Spreading the 'burden'?: A review of policies to disperse asylum seekers and refugees 9781847425782

Table of contents :
SPREADING THE ‘BURDEN’?
Contents
List of tables and figures
Acknowledgements
Glossary
Introduction
Defining the ‘problem’
Dispersal policies in the Netherlands
Dispersal policies in Sweden
Dispersal policies in the UK
What works?
Redefining the ‘problem’ and challenging the assumptions
References
Index

Citation preview

SPREADING THE ‘BURDEN’? A review of policies to disperse asylum seekers and refugees Vaughan Robinson, Roger Andersson and Sako Musterd

SPREADING THE ‘BURDEN’? A review of policies to disperse asylum seekers and refugees Vaughan Robinson, Roger Andersson and Sako Musterd

The •POLICY

PP P R E S S

First published in Great Britain in July 2003 by Policy Press North America office: University of Bristol Policy Press 1-9 Old Park Hill c/o The University of Chicago Press Bristol 1427 East 60th Street BS2 8BB Chicago, IL 60637, USA UK t: +1 773 702 7700 t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 f: +1 773-702-9756 [email protected] [email protected] www.policypress.co.uk www.press.uchicago.edu © Vaughan Robinson, Roger Andersson and Sako Musterd 2003 Index © Caroline Wilding 2003 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-86134-417-5 paperback Vaughan Robinson is Professor of Human Geography and Director of the Migration Unit at the University of Wales, Swansea, Roger Andersson is Professor of Social and Economic Geography in the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University, Sweden and Professor Sako Musterd is Director of the Study Centre for the Metropolitan Environment at the University of Amsterdam. The right of Vaughan Robinson, Roger Andersson and Sako Musterd to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the authors and contributors and not of The University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Qube Design Associates, Bristol. Front cover: photograph supplied by kind permission of www.third-avenue.co.uk Printed and bound in Great Britain by Marston Book Services, Oxford.

Contents List of tables and figures

v

Acknowledgements

vii

Glossary

viii

one

Introduction Vaughan Robinson

1

two

Defining the ‘problem’ Vaughan Robinson

3

three

four

Introduction Europe’s changing place in the global refugee system The spatial concentration of asylum seekers The spatial concentration of costs and ‘burdens’ The media response Public opinion Conclusion

3 3 6 8 10 19 21

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands Martijn Arnoldus, Thea Dukes and Sako Musterd

25

Introduction The Dutch context for dispersal policies The pursuit of dispersal policies, 1945-92 Housing asylum seekers and refugees Contemporary dispersal of asylum seekers and status holders Dispersal policies: evaluation and appraisal Conclusion

25 25 31 38 40 59 62

Dispersal policies in Sweden Roger Andersson and Dennis Solid

65

Introduction The Swedish context for dispersal policies Immigration to Sweden The refugee dispersal policy, 1985-94 Reforming the ‘Sweden-wide’ strategy, 1994-2002 The current organisation of immigration and integration issues in Sweden The geographical impact of the ‘Sweden-wide’ strategy Evaluating the dispersal policy Conclusion

65 66 67 75 80 86 88 96 100

iii

Spreading the ‘burden’?

five

six

seven

Dispersal policies in the UK Vaughan Robinson

103

Immigration to Britain: the long view Setting the context The current programme to disperse asylum seekers Continuing commentary on dispersal The Home Office internal review of 2001 Conclusion

103 104 121 136 141 146

What works? Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of dispersal Vaughan Robinson

149

The need for evidence The continuing demand for dispersal Desiderata for successful dispersal

149 150 150

Redefining the ‘problem’ and challenging the assumptions Vaughan Robinson

159

Introduction Is the clustering of refugees and asylum seekers really a ‘problem’? Challenging the rationale for dispersal Dispersal, moral panics and the purity of space Reconceptualised problem, reconceptualised solutions Conclusion

159 159 165 167 171 177

References

179

Index

197

iv

List of tables and figures

Tables 2.1

Geographical distribution of refugees who applied for asylum in the UK (excluding Vietnamese), 1983-91

3.1

Number of asylum seekers, 1986-2000

28

3.2

Number of asylum requests in the Netherlands (classified by main country of origin of the asylum seeker), 1996-2000

28

3.3

Figures on central and ROA accommodation, 1988-95

39

3.4

Total number of asylum seekers and status holders in reception facilities by category (1 May 1999; 1 June 2000)

45

3.5

Total number of asylum seekers in central reception centres (1 January, 1995-2001)

46

3.6

Cumulative target settings and realisation, July 1995-January 2000

56

4.1

Foreign citizens in Sweden, 1880-1950

66

4.2

Refugee immigration to Sweden, 1950-81

72

4.3

Refugee files by police districts, September 1981

73

4.4

Employment rates by citizenship in 1980

75

4.5

Municipal places and received refugees, 1985-96

82

4.6

Residence permits to Geneva Convention refugees, war refugees and de facto refugees in need of protection, and refugees on humanitarian grounds

4.7

Countries of origin of those seeking asylum in Sweden, 1984-2001

85

4.8

Population change for Swedish- and foreign-born inhabitants 1984-98 according to relative change for the Swedish-born population

92

4.9

Population change by municipality groups based on total population size and immigrant density

4.10 Social welfare dependency rates 1997-2000 for the 1997 refugee cohort in Sweden

8

83-4

94-5 99

4.11 Labour market participation (LMP) rates 1997 for Bosnian immigrants arriving in Sweden, 1993-94

101

5.1

132

Factors to consider when assessing whether areas are suitable for asylum seekers

v

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Figures 3.1

Encampments and neighbourhoods for Moluccans, 1959

33

3.2

The basic structure of the Dutch NTOM-model

43

3.3

The contemporary asylum claim

44

3.4

The location of Registration Centres (ACs) in the Netherlands (May 2000)

49

3.5

The location of Screening and Reception Centres (OCs) in the Netherlands (May 2000)

49

3.6

The location of Asylum Seekers Centres (AZCs) in the Netherlands (May 2000)

50

4.1

The administrative structure of Swedish refugee reception in 1990

78

4.2

An outline of the Swedish asylum procedure introduced in 1992

80

4.3

Number of refugee permissions (all permissions and asylum seekers), 1984-2001

82

4.4

Immigration to Sweden by regions in relation to each region’s share of the country’s population, 1875-1995

89

4.5

Relative representation of the foreign-born population in Sweden, 1980-95

90

4.6

Inter-municipality migration frequencies according to country of birth, 1980-95

93

4.7

Percentage of received refugees 1991-96 (by year of reception) who had left the reception municipality by 28 February, 1997

98

5.1

Flows of Vietnamese secondary migration within the UK after dispersal

118

5.2

Current consortia areas for dispersal of asylum seekers in the UK

125

vi

Acknowledgements Many people have assisted with this book, and, although it is rather invidious to mention but a few, we are particularly indebted to the following: • the European Commission DG V Justice and Home Affairs for its generous funding of the original project upon which this book is based, especially Sabine Pfisterer and Sandra Pratt; • Areti Sianni of European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) for her initial encouragement and support; • our four research officers on the EU research project: Nissa Finney (Swansea), Dennis Solid (Uppsala), Martijn Arnoldus (Amsterdam) and Thea Dukes (Amsterdam); • two anonymous referees for their encouragement; • and, last but not least, Dawn Rushen and Karen Bowler of The Policy Press for not nagging too much!

vii

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Glossary

The Netherlands AC AMA AMOG A status AVO AZC COA COW IND KCO NTOM OC ROA TNV VBTA VC VNG VOTA VTV VVTV ZZA

Registration Centre Unaccompanied Minor Asylum Seeker AZC in which asylum seekers who display maladjusted behaviour are accommodated Refugee status (issued until 1 April 2001) Additional Accommodation for Asylum Seekers Asylum Seekers Centre Asylum Seekers Reception Service Central Reception in Dwellings Immigration and Naturalisation Service Small-Scale Central Reception Facility New Reception and Admittance Model (enacted 1992) Screening and Reception Centre Regulation Reception of Asylum Seekers (1987-95) Temporary accommodation while awaiting accommodation in an OC Permit to temporary residence (issued since 1 April 2001) Departure Centre Dutch Association of Municipalities Permit to permanent residence (issued since 1 April 2001) Temporary Residence Permit on humanitarian grounds (issued until 1 April 2001) Temporary Residence Permit (issued until 1 April 2001) Arrangement for asylum seeker to live with family or friends

Sweden AGFA AMS EBO LAM LMP NGO SIV SIB

viii

Working Group with the Responsibility for Refugees National Labour Market Administration Own housing (Eget boende) Asylum reception law (Lagen om mottagande av asylsokande) Labour market participation Nov-governmental organisation Swedish Migration Board Swedish Integration Board

Glossary

UK CARF DfEE DES ECRE IaMG IND IRR IRSS JWG LEA LGA NASS NOTTAS PRC RCO RSL UNHCR URB VSU WUS

Campaign Against Racism and Fascism Department for Education and Employment Department of Education and Science European Council on Refugees and Exiles Inter-agency Management Group (of the Kosovan Programme) Immigration and Nationality Directorate (of the Home Office) Institute of Race Relations Immigration Research and Statistics Service (of the Home Office) Joint Working Group for refugees from Chile Local education authority Local Government Association National Asylum Support Service Nottingham Asylum Seekers Polish Resettlement Corp Refugee community organisation Registered Social Landlord United Nations High Commission for Refugees Uganda Resettlement Board Voluntary Services Unit (of the Home Office) World University Service

ix

Introduction

ONE

Introduction Vaughan Robinson

This book provides a comparative analysis of European state policies relating to the dispersal of asylum seekers and refugees. The seeds of the project lie in the work of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) Integration Task Force, which was established by the Council of Europe to define, encourage and establish good practice in refugee integration. The task force, by means of its projects and annual conferences, encouraged not only the networking of organisations involved in refugee integration across Europe, but also the definition of good practice through the comparison of national models. It identified key axes of integration, established working groups for each one, and funded many practical projects designed to implement good practice across national boundaries. Although the task force and its working groups achieved a great deal, inevitably not all axes of integration could be given the same attention. One specific issue that was neglected was the geography of national settlement. Although the work of the task force was inherently spatial (in the sense that it compared different national practice), its focus was on transferring good practice from the national scale to the supra-national scale. This up-scaling meant that the project did not explicitly address ‘space’ as an issue, nor did it consider the subnational scale. Consequently, it ignored the way in which good practice, as such, might be dependent upon – and indeed rooted in – local circumstances. Nor did it consider how good practice might impact differently upon different localities, with their unique histories, demographies and opportunity structures. In other words, in seeking to build a Europe-wide consensus on refugee integration, it failed to consider the geographical context of real and different places, a context in which all the work of the task force had to be set. Central to such a Europe-wide perspective is a consideration of what types of places refugees and asylum seekers live in. Increasingly, this is being determined by the way in which national governments intervene directly to engineer desired distributions of refugees and asylum seekers across national space. This volume, and the Council of Europe DGV Home and Justice grant that funded it, address this issue explicitly. This volume does so by:

1

Spreading the ‘burden’?

