Re: Deportation of asylum seekers

["Matthew Hodgetts" <matthew.hodgetts@gmail.com>]

Nick, you seem to have unfortunately conflated two issues. Asylum seekers cannot simply be equalled with economic immigrants. Treating these two groups of people as the same is very dangerous. In fact the issue in the media has concerned the failure to deport individuals who are foreign nationals. There do not seem to be any arguments to the effect that such people should be sent back if they are in genuine danger in their homecountry.

 

People on both sides of the immigration debate seem to conflate these two things leading people to infer from asylum seekers are likely to be in danger at home therefore anybody who wants to live here should be able to, or to infer that from the fact that some people come over here just because the job market is better that it's OK to deport anyone we feel like deporting. I am not trying to take a stance over who is right, just to note that the current issue in the media is NOT about deporting convicted asylum seekers, but the rather more general issue of deporting foreign nationals. (In fact one story to come out in the past week concerned a man who had been convicted, served his sentence and released who then went on to commit a further set of serious crimes. He was in fact screened for deportation, but since his home country was Somalia the Home Office decided it would be too dangerous to send him back. Had he been, say, a French national then presumably the Home Office would have deported him. For my own two cents, I think this is probably the right approach).

 

M.

 

On 09/05/06, N Tasker <pia03nt@sheffield.ac.uk> wrote:

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There seems to be something missing in the current media furore concerning the
non-deportation of criminal asylum seekers...that is, nowhere, not once did I
hear, read, or see in the mainstream media any discussion of the question
'SHOULD these people have been deported?'.

Now, I don't have a particular position on whether they should have been
deported. I just think that there is no obvious, non-trivial, uncontestable
answer to which all thoughtful people would agree. And yet there has been no
public debate. The media skipped that important stage, assumed that these
people should have been deported, and started calling for the blood of
politicians. Real problems like the presence of criminals on our streets and
real theoretical problems like the rights and wrongs of punishment and
deportation were pushed to one side as the media stir up yet another political
mud slinging match in the run up to the recent election.

Perhaps we don't need a debate on this issue? Well, I think we do. There are
plenty of chronic re-offenders, born and bred in Britain, and yet the days of
sending them off to Australia are gone. Still less would we consider packing
them off to a country which may be racked by war and rife with civil rights
abuses. I recognise that there is a difference in the case of asylum seekers,
(they weren't born on the same patch of land as we were) but what exactly is
the difference which is so great to justify returning them to a country where
they might face suffering beyond what they deserve for their crimes?

British nationals who break the law are either freed when they have served their
sentence, or in an ideal world, given rehabilitative care. But if British
criminals deserve humane treatment, then that's because they're human, not
because they're British. Wouldn't we do better to try rehabilitating criminal
asylum seekers, giving them the same humane treatment which we offer our own
citizens - which is after all, only what a human being deserves - rather than
sending them off to a fate which, if we only had to observe it on our
television screens, we wouldn't wish on our worst enemies?




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