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中文Increasingly restrictive asylum policies are being harmonized all over Europe in an effort to deter those fleeing political persecution from reaching sanctuary; the ‘Fortress Europe’ (Gordon 1989) is fortified everyday. Despite conflicts devastating the lives of many people in the South, the wealthy and stable democratic countries of the North fence themselves off from the ‘wretched of the Earth’ in what Anthony H. Richmond (1994) calls ‘Global Apartheid’. In the dominant anti-refugee discourse it is a host society that is protected from refugees whilst protection is being denied to political exiles. Refugees are represented as a threat to national security, welfare system, social cohesion and cultural purity. Popular tabloid media speak of ‘masses’ and ‘floods’ of ‘Euro-scroungers’ and ‘illegal asylum seekers’ invading British shores. The former is an expression of both prejudice and ignorance as
‘Both pure refugees and purely economic migrants are ideal constructs rarely found in real life; many among those who routinely meet the refugee definition are clearly fleeing both political oppression and economic dislocation’ (Papademitriou cited in Marfleet 2006: 12).
Social security benefits are allegedly a ‘pull factor’ on economic (in disguise of forced) migration, and refugees are ‘bogus’, cynical and calculating ‘asylum shoppers’. The reality is that categories of ‘refugee’ and ‘economic (i.e. voluntary) migrant’ are very blurred as in the migration and asylum nexus extreme poverty is often grounded in political destabilization (e.g. in Africa or Central America). What we are faced with here is prevailing culture of disbelief with its presumption that asylum seekers are not genuinely fleeing political turbulences. Furthermore, the expression ‘illegal asylum seeker’ is a legal oxymoron as according to Geneva Convention ‘everyone has a right to seek and enjoy asylum.’ But, in an orchestrated government campaign to downgrade public perception of refugees, Jack Straw, a former Home Office Minister, made the following comment:
‘Thousands of would-be migrants are taking advantage of one aspect of the Convention – namely that it places an obligation on state to consider any application for asylum made on their territory, however ill-founded’ (Jack Straw cited in Schuster and Solomos, 2001).
The institution of asylum (from Greek asylon – sanctuary, refuge) constitutes right to be recognized as bona fide refugees and receive legal protection. The UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 1951 to which UK is a signatory defines refugees as persons who are outside their country and cannot return due to a well-founded fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group. Term ‘asylum seeker’ is very new: it entered political discourse recently, in the 1990s. Asylum seeker is a de facto refugee, i.e. she left her country of origin, applied for asylum and is pending recognition; once it has been granted she becomes refugee de jure. However, this word has acquired very pejorative meaning: asylum seeker is perceived as someone who is ‘undeserving’ protection. Moreover, according to Imogen Tyler (2006: 189), ‘Inscribing the category of asylum seekers in British law through the enactment of a series of punitive asylum laws has enabled the British government to manoeuvre around the rights of the refugee as prescribed by international law’. Asylum seekers are subject to electronic tagging, detention and deportation; all these strategies of state control significantly stigmatize and criminalize them. They are barred from work and, on the contrary to what most people think, are not entitled to social housing or income support, which makes them extremely vulnerable to destitution. They have limited access to education and health care, services that are perceived as additional incentives for a ‘bogus asylum seeker’. As Arun Kundnani (2001: 45) pointed out, ‘Cruelty against asylum seekers is permissible as a deterrent against those who seek to exploit the asylum system.’ And what is rarely acknowledged, those policies have got grave social consequences: asylum seekers’ are excluded from the public sphere and are forced to live in a legal and social desert. As a result, the government’s aim, integration (no matter how defined), is completely thwarted: marginalized communities always tend to further withdraw from the dominant society, and it may lead to establishment of a ‘ghetto’ as there can be no inclusion without meeting social needs of a given group:
‘Government policy, committed to social inclusion has created a category of people who are outside the social welfare system, dispersed into impoverished areas, and excluded from decent and appropriate employment’ (Humphries 2004: 104).
In other words, British asylum laws based on reducing appeal rights, removing asylum seekers from mainstream services following establishment of the National Asylum Support Service (NASS) in 2000, and in general, tougher treatment of the applicants, have created ‘an ‘illegal’ population who are denied the status of subject-citizen’ (Tyler 2006: 187). Even when granted asylum, political exiles still need to struggle to begin a new life as their Convention rights are constantly being curtailed in the British legislation: the temporary Exceptional Leave to Remain (ELR) was abolished in April 2003 and replaced with Discretionary Leave (DL), protection given for the period of three years only; Humanitarian Protection (HP) status have been reduced from five to three years; and since August 2005 the Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), previously enjoyed by refugees have been given up and altered with only five years’ protection. This raises critical questions about the meaning of ‘rights’ in a democratic country like Britain; it seems that
‘Once they [refugees] left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless, once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth’ (Hannah Arendt cited in Cohen 2006: 8).