• providing an account of how and why three EU member states (the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK) have introduced policies to disperse their asylum and refugee populations; • describing the mechanisms employed to achieve dispersal; • describing the intended and unintended outcomes that have arisen; • critiquing national policy and drawing particular attention to good practice where it exists; • challenging some of the key philosophies that underpin dispersal. The volume contains five substantive chapters. Chapter Two describes the ‘problem’ that dispersal is designed to solve. That is, the way in which the growth of asylum seeking in Europe, and the tendency of asylum seekers to congregate in particular cities within each country, placed a great strain on the resources and service providers in those cities. Furthermore, the mass media and public opinion came to see this as an intolerable burden. Therefore, the chapter defines the problem from the perspective of the local authorities, central government and the media. Chapters Three, Four and Five are national case studies that describe and critique national policy in the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK, respectively. Each national team of researchers was given an identical brief, and was asked to contextualise its study of contemporary dispersal policies in a broader account that describes the history of previous attempts to manage the geographies of refugee, asylum seeker and minority settlement. Chapter Six asks what ‘works’ in dispersal? It uses the evidence base provided by the preceding three chapters to suggest how dispersal policies can be implemented more efficiently and effectively. In the concluding chapter, Chapter Seven, the whole question of dispersal is reconsidered from another perspective. Rather than accepting the ‘problem’ as real and given, it looks at how the problem has been socially constructed during a time of moral panic about asylum seeking. It then considers alternative interpretations of dispersal in the light of this, and challenges what dispersal seeks to achieve and the mindset that underpins and justifies it.

2

Defining the ‘problem’

TWO

Defining the ‘problem’ Vaughan Robinson

Introduction How did the concentration of asylum seekers and refugees in certain European cities come to be seen as a problem? This chapter provides an account of this development and the national policy action required to solve it. First, it considers the changing position of Europe within the global refugee system and how this has led to a growth in the number of asylum seekers spontaneously entering the continent. Second, it describes how a majority of these asylum seekers have chosen – when they have been allowed to choose – to cluster in certain cities and types of cities having entered Europe. The third section of the chapter discusses some of the pressures that such concentrations have produced. And finally, the chapter shows how these pressures came to be seen as a ‘problem’ by means of the way that they were reported in the media and characterised by politicians. The UK is used as the prime national example throughout this chapter’s discussion, and the town of Dover is taken as a local, and nationally emblematic, case study.

Europe’s changing place in the global refugee system The 1990s marked a watershed in Europe’s position in the global refugee crisis (Robinson, 1996a). Prior to that decade, several features had characterised the European view of asylum seekers. First, many Europeans considered refugees to be a Third World problem that should be resolved within the Third World; in other words, refugees were of little direct consequence to Europe or Europeans. Refugees created in Africa and Latin America were to be resettled in adjacent countries, and the only European involvement should be the charitable giving of money or aid. Second, where Europe did become involved in Third World refugee episodes, it was largely through admitting finite quotas of carefully selected refugees for settlement under controlled conditions. Third, the European image of refugees was still very much rooted in its experience of the Second World War, in which refugees fled extreme brutality at the hands of oppressive anti-democratic regimes, often during total war. In the public mind, then,

3

Spreading the ‘burden’?

‘refugees’ were white, European and deserving;‘immigrants’, on the other hand, were black and generally undeserving. Moreover, such attitudes towards refugees were forged within an atmosphere that was far more benign towards migration in general. Not too many years ago, worldwide population movements were not regarded as particularly threatening. In the 1950s and 1960s, Western European countries imported several million migrant guest workers from Turkey, North Africa, and Southern Europe to meet the labour demands of their rapidly growing economies. The United States expanded its intake too …. Australia … opened its borders to immigrants from Asia and the Middle East. In the mid-1970s, the oil producing countries of the Persian Gulf recruited migrant workers from other Arab countries and from Asia. (Weiner, 1995, p 4)

However, during the 1990s the position of Europe within the global refugee system changed radically. During that decade, the fall in the real price of air travel, the proliferation of direct air routes to European cities, the diffusion of the media and of communications technology far further into the Third World, and the chain effect of previous labour migrations all served to empower many refugees. They chose not to wait in refugee camps for selection by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), but travelled spontaneously to the West and claimed asylum there, either immediately on arrival or after a period as a visitor or student. Moreover, the arrival of larger numbers of these spontaneous refugees in Europe occurred at the same time as a sea change in attitudes towards international migration in general. This had been triggered by the 1974 oil price shock and had subsequently been sustained both by the protracted de-industrialisation of many Western economies and further oil price scares in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By the mid-1970s, Europe was no longer as desperate for cheap industrial labour as it had been during the long postwar boom. The UK exemplifies these Europe-wide trends well. First, whereas the UK had received only 4,000 applications for asylum in 1988, this number rose sharply to 44,800 in 1991, 43,900 in 1995, 71,100 in 1999 and 80,300 in 2000, before declining slightly to 71,300 in 2001. Second, over the period 1991-93 when asylum claims hit their first peak, unemployment within the UK also climbed, from 9.2% to 12.4%, whereas it had been only 5.6% in 1976 (ONS, 2001). Third, and in response to the same underlying causes, the number of foreigners (excluding asylum seekers) legally entering the country fell from 70,000 in 1980 to 46,000 in 1987 (Weiner, 1995). Furthermore, by 1991 fully 80% of all asylum claims were being made in-country rather than at the port of entry (Eurostat, 1994), alerting policy makers and the public to the permeability of the nation’s borders. The realisation in some countries that Third World refugees could no longer be kept at arm’s length came as such a profound shock that it brought about a complete rethink of refugee admission policy in many European countries.

4

Defining the ‘problem’

Deterrence came to the fore, and the concept of burden sharing was increasingly usurped by policies of containment and prevention that were designed to keep Third World refugees in the Third World (see Robinson, 1996a). Even the UNHCR sanctioned and condoned compulsory repatriation within the Third World when it became apparent that First World countries would no longer take quotas of refugees. In Europe, the EU gradually harmonised national policies on the admission of asylum seekers to maximise their deterrent effect: • carriers were fined if they transported people to the EU without the proper papers; • lists of safe countries were drawn up to which asylum seekers could be returned; • visa requirements were imposed upon those travelling from an ever-longer list of Third World countries; • an agreement (the Dublin Convention of 1990) was reached preventing asylum seekers from making multiple asylum claims within the EU and therefore becoming ‘refugees in orbit’; • arrangements were made to share intelligence (especially within the Schengen group of countries) and strengthen border controls, particularly in southern Europe (Robinson, 1996a). In parallel with this increasingly exclusionist agenda, and partly in order to justify it, recognition rates for refugees also decreased sharply. While this may have reflected the fact that asylum seekers had weaker cases than they had before, it also reflected the political agendas of national governments, keen to ‘crack down’ on ‘bogus asylum seekers’ and play the numbers game. Take the UK, for example: in 1982, 59% of all decisions awarded refugee status; by 1995, this proportion had fallen to 5%. And much of Europe was the same: The proportion of cases with the decision “recognized as a refugee” … has fallen considerably from around 60 in the early 1980s to 22 in 1990, and somewhat less than 10 in 1991. (Eurostat, 1994, p 92)

These figures were accepted by the public at face value and, not unnaturally, the extent to which asylum decisions are manipulated for political purposes was ignored. Instead, the public drew the conclusion that a growing proportion of those who apply for asylum were economic migrants representing themselves as refugees. Moreover, in the past two decades, the source of those seeking asylum in Europe has also changed. The idea of asylum seekers as white European dissidents heroically fleeing communism has been usurped by a new perception of asylum seekers: impoverished black and Asian people. By 1987, the main countries from which asylum seekers were coming to the UK were Sri Lanka (992), Iran (649), Pakistan (446) and Uganda (318). Africa therefore accounted for 30% of all applicants, Asia a further 62%, and Europe only 5.6%. The

5

Spreading the ‘burden’?

pattern in the Netherlands was not dissimilar, with the main sources of asylum applicants being Africa (39%),Asia (34%) and Surinam (9%). For many members of the public, then, the term ‘asylum seeker’ became racialised and is now taken to mean people who are visibly different and culturally distinct. The latest significant change of the past two decades has been the successful attempt by government to change the asylum-seeking discourse. The political elite has sought to change public perceptions of asylum seekers in order to justify more restrictive legislation. Through the lead they have provided, politicians have persuaded the public that many asylum seekers are bogus, that they do not deserve to be allowed entry to the UK, and that those who are already here gained entry illegally. Taking the UK in the early 1990s as an example, Kaye (1994) demonstrated how the Conservative government undertook orchestrated campaigns in 1990-91, 1992-93 and again in 1995 to downgrade the public’s perception of refugees. This was done to justify the tightening of immigration control in each of these years of Conservative rule. Kaye also notes how, ironically, the Labour Party also undermined the status of refugees and asylum seekers by failing to make any distinction between them and labour migrants. Furthermore, Labour tried to handle the asylum issue under the rubric of anti-racism policy. Around the same time, the political consensus on immigration in the Netherlands shattered. Prior to the 1990s, the three main political parties – the Christian Democrats (CDA), the Liberals (VVD) and the Social Democrats (PvdA) – had agreed not to make political capital out of the immigration issue. However, in the early 1990s, the VVD began to politicise immigration, and the CDA soon followed suit. Then, during the 1994 General Election, this problematisation of immigration became a problematisation of asylum seeking. Many commentators regard that campaign as a turning point in the portrayal and perception of asylum seekers. For example, the newspaper De Volkskrant polled voters during the electoral campaign and found that 77% of VVD supporters and 74% of CDA supporters felt that “the number of asylum seekers is too high” (De Volkskrant, 2 February 1994). From the 1980s onwards, then, asylum seeking and asylum seekers took on a different character and were represented in different ways in Europe. Public policy responded by suggesting new solutions to what was now perceived and represented as a ‘problem’.

