we are looking at around 500 places.
Clearly 20,000 over 500 is a much more significant contribution
to the issue. The problem comes when we start talking about somehow
being able to have one system and then getting rid of the other
system, that is we will have a quota system and we will not have
a process for dealing with spontaneous arrivals. The reality is
that the decisions by which people choose—for want of a
better word—to claim asylum in a particular country, is
a very complicated one and one based on partial knowledge and
information. So the idea that somebody within a country of origin
who is subject to persecution in one shape or another would, if
they had the resources, choose to go and sit in a camp and wait
to be chosen, potentially out of a camp of hundreds of thousands
of people, rather than using their resources to go and build a
safer, better life for themselves and their family immediately,
does not ring true. You will still get people arriving spontaneously
and probably the people who are most able to afford it. You then
need a system which can deal with that. You would have to have
in place something like the system we have at the moment, combined
with a quota system and that is pretty much what the US, Canada,
Australia have in place. They have a quota system which ensures
they provide protection to those who need it in a very orderly
fashion, but they also still have a mechanism for dealing with
spontaneous arrivals, because they recognise that actually people's
behaviour is much more complicated and they do not necessarily
even know that if they go to this particular camp they might get
resettled in this period of time. It does not work like that.
You would have to have a combination of the two and of course
you would need to improve the quality of the decision-making process
here to ensure that you did not end up having both the quota and
large numbers of spontaneous arrivals. It is not covered directly
in States of Conflict, but in our other work by IPPR I
would have said that our most significant concern is that many
of the asylum policies which we see at the moment are based on
this assumption about deterrents in terms of the numbers rather
than focusing the political will and the resources on making sure
that the asylum process itself is quick, robust, efficient, gets
people removed at the end of it if they should not be allowed
to stay and integrates the ones who do. That process would, for
us, ensure that applications were not made by people who did not
need protection in the way as they are now.
Q676 Bob Russell: There has been
confusion as to where these overseas, or offshore, centres would
be if they were ever established. You made a powerful point as
to why many poor countries are already over-burdened. What would
happen if the UK place where they would be processed was nearer
to home, in other words an island within the British Isles, Ellis
Island style? I ask the question. I am not saying I approve of
the idea, I am just talking about the happy compromise whereby
they are out of sight and out of mind but near to the UK where
their cases could be processed.
Dr Crawley: I take from that,
that you are talking specifically about the proposals in the Kirkhope
Commission's report, because that is essentially the first time
that suggestion has been made. We are back to this issue of what
we are trying to achieve, which is ultimately the crux of all
of this. What we are trying to achieve is that we ultimately provide
protection to those who need it because ethically, morally and
in terms of resources, we feel that is the right thing we should
do. That is why we are part of the 1951 Refugee Convention, that
is what we want to do and using quotas is one way of doing that.
How you then process those people who arrive to determine which
ones do or do not need the protection is what you are getting
at. Is it best that they are out of sight and out of mind on an
unpopulated island? Though I think most islands around the UK
are inhabited, so that is not per se the case. Are we trying
to send out some message that if you come to the UK we will put
you out on a limb and it will be very difficult for you to make
your way? Are we trying to improve the on-site provision for asylum
seekers in order to stop or reduce the impact on local communities
in terms of resources? What is it we are trying to achieve by
our processing? Those three areas are actually quite different
in terms of what might be the best solution to deal with it. The
issue about deterrence is a difficult one, but I would suggest—and
your evidence this morning from other witnesses suggests it too—that
most people would perceive that what they have in this country
is better than what they had. Ultimately many are fleeing persecution,
but even for those who are not, this is still actually better
than what they had. They have made that choice, that they can
make a better life for themselves and they will. So the deterrent
effect is a very unclear and unevidenced relationship. If what
we are trying to do is to minimise impacts on local communities,
then yes, you can provide a centre as far away from local communities
as possible, but those centres will have to be staffed with people
who can provide the resources, cook the meals, provide the security.
Then you have a real problem with how you service those centres.
If what you are talking about is something slightly different,
which is about public perception and people wanting to feel that
the asylum process is quick, efficient and that people are through
the system and a good decision is made, then I believe that you
can do all of those things without going to the huge expense and
political difficulty of setting up separate processing centres.
Q677 David Winnick: The Government
is taking much satisfaction—I think that would be the best
way of putting it—at the way in which the number of asylum
applications has decreased. Obviously you know the political situation
where the parties, certainly the two major parties, compete about
who has the best or the worst record on this issue, as the case
may be. You yourself are rather critical, are you not, about the
number of applications, which has fallen?
Dr Crawley: I am critical, but
possibly not in the way that the criticism has traditionally been
mooted.
Q678 David Winnick: You are critical
because there are too few presumably.
Dr Crawley: No, not that there
are too few. I am critical because I believe that the whole point
of the asylum process is to provide protection to those who need
it. If what you do in trying to make that system manageable, is
make it very difficult for people to access that process, then
I do not think that we have in our asylum system what we are trying
to achieve. So I am critical that some of the measures which have
been introduced undermine the very basis of having the system
in the first place. My criticism specifically in relation to the
statistics is not that they are lower per se, because anything
which makes the system and the issue politically more manageable
can only be a good thing. What I am critical of is the fact that
the proportion of people within those arriving who are being recognised
as genuinely needing protection has not changed, it is still the
same. So if the Government's measures were introduced in order
to get rid of the economic migrants from that overall number,
one would expect logically that the proportion of people being
recognised as being genuine, for want of a better word, would
go up accordingly and it has not. This suggests to me that the
measures which have been introduced are impacting on everybody's
ability to access the system, whether or not they need protection.
I am concerned about what that means for our ability to provide
protection to those who need it.
Q679 David Winnick: Are you saying
in effect that genuine asylum seekers, people whose claims are
in no way questionable, are being refused now as a result of political
pressure on the Government?
Dr Crawley: I am questioning the
language in the sense that everyone is a genuine asylum seeker,
but whether they are a genuine refugee or not is questionable.
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