And state of being devoid of one’s rights constitutes a situation where no act committed against the subaltern group is seen as a crime. For instance, a former Home Office Minister, David Blunkett who in June 2002 announced plans to build detention centers especially for asylum seeking children, admitted that he defies the idea of allowing children of asylum seekers to attend British schools because he doesn’t want them to be recognized as part of the local community (Tyler, 2006: 195). As the Director of the Social Perspectives Network (SPN) and a former Chair of the British Association of Social Workers, Terry Bamford concluded,
‘We have lowered the threshold of what is acceptable in our society. What would have been deemed wholly unacceptable ten to fifteen years ago in terms of vouchers, denial of access to health and failure to provide accommodation is now accepted as the price of deterring asylum seekers’ (LDC/ SNP 2006: 63).
The above described situation poses a real challenge to social work practitioners, faced not only with restrictive legislation and prejudices of indigenous population but also with the complexity of refugee experience. In the current political context where only three approaches are adopted by the state in relation to welfare needs of asylum seekers, i.e. internment, national administration and co-opting charities (IRR European Race Bulletin 2001: 4), and in the situation of under funding of welfare provision in the name of deterrence, social work values of anti-racism, social justice and human rights are put at risk (Briskman and Cemlyn 2005). Therefore the restrictive social policy characterized by the construction of the refugee as ‘burdensome, needy and costly’ (Humphries 2004: 101) has got grave implications for social work practice. I shall now be discussing this uneasy encounter between social providers and the tough reality of asylum laws.
It is social work practitioners’ duty to understand social processes that cause oppression and to advocate for the rights of the oppressed group (Mullaly 2002). Furthermore they have got legal obligations towards refugees and asylum seekers (LDC/ SPN 2006: 21) as prescribed by The Refugee Convention 1951; The European Convention of Human Rights incorporated into British law in 1998; The European Union Council Directive 2003/9/EC of 27 January 2003 setting minimum standards for reception of asylum seekers; and The Disability and Discrimination Act 2005. Unfortunately, social providers’ hands are often tied, especially in case of those who work in the statutory sector where calling for better support systems for asylum seekers can be perceived as raising a controversial political issue. According to Beth Humphries (2004: 194), ‘Social work has always had a contradictory and ambivalent relationship with those who use state services’. However, she argues, the balance has recently shifted significantly towards ‘control, restriction, surveillance and ultimately exclusion’ (Humphries 2004: 194) where social providers become ‘state enforces’, e.g. when evicting rejected asylum seekers from NASS properties. That is clearly at odds with social work principles of anti-racist (ARP) and anti-oppressive practice (AOP).
Even those who work in the voluntary sector are forced to collude with the state as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Refugee Arrivals Project, Refugee Action and Migrant Helpline all accepted lucrative contracts to take on the functions of the state such as running emergency housing, organizing dispersal etc. The biggest British refugee welfare organization, Refugee Council, fully relies on government’s funding which significantly weakens their power to challenge state imposed policies.
In accepting the money the organizations agree to cooperate with the deportation process and other punitive measures; it is the funding that determines what they will or won’t do, rather than the needs of those that they are to help and support. On the other hand, due to increasing privatization social services departments contract out care and accommodation to private companies, especially in case of asylum seeking unaccompanied minors. Thus social providers employed in both statutory and charity sectors can only carefully navigate between their clients’ welfare and asylum legislation, a contradiction by the very definition.
As I have already mentioned, asylum seekers have no right to welfare benefits, e.g. council housing, income support, child benefit, emergency payment etc. Their only access to public funds is provision of the Asylum Directorate Resources, formerly the National Asylum Support Service. But asylum seekers’ welfare rights were already restricted by the Conservative government’s legislation: in 1993 they were denied homeless persons accommodation if they could stay ‘anywhere’ (e.g. sleep roughly in church or mosque), and three years later the right to emergency accommodation was removed from all persons subject to immigration controls.