The spatial concentration of asylum seekers Although the scale and nature of international asylum seeking moved up the national policy agenda in the 1980s and 1990s, the issue also had domestic corollaries that further sharpened the need to take urgent action. One of the key issues of the late 1990s was the way in which spontaneous asylum seekers tended to congregate in particular regions of the country (especially particular cities and even particular neighbourhoods) while they awaited the outcome of their asylum claims, and later when they were granted residence rights.

6

Defining the ‘problem’

In the UK, these clusters of asylum seekers and refugees were largely found in the South East of England near the main ports of entry (Dover and Gatwick), and also within Greater London. Although the UK had no official data until very recently on the distribution of asylum seekers1, clear indications exist of the extent to which asylum seekers and refugees were geographically concentrated prior to the 1999 Asylum and Immigration Act. For example, Robinson and Hale (1989) found that, as a result of secondary migration, 46% of all Vietnamese quota refugees in the UK were living in London by 1988, and there were concentrations within that city in the boroughs of Southwark, Lambeth and Greenwich. More recently, Carey-Wood et al (1995) demonstrated that 85% of refugees who applied for asylum in the UK between 1983 and 1991 did so from addresses in London. Only 3% of applicants were living elsewhere in the South East, and another 12% in other parts of the UK (Table 2.1). More recently still, the Audit Commission (2000a) collated figures on the geographical concentration of asylum seekers and refugees in London. It estimated that between 240,000 and 280,000 asylum seekers and refugees were living in London in 1997, and that the city housed 85% of all asylum seekers and refugees resident within the UK. Moreover, these groups were not evenly distributed within London. Some boroughs, such as Havering and the City, had fewer than 1,000 asylum seekers and refugees each, and these groups formed only 0.2% of their resident populations. On the other hand, Newham had an asylum seeker and refugee population of 20,000; these groups formed about 7% of its total population. Hackney and Haringey also had asylum seeker and refugee populations numbering between 16,000 and 20,000. The Audit Commission also estimated that, by April 2000, London boroughs were supporting 80,000 asylum seekers. The Local Government Association (LGA) (2000a) announced that 90% of all destitute asylum seekers who were being supported by local authorities in the UK in March 2000 lived in London and the South East. Included within these totals was the asylum-seeking population of Dover. As one of the main ports of entry to the UK, Dover in the late 1990s attracted a relatively large asylum seeker population relative to its overall size. Although the figures are hotly disputed (an issue discussed at greater length later in this chapter), it is generally agreed that, in early 2000, 700 asylum seekers were living in Dover among the local urban population of 33,000 and district council population of 103,000. As we shall see below, this particular concentration proved to be highly significant in prompting the introduction of a dispersal policy in the UK. The same generalisations about the geographical concentration of refugees and asylum seekers within large cities also applied to the constituent parts of the UK. Within Wales, for example, the picture was very similar, with 67% of its 1,016 refugee households in 1996 being found in Cardiff, its capital city (Robinson, 1997). The same was also true of unaccompanied minors who had sought asylum in the UK. Williamson (1995) provided a breakdown of the geographical distribution of this subgroup within the asylum seeker population. He noted

7

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Table 2.1: Geographical distribution of refugees who applied for asylum in the UK (excluding Vietnamese), 1983-91 Locality East London

% 12

West London North London North-west London

12 17 7

South-east London South-west London Outer London

8 10 19

South East of England Rest of UK

3 12

Source: Carey-Wood et al (1995)

that, in December 1992, there were 334 children being supported in London and 11 in West Sussex. Within London, the main concentrations of minors were in the boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea (50), Lambeth (47), Camden (42) and Hillingdon (41). The geographical concentration of asylum seekers in particular cities was not unique to the UK. Rather, in 1986, 53% of all asylum applicants in Belgium resided in Brussels, and 86% were found in the five cities of Brussels, Liege, Antwerp, Ghent and Leuven (Norro, 1992). The degree of concentration was such that some cities were insisting that new applicants for welfare benefits had to have already lived in that particular city for a certain period of time, thereby excluding asylum seekers who had just arrived in the country. Some cities even refused to register asylum seekers for benefits at all. Hammar’s (1992) work on Sweden also demonstrated how refugees concentrate into particular cities upon arrival. He found that, in 1985, 52% of all refugees admitted to Sweden settled in metropolitan municipalities, with 38% living in Stockholm County alone.

The spatial concentration of costs and ‘burdens’ While the public perceived the spatial concentration of asylum seekers in particular cities as a problem in itself, the concentration of these people also produced concentration of economic costs. The UK’s 1996 Immigration and Asylum Act (and a subsequent High Court challenge to parts of that act) imposed direct responsibility on local authorities to care for asylum seekers within their geographical domain. There was a broader context for this act – families had to be supported under the 1989 Children Act, and destitute and single asylum seekers had to be provided for under the 1948 National Assistance Act. The 1996 Immigration and Asylum Act followed in a similar vein, by imposing a duty of care on local authorities for port of entry applicants. By 1998/99, £475 million was being spent on supporting asylum seekers; however,

8

Defining the ‘problem’

due to the geographical concentration of asylum seekers, much of this was being funded by, or channelled through, only a small number of local authorities. The LGA (2000a) calculated that, between April and December 1999, local authorities spent £8 million more on supporting asylum seekers than they received from central government. Between December 1999 and March 2000, the shortfall grew by a further £10 million. More importantly, however, the Audit Commission (2000a) calculated that 92% of this ‘overspending’ was within Greater London. The key problem within London was the difficulty of finding reasonably priced accommodation that would allow total spending per asylum seeker to remain below the government’s grant cap of £140 per week for single adults and £240 per week for families (Audit Commission, 2000b). The Audit Commission (2000a) noted that, for some London boroughs, up to 25% of total expenditure on supporting asylum seekers was not reclaimable from central government and therefore had to be met from general revenues. The LGA also noted that local authorities were spending an additional £3 million more than they were receiving on supporting unaccompanied minors, with well over a third of this total being accounted for by only two London boroughs – Kensington and Chelsea, and Hammersmith and Fulham. The latter borough was meeting its £1.1 million ‘overspend’ from its general contingency reserves. The concentration of asylum seekers, and the costs associated with their support in an environment where central government grants did not cover all expenditure, generated highly localised fiscal – and therefore political – pressures. Certain localities became ‘sites of struggle’ that changed the subsequent course of national policy. Dover was one such site in the UK. As we have noted, Dover had become home to a sizeable population of asylum seekers on account of its geographical location. It was controlled by a hung council and had a Conservative leader who was keen to wrest overall control. Furthermore, it was situated within Kent, which had a Conservative-dominated council. Research undertaken by the Conservative Party found that immigration and asylum was either the most or second most important issue for most local voters. The issue, then, was a potential vote winner (Dodd, 2000). In order to highlight what they felt was the unfairness of the system, local Tories mounted a campaign to make the real costs of supporting asylum seekers explicit to their local charge payers and voters. In March 2000, they claimed that they were facing a funding shortfall of £400,000 because of the cost of supporting asylum seekers. They publicised the fact that the Kent County Council Community Charge precept would have to be increased the following year by £3 per household specifically to meet this cost. The prospective Conservative councillor for Dover and Deal went on to say that: ... it shouldn’t be down to local people to fund a national problem. That in itself is one of the reasons for local tension and the government has caused that tension by not meeting the costs.

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Spreading the ‘burden’?

The announcement of the charge’s increase triggered a popular movement against asylum seekers in the town that culminated in the collection of 1,400 names on a petition objecting to the additional charge. This incident raised national concern about the asylum issue in general and the plight of Dover in particular, since the latter had already become national news after some highly contentious local media reporting (discussed later in this chapter). Dover was not alone in making public the localised costs of supporting asylum seekers. Much earlier, in 1992, the London Borough of Hillingdon (which includes Heathrow airport within its boundaries) had also argued that its Community Charge rate would have to be increased to meet the cost of supporting unaccompanied asylum seekers. In the previous financial year, the bill had come to £967,000 (Williamson, 1995). One commentator on this development wrote at the time: Providing residential accommodation or foster care is always very expensive and unaccompanied refugee children often have particular needs which lead to additional costs …. An additional problem is that the cost is unevenly spread throughout the country, and indeed throughout London (where most refugees live). (Williamson, 1995, p 59)

Once again, complaints about the geographical concentration of the costs associated with asylum seekers are not unique to the UK. In Sweden, three municipalities (Botkyrka, Gothenburg and Malmö) led the campaign for dispersal in the early 1980s, and these three are still at the forefront of the campaign for more strictly enforced dispersal today. Anders Arnesson, the leading Social Democrat in the municipality of Botkyrka (which lies in the southern part of the Stockholm region), recently stated that, as a result of the growth in asylum seeking in 2002, half of Botkyrka’s population is immigrant. He estimated the additional costs associated with these arrivals to amount to some 20 million SEK (£1.5 million) per annum. He concluded by saying “it is time for others to take their responsibility” (Stockholm City, 2002).

The media response It is unclear whether the media has an independent role in public policy agenda setting and the formation of public opinion or simply reflects and amplifies the views of the ruling political elite (Kaye, 1998). What we can be sure of, however, is that the media is a bridge between the voter and the government. There are four ways in which the UK media has shaped the nature and tone of the debate about asylum seeking, and therefore influenced public opinion on this issue. First, the print media uses particular language about asylum seekers that stereotypes their migration and justifies action against them. This is a clear example of media ‘agenda setting’, by which the media decides what is news and what is not; that is, what is important and what is not. Second, reporting of asylum seeking by the print media has been largely negative and

10

Defining the ‘problem’

has created a public perception that asylum seekers are a problem. Third, some newspapers deny asylum seekers a voice but allow extremists to express their views without any form of censorship. Fourth, the print media has consistently repeated ‘asylum myths’ and conditioned public attitudes and perceptions. These tendencies are examples of ‘news framing’, by which the media creates a view of the world that then influences how facts and news are subsequently read and interpreted. The print media in Britain is highly influential. In 1995, 13.7 million copies of the leading 11 dailies were printed each day, and roughly two out of every three households in the country bought a copy. Moreover, unlike TV and radio in the UK, which are tightly controlled, newspapers still police their own conduct and decide the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Traditionally, the daily newspapers have been against large-scale immigration to the UK. Consequently, it was no surprise that they also adopted a negative stance towards the rise in the number of asylum seekers in the 1990s. One of the ways in which they did this was to adopt, and use repetitively, a vocabulary that conditions readers to see asylum seeking as a ‘problem’, and one that requires urgent action. Asylum seekers were depersonalised, so that asylum seeking became a mass and unstoppable phenomenon analogous to the forces of nature. Asylum seekers were no longer people, but a ‘wave’, and since numbers were increasing that wave became a ‘tide’, and since tides can breach defences, tides became a ‘flood’, and since floods inundate land, the ‘flood’ had the potential to ‘swamp’ Britain. One can see how easily the metaphor can set alarm bells ringing. Another way in which the media framed the news and set the agenda was to use ‘descriptive conglomerations’ (Hargreaves, 1996). That is, words and terms were routinely linked together in reports so that readers eventually came to accept a causal link even where one had never been proven. For example, asylum seekers were increasingly dubbed ‘bogus asylum seekers’ or ‘economic migrants’, thereby undermining their honesty and integrity and questioning whether they were ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’. All in all, these tendencies set the agenda that asylum seekers were a problem, and framed the news in such a way that readers were always drawn to the negative aspects of the phenomenon, and action against asylum seekers was legitimated. Coleman’s (1996) early study of newspaper reports of asylum seeking demonstrates many of the propensities that I have just described. He reviewed the content of 11 national daily papers over a three-month period ending on 1 December 1995. He found 261 articles on the asylum issue; that is, approximately four articles per day. Coleman concluded thus: The survey found that the ‘angle’ most used by the national daily press to cover issues of immigration and asylum was to define migrants and asylum seekers as a ‘problem’ for British society. Many of the articles in the survey used a recognizable stock repertoire of images that depicted migrants and asylum seekers coming to Britain as:

11

Spreading the ‘burden’?

