ASYLUM SEEKERS & the MEDIA: Inflation & Exaggeration

A range of media, in the UK, most notably tabloid journalism, peddles the line that the country is being flooded by people falsly claiming asylum who are bringing to this country disease, terror and crime, who sponge benefits, steal British jobs and threaten the sovereignty of the UK as a nation-state.

This is a highly seductive fable being spun relentlessly every day by a large number of newspapers being sold in this country. Around the country racist groups and parties like the BNP are mobilising around local opposition to migration.

There is plenty of evidence that shows links between racist inflammatory media and the carrying out of violent racism. Sensationalist reporting in the Sun about Asians expelled from Malawi was directly followed by a sharp rise in attacks on Asian shops, and Asian people.


As the journalist Paul Foot remarked:

"Race hate and violence does not rise and fall according to the number of immigrants coming into Britain. It rises and falls to the extent to which people's prejudices are inflamed and made respectable by politicians and newspapers."

Daily Racism: The Press and Black People in Britain (1989) Gordon and Rosenberg, London: Runnymede Trust

CLAIM: "Asylum seekers are putting a strain on the system."

FACT: Britain hosts less than 1% of the worlds 12 million refugees and is one of the richest nations on earth.


CLAIM: "Britain is a soft touch"

FACT: The UNHCR show that the UK ranks 9th in terms of asylum applications. Belgium, Ireland, and Norway are some of the countries that offer more generous support.


CLAIM: "Bogus asylum seekers exploit the Human Rights treaty; they wouldn't face any harm if we sent them packing back to their own countries."

FACT: Most Asylum applications come from countries that the UK acknowledges to be under tyrannical regimes.


CLAIM: "Asylum seekers are all benefit cheats" & "Pensioners have to scrape by while refugees get huge benefits"

FACT: There is no automatic right to benefits; under the current system they are only entitled to 70% of Income Support.
Asylum seeker: >>£ 36.54 per week
O.A.P: >>£ 78.00 per week


CLAIM: "Asylum seekers are violent criminals who deal in drugs, prostitution and guns carrying networks."

FACT: There is no evidence to suggest that the level of criminal behaviour of asylum seekers is above average. Police in Dover state that there has been no increase in crime since refugees began to arrive in large numbers. The majority of crimes that involve refugees has them down as the victims rather than the perpetrators, but when minority communities are the victims of physical or verbal violence it is rarely reported in the press.


CLAIM: "Alarming levels of infectious TB, Hepatitis B and AIDS are being brought into Britain"
"We live in fear of foreigners bringing death to our land... It is not by allowing in terrorists that the Government's policy of mass immigration, especially from the Third World, will claim most lives. It is through letting in too many germs."

FACT: The British Medical Association (BMA) states in no uncertain terms that theses kind of claims are not based on any clinical evidence but are spurious allegations.


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The Sun has recently begun circulating a petition every day accusing the majority of asylum seekers of being fraudulent and posing a security threat to this country.

"I call on Prime Minister Tony to protect Britain before it is too late, END THIS ASYLUM MADNESS NOW"

The Sun.
568,000 have put their names in the petition to date.

On the 21st of February 2003, Britain was found to be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) due to its draconian regulations that deny benefits to asylum seekers if they do not apply for aylum immediately upon arrival in Britain.

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, responded in Sun-style rhetoric: "We're not a soft touch and we're not going to be seen as such."

He says he will fight the court decision (with the backing of the Sun) and try and overturn the ECHR ruling, which deemed his legislation illegal.

Many people fail to take into account the wider history of the situation and the complicity of the western world in supporting tyrannical regimes and implementin economic foreign policies which cause devistation in the developing world. As a Sri Lankan delegate commented to a conference of European aid-givers:

'It is your economics that makes our politics that makes us refugees in your countries.
We are here because you are still there'