In 1994 those seeking asylum lost entitlements to cash benefits whilst the Asylum and Immigration Act 1996 introduced Section 55 that barred those who did not apply for asylum at the port of entry from entitlement to mainstream welfare benefits. Section 55 was the beginning of asylum seekers’ destitution but at that time (prior to establishment of NASS in 2000) they were still entitled to local authority assistance under the National Assessment Act 1948, i.e. ‘community care services for the ill, elderly and disabled people and anyone else who was in need of care and attention which is not otherwise available’ (LDC/ SPN 2006: 22). When Labour came to power in 1997, it further strengthened already existing anti-asylum legislation and ‘created a new apartheid social security system, separate from and deliberately inferior to the already miserable levels of the welfare state’ (Mynott 2002: 122). The Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 amended the entitlements to the National Assessment Act, and destitution alone was no longer enough to become eligible for Social Services assistance, whereas the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 excluded failed asylum seekers from support under the Act. Currently in order to fall under the NAA provision asylum seekers must be assessed as having community care (e.g. disability, health issues like HIV) and/ or mental health needs and be linked to a community care team or mental health team (LDC/ SPN 2006: 30). At the same time, the (Charges to Overseas Visitors) Regulations 89 and 2004 Amendment severely limited health care available to asylum seekers (SICE 2006: 2) and what more, due to anti-refugee hysteria permeating British society, asylum seekers are even refused medical care that they are entitled to. It must be also emphasized that those subject to immigration control are exempt from both Mental Health Act 1983 and Children Act 1994. The latter leads us to a highly controversial scheme, the infamous Section 9 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants etc) Act 2004. Section 9 concerns families of rejected asylum seekers whose support is cut off, and who risk having their children taken into care should they refuse to leave United Kingdom. Similar legislation, Section 4 provides board and lodging (in the form of vouchers) for single failed asylum seekers provided that they are ‘cooperative with removal’; in such a way welfare has become a ‘weapon forcing them into colluding with their own deportation’ (Cohen 2006: 114). Furthermore, local authorities are under duty to report to the Home Office information on any resident suspected of unlawful presence in UK (Humphries 2004: 102). As Steve Cohen (2006: 127) concluded, ‘Welfare, and the welfare state, are not as what they present themselves to be, namely universal and humanitarian, but are instead narrow, nationalistic and racist.’ And yet the significance of community care provision to people subject to immigration control and devoid of access to benefits is enormous; thus it seems that something is very wrong here. However, it is difficult to judge social work practitioners in the context of severe state constraints that their profession is entangled in: it does constitute catch 22 situation. Undoubtedly, if refugees and asylum seekers are to attain well-being, ‘there must be an end to the system of using welfare, health and social care services as a tool to control immigration'(SCIE 2006). Nonetheless, I feel that social practitioners should advocate more on behalf of asylum seekers; otherwise they won’t live up to the principles of their work. And even though it all looks bleak, some do embark on this ‘mission impossible’. Let’s have a closer look at daily day practicalities and difficulties of their job.
In the 1990s there was an underlying presumption that there was no need for specific projects for asylum seekers and refugees because they were ‘not here to stay’ (LDC/ SPN 2006: 5). Today we still have a practical problem in meeting their social care needs. First of all, we lack proper research on refugee communities; they might face similar problems to Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities, but they do differ a lot:
b) Those seeking asylum are caught in a bureaucratic, Kafkaesque net of asylum determination process that they need assistance to comprehend. Very often they spend years in a legal limbo waiting for a decision. Unfortunately, social workers usually lack that sort of legal knowledge, are confused about clients’ entitlements (e.g. there are disputes occurring between NASS and local authority) due to frequent changes to legislation and generally do not follow up asylum policy.
c) Refugees and asylum seekers are victims of particular new form of racism, ‘xeno-racism’ (Sivanandan 2001), that has got characteristics of old racism (e.g. exclusion, scapegoating and exploitation) but targets foreigners regardless of their racial/ethnic background. As Parker (2000: 63) rightly stated, ‘It is imperative that social work students gain competence in working in a multi-ethnic society and learn to deploy anti-racist skills in their practice’; however, we need more than this: we require full awareness of different forms of prejudice and social oppression and the impact they have on accommodation and education. And we must not forget that dominant negative public discourse may be affecting service providers as well.
d) We have to recognize the fact that refugee communities are culturally diverse and that high cultural competence is essential when working with this particularly vulnerable group. Social workers do not have training in anthropology/ ethnology, and cultural sensitivity is often mentioned but hardly ever practiced.
e) Last but not least, asylum seekers face difficulties in obtaining help. One of the most serious barriers to accessing services is lack of English, particularly among women asylum seekers. Thus competent language support and interpretation are absolutely crucial. The issue of trust is very important here, and in some cases the wrongly assumed allegiances between a client and an interpreter may be highly disruptive. Therefore it requires in depth knowledge of political, ethnic and linguistic divisions in a country of client’s origin. Secondly, seemingly trivial issues such as lack of money for bus fare may be impeding the access to services.