• A ‘flood, wave or tide’ • A ‘bogus’ group who are prepared to deceive the authorities to stay in Britain • A ‘fraudulent’ group of people who scheme and lie to live off the state and the taxpayer. (Coleman, 1996, p 2)

Kaye (1998) also found evidence of the repeated use of a loaded vocabulary in his study of asylum reports in The Times, The Guardian and The Independent between October 1990 and October 1995. He calculated that the words ‘bogus’ or ‘phoney’ appeared in 58% of all articles. In some cases (and in particular in The Guardian) these phrases were mainly employed to challenge the way in which others (for example, the government) used them. Even so, Kaye concluded thus: The news is framed in terms of the ‘genuineness’ of refugees being a newsworthy question, demanding frequent comment, report and discussion, and this may in itself have the effect of socializing the reader into using this construct when thinking about refugees. (Kaye, 1998, p 178)

Mollard’s study of Scottish daily newspapers also found that “the terms ‘asylum’, ‘economic migration’, and ‘illegal migration’ are often used synonymously, and asylum seekers are presented as a threat to Britons” (2001, p 11). The continued use of the word ‘bogus’ alongside ‘asylum seekers’ fixes very negative stereotypes in readers’ minds and gives the impression that all those who are refused refugee status have tried in some way to cheat their way into the UK. (Mollard, 2001, p 11)

The second tendency of the print media has been to report on asylum seeking and asylum seekers in a very negative way. For example, asylum seekers are stereotyped as being more numerous than they actually are; furthermore, they are dishonest, undeserving, and a burden on British society and the economy. Sections of the print media have changed public perceptions by criminalising asylum seekers. Some newspapers focused on the proportion of asylum seekers whose full claims were eventually recognised, and implied that those asylum seekers whose claims were rejected had in some way behaved dishonestly and illegally. They also concentrated coverage on those asylum seekers who tried to enter the UK illegally and were either apprehended or died en route. And they reported with relish what they saw as abuses of the asylum system or the welfare system, typecasting asylum seekers as dishonest ‘scroungers’. For example, Coleman (1996) discovered that 11 of the 14 articles published by The Sun in his study period were either negative about asylum seekers or cast them as a ‘problem’. Even worse, in the Daily Mail, which was waging a war against immigration, 41 of the 43 articles published on asylum were critical. The end product of this type of reporting is:

12

Defining the ‘problem’

a climate of fear about asylum seekers … supported by the press, with the use of unsubstantiated claims about the numbers of people claiming asylum in the UK, their motives, and alleged anti-social behaviour among asylum groups. (Mollard, 2001, p 11)

The following are typical examples of this tendency to report negatively: An asylum free-for-all is a time bomb ticking away … that could one day explode with terrifying public violence. (Scottish Daily Mail, 13 April 2000) Senior judges have made a string of absurd rulings – and made Britain the Costa Del Dole for bogus refugees …. That is why 300,000 refugees have poured into Britain in the past ten years. The vast bulk of them are here illegally. And with wives and children the true figure could be as high as ONE MILLION. (The Scottish Sun, 11 April 2000) Gipsy spongers are building themselves PALACES with the vast fortune they are milking from soft-touch Britain. The palaces are festooned with marble and gold. (The Sun, 14 March 2000) Family gangs of East European asylum seekers ... are terrorising Middle England’s village stores and sub-post offices in a wave of robbery and shoplifting. (Daily Mail, 16 April 2000) Bosnian treated on NHS asks for £1500 handout to go on holiday. (Daily Mail, 27 May 2000) Why do we let in this army of spongers? (Daily Mail, 26 September 1998) Send spongers packing before we are over-run. (Sunday People, 13 February 2000) Boot asylum spongers out. Tougher action is needed to stop this human flotsam. No benefit payments. No housing. No free lawyers. No right of appeal that keeps them in Britain for months. Just dump them back on the boat the same day. (Sunday People, 10 January 1999) Coping with the flood of asylum-seekers is costing one council more than £24 million a year.... The disastrous drain on taxpayers’ cash ... offered further evidence that Britain’s immigration crisis is spiralling out of control. (Daily Mail, 13 February 2000) Another village in fear as it is forced to become home for asylum seekers with its pub, post office, and strong sense of community, it is a pleasant corner of England in which people take a quiet pride. But today, the villagers

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Spreading the ‘burden’?

of Thorrington ... are looking with mounting trepidation towards a cluster of chalets ... being turned into a centre to house up to 120 asylum seekers ... the impact ... could be devastating. They are worried crime will soar.... (Daily Mail, 17 June 2000)

The third tendency of the print media, as we have already mentioned, is to deny a voice to asylum seekers and the organisations that represent them. Conversely, it allows those members of the public who are opposed to such immigration to speak as often and in as extreme a manner as they wish. In this way, newspapers reinforce their own negative stance on the issue and imply that the public supports them and their views. Mollard (2001), for example, found only 6% of the newspaper coverage she studied to have emanated from asylum seekers, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or refugee councils. Coleman (1996) found that not one single article among the 261 he reviewed contained the views or opinions of asylum seekers, or indeed used asylum seekers as a source. He also found that: ... articles that discussed the issues of asylum seekers coming to Britain rarely included reports, analysis or investigation of claims of human rights abuses in the countries from which asylum-seekers originated. (Coleman, 1996, p 2)

The letters pages of newspapers are the most explicit example of this tendency to broadcast only one side of the story. Here, concerned individuals express their often extreme views uncensored. By publishing such letters, newspapers are able to broadcast views indirectly that it would be unacceptable for them to voice directly. While Wilson (2000) found that roughly half of all articles published in the regional press in an eight-week period in late 1999 were negative towards asylum seekers, fully three-quarters of the 80 letters concerning asylum that the same papers printed were hostile. Mollard described how, on four occasions, The Scottish Sun had “printed whole pages that were dedicated to letters expressing negative views about asylum seekers” (2001, p 17). The following are random examples of such letters and reported comments of interviewees: What is racist in complaining about con-artists coming into this country and getting hand-outs to the detriment of pensioners, hospitals and schools? (Letter in the Scottish Daily Express, 19 April 2000) I am absolutely outraged at the thousands of immigrants flooding into this country. If the government don’t stop this, we Britons will become an ‘ethnic minority’ in our own country. (Letter to the Scottish Daily Express, 19 April 2000)

14

Defining the ‘problem’

“People are deeply concerned because we have absolutely no idea who these people are. For all we know, they could be rapists, murderers or monsters.” (respondent quoted by Daily Mail, 17 June 2000) “It’s an absolute joke. There was no money for patients when they needed money for beds in those wards, but the money was found instantly for illegal immigrants.” (respondent quoted in Daily Mail, 8 December 1998) “It makes me mad when I think about the way they are milking this country. They live like Lords. They get all that money from the government and they’re still not content.” (respondent quoted in Daily Mail, 2 March 2000)

The fourth tendency of the print media is to perpetuate ‘asylum myths’ uncritically, so that they become accepted as common sense, and taken for granted. Mollard’s (2001) study for Oxfam, examining how the Scottish daily newspapers reported the asylum issue in spring 2000, provides a range of examples of this tendency. Mollard identified nine main asylum myths that are regularly propagated by the print media: 1. Britain is a soft touch. It takes more than its fair share of asylum seekers and is experiencing an asylum crisis. 2. Most asylum seekers come from safe countries. 3. Only a small percentage of asylum seekers are genuine. 4. Most asylum seekers are economic migrants. 5. Asylum seekers get huge handouts from the British government. 6. The number of asylum seekers using state services is spiralling and is crippling those services. 7. Asylum seekers are taking the best accommodation in British cities. 8. Asylum seekers do not contribute to British society – they only take from it. 9. Asylum seekers from some countries are more deserving than those from others. Examples of media perpetuation of such asylum myths include: Supporting bogus asylum seekers in London is costing taxpayers the equivalent of £63 for every household in the city – enough to put 5,000 extra police officers on the beat. (Daily Mail, 30 March 2000) A self-confessed child abuser was offered sanctuary in Britain.... Mr X was granted ‘exceptional leave’ to stay for the rest of his life on compassionate grounds. The Iranian is currently costing taxpayers £300 per day, taking English language classes and visiting the gym and library at an asylum seekers’ detention unit. (Daily Mail, 4 September 1999)

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Spreading the ‘burden’?

The cost of holding an asylum seeker in a detention centre is £1300 per week – nearly as much as putting them up at the Ritz. (Daily Mail, 2 February 2000) The report is just the latest in a long line of alarm calls that reveal Britain is increasingly unable to cope with ... asylum seekers flooding in. The influx has completely overwhelmed the system. (Daily Mail, 13 January 2000) ‘House asylum seekers or face more’ warning. The government has threatened to flood the West Midlands with asylum seekers unless more than 5000 are found homes immediately. (Sunday Mercury, 2 July 2000) Like bees to honey, they have been drawn by our generous and laxly monitored benefit system. (Mail on Sunday, 29 November 1998)

Perhaps the case study that best illustrates many of the media’s themes and tendencies is the town of Dover. Prior to 1997, when Czech and Slovak refugees began to arrive in the town, ethnic minorities accounted for only 0.6% of the total population. Even after the arrival of asylum seekers from Eastern Europe, Kent County Council Social Services estimated there to be only 750 asylum seekers living in Dover in 1999, where they formed only 0.4% of the total population. However, tensions had been rising between this group and the local residents for several years: asylum seekers were routinely attacked, and some were pushed into the paths of oncoming cars and hit over the head with iron bars. Some local hoteliers resented the undermining of their tourist trade by the presence in nearby bed and breakfast hotels of asylum seekers. There was competition between local youths and male asylum seekers for the attention of local girls. And, furthermore, Dover was suffering an economic decline that blighted the futures of local people. Not dissimilar conditions had also applied in a number of London Boroughs – however, the critical difference was the manner in which the local press reported the asylum issue. In Dover, the twinned local newspapers, the Dover Express and the Folkestone Herald, campaigned robustly to rid the town of its asylum seekers. For example, the Dover Express had not been afraid to run an editorial with the headline ‘We want to wash dross down drain’: ... illegal immigrants, asylum seekers (when they get to asylum are they happy?), bootleggers (who take many guises) and the scum of the earth drug smugglers … have targeted our beloved coastline. We are left with the backdraft of a nation’s human sewage and no cash to wash it down the drain. (Dover Express, 1 October 1998)

The paper described Folkestone Road, where most of the asylum seekers lived, as ‘Shanty Town’ or ‘Asylum Alley’. And in January 1999, the paper ran a story

16

Defining the ‘problem’

suggesting that young Roma women were opening brothels along that road. According to the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF): ... the Dover Express and the Folkestone Herald … have continually referred to thousands of asylum seekers flooding the Kent area and, by sheer dint of numbers, running down the welfare state. (CARF, 1999b, p 2)

The two local papers, then, had framed local news in a particularly negative way towards asylum seekers. However, the incident that converted this local story into a national and emblematic issue was a violent scuffle between young asylum seekers and local youths at a fairground on 13 and 14 August 1999. As is often the case, the facts of the altercation remain unclear, but it seems that the locals had been taunting the immigrants, who retaliated by attacking them with Stanley knives. One youth required 175 stitches, another 48. As a result of the fairground violence, the local issue of asylum seekers hit the national headlines. Perhaps this was because Kent is the bucolic ‘Garden of England’, or because, for one generation at least, Dover symbolises English national identity, with its White Cliffs and its evocation of Winston Churchill’s defiant words about ‘fighting them on the beaches’. Dover became a site of struggle, and an example of all that was wrong with UK asylum policy. Only five days after the Express’s infamous editorial, the Daily Mail published an “investigation into Britain’s immigration crisis”, based on research in Dover. It headlined the piece ‘The good life on asylum alley’, and wrote about stemming the tide of Roma immigration. It characterised the Roma as bogus asylum seekers milking state benefits (CARF, 1999a). It even printed the address of one asylumseeking family in Dover that subsequently had its house attacked and windows smashed. Its campaign continued, and broadened, throughout October, November and December 1998 and into January 1999. The paper accused the Home Office of operating a “virtual open door policy”, and of “going soft” on the “war against bogus asylum seekers”. On 28 November 1998, it ran an article describing how the number of successful asylum applications had increased by 50% with Jack Straw as Home Secretary. And on 30 November, it ran a story about how asylum seekers were having a “devastating impact” on crime in London, even though the evidence stretched to no more than 44 cases. Furthermore, the Daily Mail did not stand alone. On 17 August 1998 The Daily Telegraph took up the plight of Dover and its residents in an article entitled “Strife in the Garden of England”, which has since been critiqued by Goldman in an article published online (undated). Goldman recounts how the Telegraph’s article bemoaned the decline of this “once proud town”, and described how Dover and neighbouring Kent towns now house 5,000 asylum seekers made up of “economic migrants from Eastern Europe” and refugees from Kosovo. The article claimed that “nobody knows how fast these people are arriving, because, plainly, some are being smuggled in, but the Conservative leader … has put the influx at around 1000 per month”, and that a “tinder box situation”

17

Spreading the ‘burden’?

had consequently arisen in the town. The article quoted claims by the leader of Kent County Council that asylum seekers were being dumped in Dover by London boroughs, and that local people were now “swamped and resentful” as well as “increasingly fearful”, partly because the asylum seekers were “forming gangs and engaging in theft, shop-lifting and behaviour calculated to offend”. Given such local and national reportage of the asylum issue, is it any surprise that those with strongly negative views felt legitimated in their beliefs, felt that they could express their views openly? They were presented with the opportunity to do so by newspapers that were eager to show they were in touch with their readers. Goldman (undated) reprints excerpts from two letters reproduced in a local Kent newspaper after the furore over the fairground violence: Welcome to Kent’s planet Thanet where all hell is currently breaking loose as hordes of illegal Albanian immigrants drive the locals to despair and, sadly, violence. Now my in-laws are a lovely, straight-down-the-line couple who have lived and worked in Thanet for most of their lives. In the past year though they have seen their once cosy neighbourhood of holiday B&Bs turned into a ghetto of thieves, drunks and beggars. Just walking to the corner shop for a pint of milk now involves running a gauntlet of headscarved women with interchangeable babies holding their hands out and shifty looking blokes who have somehow found the money for booze.

Parallel, if not identical, trends in the media have been at work elsewhere in Europe. In Sweden, for example, the media is widely thought to be proimmigration in general. However, certain newspapers have contributed to the stigmatisation of ‘immigrant-dense’ neighbourhoods. Ericsson et al (2002) have argued that, by focusing upon unemployment, poor school performances and civil disorder in these neighbourhoods, some newspapers have helped create a public perception that areas with significant immigrant populations are now ‘problem areas’. Not surprisingly, these same newspapers were very enthusiastic supporters of policies designed to disperse asylum seekers. In the Netherlands, too, and especially since the 1994 General Election, the print media has been less positive towards asylum seeking. For example, popular newspapers began to print erroneously inflated estimates of the scale of asylum seeking. Some even devised their own forecasts of the scale of expected levels of asylum migration. De Telegraaf went so far as to forecast that asylum immigration would exceed 100,000 people in 1994. The broadsheet daily De Volkskrant commissioned polls into what the public thought about asylum seeking, and found that 69% of its sample felt the number of asylum seekers in the Netherlands to be “too high”.

18

Defining the ‘problem’

Public opinion Public attitudes to asylum seeking and asylum seekers have also changed, partly as a result of the factors outlined so far in this chapter. By 1997, Britons were already expressing the view that their tolerance was being overstretched. The Eurobarometer (1998) survey recorded that, among the British sample: • 66% agreed with the statement ‘Our country has reached its limits; if there were to be more people belonging to (non-EU) minority groups we would have a problem’; • 32% were prepared to define themselves as ‘very racist’ or ‘racist’; • 30% felt that non-European minorities were so different that they could never be fully accepted in British society; • 26% felt that minority groups should have to give up their own cultures in order to be more fully accepted in the UK; • 44% thought there were ‘too many’ people from racial, religious or cultural minorities in the UK; • 37% claimed that the UK would be a great deal better off without non-EU immigrants; • 15% supported repatriation of immigrants and their British-born children originating from outside the EU. The report concluded that: ... the anxieties expressed by a number of respondents seemed to result not so much from the actual presence of minority groups but from the perception as to the ability of the host society to accommodate them, giving rise to feelings of insecurity. (Eurobarometer, 1998, p 23)

However, as the asylum issue has become more prominent in the media and on the political agenda, so attitudes have further hardened. A MORI poll for the Readers Digest in 2000 found that “80% of adults believe that refugees come to our shores because they regard Britain as a ‘soft touch’” (Readers Digest, 2001). Respondents to the poll overestimated the amount of financial assistance given to asylum seekers by a factor of 300%, and 66% of adults felt that there were too many immigrants in Britain, a rise of 11 percentage points over a similar survey undertaken only 12 months previously (Readers Digest, 2000). In early 2001, a MORI poll for the Mail on Sunday confirmed the growth of negative feeling towards asylum seeking and asylum seekers. Forty-four per cent of respondents expressed the opinion that Britain should take no more asylum seekers; 59% agreed with the statement ‘A very large number of those seeking asylum are cheats’, and 57% agreed that ‘The demands on scarce housing and medical care made by dishonest economic migrants is stretching the patience of voters’. Even Eurobarometer found that attitudes towards immigration in

19

Spreading the ‘burden’?

the UK had hardened when it polled across Europe in spring 2000 (Thalhammer et al, 2001). It noted that, in Europe as a whole: ... many EU citizens favour policies designed to improve the coexistence of majorities and minorities. Support for such policies has increased over the past three years. (Thalhammer et al, 2001, p 11)

In the UK, however, it found that optimism about multiculturalism was waning. Fewer people felt that it was a good thing for a society to be made up of people from different races, religions and cultures, and fewer respondents agreed that such diversity adds to society’s strength. Instead, more people were in favour of repatriation. Eurobarometer also noted that the support shown for integration did not extend to refugees and asylum seekers. The national media was not the only actor to express and help shape opinions on asylum seekers and their settlement within the UK. Local actors also had their say. Local politicians, local action groups and the local press were all prepared to express anti-asylum seeker attitudes where it was felt such public expression would benefit them. Again, Dover provides an excellent case study of how local politicians and the local media took a public stance against asylum seekers while local activists sought publicity for their cause and to change the opinions of others. As we have already noted, Dover was contested political territory and was sited in a county that supported the Conservative Party; that is, the party in opposition. The asylum issue was therefore a local grievance that could be used for political gain and to embarrass the government. The leader of Kent County Council, Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, wrote privately to the Immigration Minister, Barbara Roche, to express his concerns about the number of asylum seekers in Dover. He described how the tensions surrounding their presence in the town had turned Dover into a “tinderbox”, and suggested that “we are increasingly fearful that it could culminate in a fatal confrontation or arson attack”. The letter was then leaked into the public domain and was widely reported in the national print media, beginning with the The Daily Telegraph, as we have seen. Following this, the Shadow Home Secretary, Ann Widdecombe, visited Dover (a widely reported event in itself), where she claimed that the warnings of imminent danger were being ignored by the government. Local grievances had thus been used to mount an attack on the policies and effectiveness of the national government. The government’s response to this local pressure confirmed perceptions that it was wrong for asylum seekers to cluster in particular areas and legitimated resistance to this. Lord Bassam, then a Home Office Minister, said that the situation in Dover was “intolerable” and had been caused by the “dumping” of asylum seekers in the town without adequate support. He agreed that they were in the “wrong place”, and claimed that the government was trying “to see the problem off before it arrives on these shores” (BBC, 1999). Given the intemperate language being used in this very public exchange, it was hardly surprising that local people also felt empowered to express their

20

Defining the ‘problem’

views more openly and more actively. The Campaign Against Racism and Fascism noted that: ... asylum seekers faced a sharp rise in racist violence …. Families of refugees had lighted rags and fireworks pushed through their letter boxes and bottles thrown through their windows. The words ‘we will burn you out’ were painted on one house. (CARF, 1999a, p 2)

A teenage girl was kicked in the stomach for being a suspected prostitute. A public meeting was called by those opposed to immigration, and at that meeting a new organisation was created, which drafted a pamphlet entitled Dover the land of plenty. This pamphlet listed 33 reasons “why we should send them back and close the door”. These included the claim that asylum seekers would trigger “an epidemic of venereal diseases” because of “their promiscuity and selling sex for money”, and that the local hospital had advised that should anyone have “blood contact with these people, then medical help is of the utmost importance”. Reason No 13 was that “Pregnant refugee mothers only want brand new equipment for their new offspring. Are these infants now entitled to hold a British passport to success now that they have been born in our local hospitals?”. In an interview with The Guardian on 28 March 2000, two supporters of the group claimed that only one in 10 asylum seekers had a genuine case to make and that the others were “bogus”. One then went on to say that: People are resisting because of what they’ve got. They’re on benefits, they’re walking around with mobile phones, the latest clothes and cars. They’re having the life of luxury on it. Some are sending back £500 in cash a week to Romania.