Therefore I think that treating asylum seekers like other BME groups (e.g. service planning on the basis of data on existing ethnic minority categories) is wrong, and I disagree with Lorenz (1998) who claims that social work with migrants and refugees shouldn’t be a special area of expertise. Once we understand better all the issues concerning asylum seekers, we can be in a better position to meet their needs.
Ideally, asylum seekers and Refugee Community Organizations (RCO) ought to be actively involved in designing the services following the principle that social care providers should trust clients and respect their views (Powell 2001). Otherwise we risk speaking for the ‘Other’, a very undesirable pattern that is to be avoided in socially progressive politics. Initial powerlessness of refugees in a country of asylum, plus the application of the welfare model might lead to pathologizing, medicalizing and labeling the refugee as ‘helpless and vulnerable’ (Steen cited in Harrell-Bond 1999: 153). When refugeedom is constructed as a social problem, asylum seekers and refugees join other ‘weak’ groups such as children, alcoholics, drug addicts etc., and there is a danger that welfare system may transform active adults into passive clients (Wahlbeck cited in Harrell-Bond 1999: 151). And yet those seeking asylum are independent, courageous and resilient decision making individuals; the mere act of fleeing country of origin already proves their agency. They do find themselves in a completely different and highly stressful life situation, in a new country, with new culture and language, and they do resemble helpless children as they need to learn everything from the start to begin new lives. Nevertheless they are social actors and we must do our best to promote their independence and self-sufficiency; unfortunately,’ Social services deliverers customarily create an image of ‘the refugee’ in such a way that as ‘experts’ they can take custody of them’ (Indra cited in Harrell-Bond 1999: 139). And if social care providers maintain this exercise of authority over their clients, it will inevitably result in learned dependency syndrome, enforced idleness and boredom. Moreover, there is a basic human need to control one’s own destiny, and that power is often taken away from asylum seekers. According to Seligman (cited in von Buchwald 1994: 233),
‘Individuals who perceive themselves as having control over what happens to them experience less stress and greater tolerance for misfortune than those who believe they powerless. In contrast, a low sense of perceived control results in frustration, and may eventually lead to chronic depression’.
Asylum seekers obviously don’t have control over their asylum cases, and as the process may take years it seriously affects their well-being. However, there are other situations when their agency is threatened, for instance due to dispersal policy they have no choice on where to reside, and because of vouchers scheme they can’t even choose where to go shopping etc. These practical problems do have bad impact on asylum seekers’ mental health (Hirayama et al. 1995) and it is social care providers’ task to alleviate this. And the best way forward is to empower asylum seekers as individuals and groups, so that they can make their own decisions and regain control over their lives. It would enhance their coping strategies, rebuild self-confidence and reduce feelings of lethargy and despondency.
There is a potential for social workers to help asylum seekers to effectively integrate into local communities. In order to do so social care providers need to know how to work with people in crisis, and at the same time have to be focused on community development facilitation. Nash, Wong and Trlin (2006: 345) suggest that social work with asylum seekers should be divided into three dimensions: macro level that is advocacy work on behalf of clients; meso level- community development and empowerment; and micro level – problem-solving with individuals and families.
All those levels require awareness of the problems that asylum seekers face in the personal, cultural and institutional terms, and knowledge on how to tackle them through improved coordination between key players, i.e. social services, ARD (formerly NASS) and refugee agencies:
‘Good practice in service provision to refugees and asylum seekers includes effective partnership between statutory and voluntary sectors and a holistic view of individual needs, which takes into account practical, legal and social issues’ (SCIE 2006: 3).
Services for asylum seekers need to be accessible (e.g. use free phone number, employ translators); central (in a form of one-stop shop); specialist (meeting needs based on ethnicity and gender); appropriate (culturally and linguistically) and safe (particularly for women and children). Both advocacy and practical needs should be catered for: social workers need to call for breaking the link between entitlement and immigration status. The principles of social justice and human rights cannot be abandoned in the name of restrictive asylum policy; social care providers have an obligation to reclaim asylum seekers’ humanity.