The other supporter then added, “In the Post Office there was uproar as one man was getting £700 in cash”.

Conclusion The changing place of Europe in the global refugee system has had a profound impact upon government response. More asylum seekers than ever before are now making their way directly to Europe and claiming sanctuary. Many of these asylum seekers are not the stereotypical European political dissidents that helped create the public image of the refugee during the Cold War era. Rather, they are poor people fleeing for a multitude of reasons and they are highly visible because of their race, religion or culture. Moreover, the channelling of international travel through key transportation hubs means that many asylum seekers now seek to access Europe through a relatively small number of entry points – the main international airports and seaports. Once in Europe, many were (until recently) free to settle where they wished, and they chose either to

21

Spreading the ‘burden’?

live in the capital or major cities, or in their place of entry to Europe. Significant concentrations of asylum seekers have thus developed within national space. Coterminous with the arrival of this new group of disadvantaged people has been the retrenchment of the European state and the restructuring of its economies. Deregulation, market testing and privatisation has shrunk the state and reduced its tendency to intervene to ensure social justice. In the UK, for example, the public housing sector has been dismantled and social housing is now only a residential category rather than the one third of the housing stock it once was at its peak. At the same time, the New International Division of Labour has dealt a body blow to manufacturing industry in the high wage economies of Western Europe. It has ensured that the demand for unskilled labour, so buoyant in the 1960s and early 1970s, has all but dried up, taking with it the need for mass international migration. The arrival of a growing number of visible asylum seekers in particular large and often industrial cities at a time when the local populations feel disadvantaged and neglected has combined to create a local situation that has been turned into a national problem by means of the media’s reporting. Media threats of ‘economic migrants swamping soft-touch Europe’ has created a climate of fear in which it is acceptable to publicly voice anti-asylum opinions. Furthermore, these opinions are acknowledged as reasonable and mainstream. Kundnani (2001), for example, has written about the new ‘common-sense racism’ towards asylum seekers that has displaced the now unacceptable racism against settled ethnic minorities. Such common sense racism has also been legitimated by the way successive governments have handled the asylum issue and set the agenda. The increasing focus on numbers, deterrence, removals and the proportion of asylum seekers granted residence has fuelled the belief that asylum seekers are not genuine, are in some way a threat, and are not deserving. The media’s behaviour has also impacted upon public behaviour and attitudes. Racist attacks on asylum seekers have increased, local groups have formed to oppose further immigration in sites of struggle, and public opinion polls have shown a generalised hardening of attitudes against asylum seekers and immigration. Thus, by the late 1990s, many European countries were faced with a ‘problem’ that the media and voters insisted had to be resolved: there were too many asylum seekers gaining entry to national space and they were too concentrated in inappropriate locations within that national space. It became an accepted (and largely unchallenged) ‘fact’ that concentration was a problem that needed to be solved. In Britain, the LGA wrote that: The burden of the current ad hoc system is intolerable for some local authorities and the LGA has accepted that the government must take firm action on this issue. (LGA, 2000b, p 1)

When commending the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Bill, it also wrote that:

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Defining the ‘problem’

The LGA supports a national approach to the national responsibility towards asylum seekers …. The proposals in the Bill will remove the intolerable burden currently placed upon a small number of local authorities for asylum seeker support. (LGA, undated)

In Sweden, the 1983 bill that introduced dispersal policies justified their need by aiming to make “the concentration of refugees less strong and thereby relieve/ unload some of the burden that the (metropolitan) municipalities having recently received many refugees are carrying” (Proposition, 1983/1984: 124, p 14). The response to this ‘problem’ of concentration has been deterrence and dispersal. The concept of dispersal has been justified by reference to a persistent belief in the efficacy and morality of the idea of ‘burden sharing’. This principle, which is well established as a basic tenet of the international refugee regime, has increasingly been woven into national policy. It is based upon two parallel premises: 1. Since the arrival of refugees is a national ‘problem’, no one locality should be expected to bear a disproportionate share of the ‘costs’ of their resettlement. 2. The right of the indigenous population to live in communities where their cultures and identities are not challenged by the presence of non-conforming groups should be privileged over the rights of refugees. Refugees, then, are consequently denied the opportunity to congregate in clustered ethnic communities, with all the benefits these provide new and old arrivals alike. This privileging of the aspirations of one group over another has led dispersal to become the accepted wisdom. Given that such thinking had already become entrenched in policy towards quota refugees by the early 1970s and has only been subtly modified since, it is perhaps not surprising that it also underpinned policy towards spontaneous asylum seekers, when that form of migration became numerically significant in the 1990s. Dispersal offers several tangible benefits and – since asylum seekers are politically very weak – few downsides too. The benefits might include: • spreading financial costs between a larger number of local authorities; • spreading social costs between more authorities; • avoiding increasing pressure on housing and social services in areas that are already under stress; • offering better opportunities for long-term integration for those asylum seekers who become refugees; • preventing asylum seekers becoming targets of racist harassment because of their concentration in visible ethnic quarters; • placating disadvantaged local people who might otherwise resist large-scale settlement in their locality.

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Spreading the ‘burden’?

The next three chapters of this book look at how three European countries – Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK – have implemented dispersal as a solution to the ‘problem’ of asylum seeker concentration. Note 1

There are no population registers in the UK, and annual lists only exist for those eligible to vote. See Robinson (1998).

24

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

THREE

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands Martijn Arnoldus, Thea Dukes and Sako Musterd

Introduction This chapter describes in depth the various policies used by the Dutch government to spatially concentrate or disperse ethnic minorities. Particular attention is paid to those policies that were – and are – aimed at asylum seekers and refugees. The chapter is structured around three main sections. In the first section, the national context within which dispersal policies have to be analysed is roughly sketched, and immigration trends and developments in the Netherlands are outlined. The section also describes developments in Dutch migration and minority policy. The arrival of repatriates from the former Dutch East Indies after the Second World War is taken as the starting point, because they formed the first large group of immigrants the Dutch national government had to receive and house in the Netherlands. This immigration resulted in the first deliberate national dispersal policy. The second section introduces and describes the main dispersal and concentration policies that have been put into practice in the Netherlands in the past, and considers what links them to contemporary asylum policy. In the third section, these programmes will be evaluated. It is hoped that this evaluation will be of considerable use when we come to assess future policies. Since we have used English translations of Dutch governmental institutions, many abbreviations have come to be used throughout this chapter. To assist the reader to keep track of these, we have provided a brief glossary on page viii.

The Dutch context for dispersal policies The Dutch are always proud to announce their tolerance towards ‘strangers’. The Netherlands has a long tradition, or so it is said, of welcoming refugees. However, this is by no means a fact of life: to what extent the Dutch have been hospitable to refugees is subject to continuous debate. Quantitative data have been used to show that the Netherlands is not as tolerant towards aliens as some often think (Bronkhorst, 1999), and indices have been developed to measure the degree of hospitality of the Dutch asylum policy (Kuiper, 1992). Recent data gathered by the Dutch Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute

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Spreading the ‘burden’?

(NIDI) suggest that there is a large consensus on restrictive policies regarding the admission to – and residence of – foreigners in the Netherlands. However, the survey also showed that about 70% of the respondents to NIDI’s survey thought the Netherlands had a moral obligation to admit refugees (Moors et al, 1999). However, ‘tolerance’ means a lot more than the admittance of asylum seekers alone. It is also about how people expect newcomers ‘to behave’. By the late 1970s, people were already beginning to claim that Dutch society had become multicultural or multiethnic. However, even today there is no consensus on whether this is really the case. One of the latest – and most contested – statements is that, while the Netherlands may be a multiethnic country, it is definitely not a multicultural one (for recent debates see Scheffer, 2000). The discussion concerning the nature of Dutch society has been fuelled partly by the large increase in the number of people that have come in recent years to seek refuge in the Netherlands. The next section provides a general description of the phases of migration, of the parallel developments in Dutch migration and minority policy, and of changing societal attitudes towards newcomers and ethnic minorities.

Phases in immigration Prior to the Second World War, migration to the Netherlands only occurred on a limited scale. After the war ended, the number of immigrants increased due to the rapid redrawing of the political map of the world. The Dutch loss of its Indies colony led to a large influx of people from the newly independent state of Indonesia. Most of them were of Indo-Dutch descent and had never before been to the Netherlands. During the period 1945-51, it is estimated that 212,000 repatriates came to the Netherlands. A second (but smaller) wave of immigration occurred in the period 1957-58, when another 40,000 immigrants from Indonesia arrived in the Netherlands (Surie, 1973). It is difficult to state the exact number of Dutch repatriations since the end of the Second World War, but estimates lie between 250,000 and 300,000 (Surie, 1973; Ellemers and Vaillant, 1985; Puts, 1995). The Moluccans arrived in the Netherlands throughout 1951 especially, marking the second phase of Dutch immigration. The Moluccans constituted a special category of migrants from the Dutch Indies, since the majority of the men among them had served in the Royal Dutch Indies Army (KNIL). When the KNIL was disbanded in 1950, the Moluccans were given the choice of either joining the Indonesian army or becoming ordinary Indonesian civilians. Neither option was acceptable to most Moluccans, and the Dutch government finally decided to allow the Moluccans to come to the Netherlands. Some 12,500 arrived within a year (Van Amersfoort, 1970; Tuynman-Kret, 1985; Veenman, 1989). A third phase of immigration began in the late 1950s. The Dutch economy was booming and there was a continuing shortage of labourers, so companies

26

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

began to recruit labour abroad. At first they only recruited in nearby countries, but this soon proved insufficient in meeting the demand. Consequently, labour migrants were increasingly recruited in the Mediterranean countries. From the 1960s onwards the Dutch government streamlined labour migration by concluding recruitment contracts with the countries of origin. Initially, most migrants came from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia, but after 1970 most were recruited in Turkey and Morocco. Although a relatively large number of these migrants returned to their countries of origin, the labour migrant population continued to grow even after the termination of the recruitment contracts in the 1970s. This was largely due to family reunion and the relatively high fertility of the migrants (Van Kempen and Van Weesep, 1997). Although immigration has slowed down, these days Turks and Moroccans constitute the largest groups among the former recruited labour migrants. A fourth phase occurred during the late 1960s and the 1970s. In parallel with labour migration, many Surinamese came to the Netherlands from the not yet independent state of Surinam. Until the early 1970s, most of them only stayed temporarily, usually to study, and then returned to work in Surinam. However, the declining economic situation there during the 1970s encouraged a growing number of Surinamese from lower socioeconomic classes to risk migration to the Netherlands in search of better living conditions. It is hard to measure their exact number since the Surinamese (and also the Antilleans) were official Dutch nationals and carried Dutch passports. Therefore, they did not appear as a distinct group in the population statistics (Van Praag, 1973). The migration of Surinamese and Antillean people to the Netherlands continued in the 1980s and 1990s. The continuation of this trend can be explained largely by family reunion and family formation (Musterd and Smakman, 2000). Although labour migration and migration from Surinam and the Netherlands Antilles have stabilised somewhat over time, the 1980s saw the beginning of a fifth phase of migration: the influx of asylum seekers. From the end of the Second World War until the late 1970s, around 20,000 people were recognised as refugees and were admitted to the Netherlands (ACOM, 1979). Many of them were invited (or quota) refugees. However, the arrival of 3,400 Tamils, seeking refuge in the Netherlands from 1984 on, led to a thorough reformulation of asylum policy. Concern about the growing numbers of asylum seekers in the Netherlands was also felt in the media (cf Chapter Two); indeed, the arrival of the Tamils was referred to as a “bursting of the dikes at the Dutch borders” (Bronkhorst, 1999, p 16). Table 3.1 presents an overview of the growth of migration for asylum since 1985. One can see clearly that the number of asylum seekers rose to around 20,000 in the early 1990s, and then sharply increased to more than 50,000 in 1994. This enormous increase can be explained largely by the influx of refugees from the former state of Yugoslavia. Numbers then began to decrease, before rising again during the last years of the 1990s. Furthermore, a notable fact is the diverse range of origins of these refugees (Table 3.2); this demands that policies be adapted to the specific background of each asylum seeker.

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Spreading the ‘burden’?

Table 3.1: Number of asylum seekers, 1986-2000 Year

Number

1986 1987 1988 1989

5,865 13,460 7,486 13,898

1990 1991 1992

21,208 21,615 20,346

1993 1994 1995

35,399 52,576 29,258

1996 1997 1998

22,870 34,476 45,217

1999 2000

41,306 41,082

Source: Unpublished date supplied directly by Ministry of Justice; IND

Table 3.2: Number of asylum requests in the Netherlands (classified by main country of origin of the asylum seeker), 1996-2000 Country of origin

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

Former Yugoslavia Afghanistan Iraq

3,631 5,055 2,773

7,125 4,400 3,703

4,289 7,118 8,300

1,652 5,920 9,641

797 3,019 4,378

Somalia Iran Turkey

2,110 2,543 2,277

2,731 1,527 1,490

2,775 1,679 1,222

1,280 1,253 1,135

1,461 1,521 692

China Bosnia-Herzegovina Sri Lanka

nd 1,652 nd

1,246 1,169 856

nd 3,769 1,049

1,158 1,968 1,497

nd 984 1,483

Sudan Azerbeidzjan Other

1,426 nd 22,303

nd nd 18,473

1,875 1,268 11,873

678 nd 8,294

658 nd 7,877

Totalb

43,895

42,729

45,217

34,476

22,870

Notes: nd = No data available. Totals do not always tally because of the use of data from different sources. Sources: Unpublished data supplied directly by Ministry of Justice (figures for 1999); IND (figures for 199698)

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Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

Phases in minority policy Each policy aimed at the dispersal or concentration of refugees and asylum seekers, and more generally of ethnic minorities, is part of a wider context of minority/immigration policy. Therefore, in order to be able to better comprehend these dispersal policies, it is necessary to give a brief outline of developments in minority policy in the Netherlands. Dutch minority policy has always been ad hoc, and has developed in reaction to trends in migration. The ad hoc nature of minority policy is easily explained. For a long period of time, immigration was not considered to be a problem since the number of immigrants was relatively small. Only during the two world wars had the Netherlands received large numbers of refugees, but even then their residence was supposed to be only temporary (Leenders, 1998). Even after the postwar arrival of the repatriates and Moluccans, the government stuck to the view that the Netherlands was not an immigration country. As a result of this conviction, no special measures were introduced to help the Moluccans participate in Dutch society. On the contrary, the Moluccans were almost entirely kept separated from the Dutch, and the central government held all the responsibilities for their maintenance. Only by the end of the 1950s did it began to occur to the government that it would probably take a long time before the Moluccans would be able to return to their country of origin – if ever. By that time, labour migrants were beginning to be recruited by private firms. There were no governmental policies directed at these migrants, since – again – they were thought to be transients. However, midway through the 1970s it became clear that most migrants would not return to their countries of origin. The government became increasingly aware of the fact that the lengthy or even permanent stay of many migrants required new approaches to minority policy. In 1979, the Minister of the Interior (Minister van Binnenlandse Zaken) was appointed to coordinate the newly formulated minority policy. During the same year, the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy – or Wetenschappelijke Raad voor de Regering (WRR) – published a report in which it recommended abandoning the conviction that migrants would reside in the Netherlands only temporarily (WRR, 1979). Moreover, the WRR called for a more restrictive admittance policy. An advisory commission on cultural minority issues, the Adviescommissie Onderzoek Culturele Minderheden (ACOM), was founded and soon proposed a programme for research in the field of migrants and ethnic minorities. This research was rooted in the idea that the migrants would stay in the Netherlands permanently (ACOM, 1979). The WRR report of 1979 also laid the foundation of the Memorandum on Minorities (Nota Minderhedenbeleid) that came into force in 1983 (Ministry of the Interior, 1981, 1983). In this memorandum the government acknowledged the permanent character of migration, and set out the path for a reformulated minority policy. A few points were assigned special attention in the memorandum. The government laid out the intentions to strive for:

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1. improvement of the social participation of ethnic minorities in Dutch society; 2. consolidation of their legal status; 3. amelioration of their social and economic position. According to the memorandum, the problem of the social and economic deprivation of ethnic minorities (as identified in their third point of interest) was closely related to their isolation from Dutch society in general. This finding was important to take on board when spatial dispersal policies were being considered. In order to achieve the three aims of the memorandum, provision for ethnic minorities was mainstreamed; special or targeted measures were abandoned as being inadequate. The key aim of minority policy was to push back deprivation (Kruyt and Niessen, 1997), although admitting that migrants might become permanent residents also opened the door for integration measures (van Egeraat, 1995, p 15). Nevertheless, policy makers still clung to the belief that some migrants would eventually return ‘home’. Subsequently, a double-tracked policy emerged in which ‘integration while preserving one’s own culture’ (integratie met behoud van de eigen cultuur) was officially promoted. For example, this policy offered members of minority groupings the possibility of taking courses in their own language. This idea was abandoned in the late 1980s, when another WRR report on minority policy was published (WRR, 1989). In this report, entitled Allochtonenbeleid, or ‘Aliens policy’, the WRR reached the alarming conclusion that, despite 10 years of minority policy, the position of aliens in the Netherlands had not improved significantly. It was argued that, in future, aliens should become actively engaged with integration programmes and measures. On a more technical level, the WRR tried to distinguish between aliens (allochtonen) and minorities (minderheden). According to the WRR, minorities are those aliens that are in some way deprived. The government adopted almost all of the recommendations of the WRR report, which once more had major consequences for the policy. Aliens policy (for this designation came to replace the term ‘minority’) would henceforth be, and continues to be, made up of three kinds of policies: • Foreigner policy (vreemdelingenbeleid): deals with the admittance and reception of immigrants and asylum seekers1; • Integration policy: aims successfully to integrate aliens into Dutch society; • Culture policy: concerns provisions to enable aliens to express and preserve their own culture. From 1989 on, special attention was to be paid to the integration of aliens, with an increasing focus upon the so-called ‘hard’ sectors (education and the labour market), and a diminishing interest in the ‘weak’ ones (welfare, work and culture). In 1996, mandatory integration contracts between foreigners and the municipalities in which they were going to settle were introduced.

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Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

These contracts obliged foreigners to take specific integration courses, such as language or orientation courses. The municipality was responsible for the organisation and administration of these courses.

The pursuit of dispersal policies, 1945-92 The very first group for which a national dispersal policy was introduced was of repatriates. Their dispersal has to be analysed mainly within the context of the general disorder that raged in the Netherlands at the end of the war, during which the Dutch had to rebuild the country and its housing stock. Housing repatriates was therefore an enormous problem, and initially many were accommodated in encampments and boarding houses (Ellemers and Vaillant, 1985). This temporary solution gave the government the opportunity to spatially spread the repatriates, forestall concentration, and aid rapid integration (Van Amersfoort, 1974). However, many repatriates tried to find their own housing, and the government did not hinder them in their attempts. Until 1950, therefore, the majority of the repatriates settled themselves, with most finding their way to the larger cities (notably The Hague). However, from 1950 onwards, the shortage of housing and the increased number of repatriates entering the country made self-settlement very difficult (Puts, 1995). As a result, an emergency law was promulgated in 1950, which aimed to persuade local authorities to take in repatriates in exchange for additional house-building quotas. This assisted authorities since they were unable to build properties without government permission. It also allowed national government to introduce a dispersal policy (VNG, 1950, cited in Puts, 1995, p 16). Twenty-five thousand repatriates were consequently resettled across the country (Puts, 1995). The government enacted a third measure to foster the housing of repatriates, the so-called RVK regulation, or Regeling Rijksvoorkeurswoningen. Accordingly, the Dutch government had the right to claim a specific percentage of the social housing stock of the municipalities in order to house special groups. Originally, this arrangement had been made to house civil servants; later, however, it was altered so that repatriates could also lay claim to 5% of all social housing accommodation. According to Puts (1995), about 80,000 repatriates made use of this regulation. Although the arrangement applied from 1952 until 1963, it continued to be a popular instrument to house immigrants, not least because the usage of this regulation guaranteed spatial dispersal, as we shall see (Van Amersfoort, 1974).

Dispersal policy and the Moluccans In contrast to repatriates, the Moluccans were considered to be transients. Consequently, policy to deal with them differed greatly from government policy for repatriates. There was no need to house Moluccans in ‘normal’ accommodation; instead, they were concentrated in special encampments, the

31

Spreading the ‘burden’?

locations of which were randomly chosen. They were established especially in places where former barracks and other military buildings or former concentration camps were available (Van Amersfoort, 1970). Most were situated at a distance from the nearest town, and thereby the Moluccans lived quite isolated from Dutch society. The government had no intention of stimulating the societal integration of Moluccans and did not encourage the participation of Moluccans in Dutch society. Indeed, the Moluccans’ first reception in the Netherlands had many characteristics of total segregation (Entzinger, 1980). Some of the bigger encampments even had their own schools and medical facilities (Tuynman-Kret, 1985). The government had accepted complete responsibility for the maintenance of the Moluccans, and only rarely were municipalities involved with the encampments within their municipal borders (Puts, 1995). Some local authorities were not even aware of the presence of an encampment! The encampments were in the charge of a special commissioner for care for the Moluccans, the Commissariaat voor de Ambonezenzorg (CAZ). In the mid-1950s, it became increasingly clear that the Moluccans would not return to Indonesia in the foreseeable future, and the attitude of the government changed accordingly. The participation of Moluccans in Dutch society had to be stimulated, and relations ‘normalised’ (Matelussi, 1980). Not surprisingly, the conclusion of a special commissioner’s final report on the issue was that the remote location of the encampments impeded the integration of the Moluccans (Commissie Verwey-Jonker, 1959). After consultation with the very well organised leadership of the Moluccans, the government decided in 1959 to replace the encampments with special ‘open neighbourhoods’, each containing some 50 dwellings, to be built for the Moluccans near existing residential precincts. (It should be noted, however, that the last encampment did not close until 1991.) The replacement neighbourhoods were to be normal residential areas, in which Moluccans could live near one other. This policy promoted a kind of ‘bundled deconcentration’ by which Moluccans would spread in groups over the country. This policy was the result of a compromise between the government and the Moluccans. The government favoured dispersal, while the former inhabitants of the encampments wanted concentration (Van Amersfoort, 1974). However, the CAZ left no doubt about its eventual objective of also dispersing the Moluccans within cities as well as between them. Indeed, interviews published in the report by Tuynman-Kret (1985) show that the CAZ was still actively trying to persuade municipalities to individually rehouse the Moluccans from encampments. These new ‘open neighbourhoods’ were not only to be scattered across the country – they were also to be situated near centres of manufacturing employment. Moluccans were considered well suited to this kind of work, and settling them near such centres was a deliberate attempt to encourage them to find work in this sector. However, the proposed dispersal policy got off to a bad start (TuynmanKret, 1985). The locations of encampments (and the first open neighbourhoods)

32

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

Figure 3.1: Encampments and neighbourhoods for Moluccans, 1959

Groningen Friesland

Drenthe Noord-Holland

Overijssel AMSTERDAM

HAGUE

Gelderland

Utrecht

Zuid-Holland ROTTERDAM

Noord-Brabant Zeeland

Limburg

Source: Tuynman-Kret (1985, p 91)

in 1959 are shown in Figure 3.1. Many of the neighbourhoods were built in the vicinity of the former encampments, and only a few were erected near the intended sites of centres of manufacturing employment. In spite of the national dispersal policy for economic activities, the best employment opportunities were still to be found in the larger cities in the western part of the Netherlands, and almost all of these cities struggled with continuing shortages of land. Moreover, the government could not force the municipalities to make available land for Moluccan neighbourhoods; therefore, the CAZ had always to negotiate their case. Sometimes negotiations were far from easy. Apart from the argument of land shortages, some municipalities objected both to building neighbourhoods specifically for Moluccans (Tuynman-Kret, 1985), and to the ethnic concentrations these would produce. An important change in the policies with regard to the Moluccans occurred in the late 1960s, when the state began to devolve the housing of the Amboinese to local authorities. From 1969 onwards, open neighbourhoods were no longer

33

Spreading the ‘burden’?

erected and supervised by the Dienst der Domeinen, the national administrative body that until then had been responsible for the neighbourhoods, but, rather, by the local authorities. The municipalities were granted additional housebuilding quotas for the construction of dwellings for Moluccans. However, the dispersal policy – by means of the erection of special living areas for Amboinese – continued until 1978. During 1978, a noteworthy shift in the approach to the dispersal policy occurred: no longer would new open neighbourhoods be constructed; instead, the dispersal of Moluccans would be from the existing open neighbourhoods to other municipalities (Tweede Kamer, 1978). In fact, the government tried to launch a second wave of dispersal. In agreement with the shift in minority policy from a categorical towards a more general approach to minority issues (described earlier in this chapter), this second stage of dispersal had to be achieved by means of regular subsidised housing. The RVK regulation was the only form of categorical policy that the government continued to pursue in order to disperse Moluccans. The arrangement applied to the Amboinese from 1978 until 1985.

The dispersal of recruited labour migrants, Surinamese and Antilleans Aa far as the government was concerned, the Surinamese and Antilleans, and the recruited labour migrants, constituted migrant groups that were quite distinct from the repatriates and Moluccans. In contrast to its dealings with the latter two groups, the government did not at first set out any housing policy for their fellow citizens, the Surinamese and Antillean, nor the recruited labour migrants. Recruited labour, it made clear, was the responsibility of the employers. A special dispersal policy was never set out, since the labour migrants had to live near their workplace. Mainly they settled in the larger cities in the western part of the Netherlands and in the area of Enschede-Almelo, where a lot of manufacturing was also situated. At first, it seemed that the arrival of Surinamese and Antilleans would not pose any great problems either. Until the mid-1970s, they only came to the Netherlands in small numbers, and as their residence in the Netherlands was supposed to be temporary, the public authorities did not feel the need to formulate special housing or dispersal policies for them. But step by step, the three groups grew as a result of increased immigration and extended residence. Eventually a threshold was reached, and tensions between Dutch-born residents and alien residents increased. Most of the Surinamese settled in Amsterdam and, to a lesser extent, Rotterdam and The Hague, even though it was very hard for them to acquire proper housing accommodation in these cities. In Amsterdam, this was partly due to the prevailing accommodation shortages and partly to the regulation that one had to have been registered in the municipal register for at least two years before being eligible for housing (Reubsaet and Kropman, 1982; Beemer, 1986). Eventually, the larger municipalities claimed

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Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

that the national government was responsible for the increasing turmoil between Dutch and migrant groups, and called for a dispersal policy (Puts, 1995). The government started to persuade those municipalities constituted of more than 25,000 inhabitants to cooperate in housing Surinamese on a voluntary basis, but it did not succeed in getting results from this approach (Reubsaet and Kropman, 1982; Puts, 1992). Ultimately, in 1975 (the peak year, in which Surinam became independent), the government again fell back on the instrument of the RVK regulation to assure a degree of dispersal. However, the larger cities were exempted from this regulation (Beemer, 1986). It was argued that the application of the RVK regulation (and the resulting dispersal) would benefit integration of the Surinamese, but central government also wished to see the cost of housing immigrants swiftly devolved from central to local government (Biervliet et al, 1975; Gerrichhauzen and Van den Berg, 1980). In 1975, a special office – the Centraal Bureau Uitvoering Vestigingsbeleid – was created to carry out the housing of newly arrived Surinamese (Ahmad Ali and Breunissen, 1980). The amount of social housing stock the government could claim from the municipalities was even raised from 5% to 10%. The RVK regulation continued to apply to Surinamese until 1985, although after 1980 the instrument was no longer used intensively. The application of the RVK regulation does seem to have contributed to the dispersal of Surinamese: on 1 July 1981, nearly 21,000 Surinamese had been accommodated by means of the regulation (Reubsaet and Kropman, 1982). It is very hard to tell just how many of these were Surinamese who had been living in the Netherlands already (and thus had been resettled), although in 1979 there were about 300 requests for resettlement (Reubsaet and Kropman, 1982). In the end, however, the Surinamese were still more concentrated in the western part of the Netherlands than the recruited labour migrants. In 1993, almost three-quarters of the Surinamese lived in the provinces of North and South Holland (as compared to 57% of the Antilleans), and nearly two thirds lived in municipalities of more than 100,000 inhabitants (Van Amersfoort, 1993).

The temporary end of dispersal policy? At the same time that the government began to use the RVK regulation to disperse Surinamese, discussions on a broader dispersal policy for all minority groups were beginning to take place. In a few decades, the largest cities had had to absorb relatively large numbers of immigrants, and a lot of people believed that these immigrants were too concentrated in particular residential areas. Therefore, some cities formulated dispersal policies at the city level and sometimes even at the neighbourhood level. Two cities that gained a notorious reputation for this practice were Rotterdam and Amsterdam (Spreekmeester and Valkonet-Freeman, 1979; Kornalijnslijper, 1988). The other two large cities, Utrecht and The Hague, attached less importance to a deliberate dispersal of foreigners (van Hoorn, 1987). Rotterdam launched a five-percentage regulation in the early 1970s. This meant that, in some neighbourhoods, no more than

35

Spreading the ‘burden’?

5% of the resident population could be alien residents. Once this 5% was reached, housing associations would discontinue allocating dwellings in that particular area to non-native Dutch people. A ‘closed neighbourhood’ regulation prevailed in Amsterdam for some time, by which aliens were left with no hope of acquiring housing accommodation in particular parts of the city. At the neighbourhood level, some Amsterdam housing associations even employed a maximum number of apartments per doorway that could be allocated to aliens. The government of the Province of South Holland, the Council of State, eventually voided Rotterdam’s dispersal policy and, with that, dispersal policy was banned. In Amsterdam, dispersal policy set out by housing associations was eventually nullified as well, although the municipal council pretended it had not been aware of the housing association’s dispersal policies for a long time. However, these actions did not quell the debates on dispersal policy. Although dispersal was officially prohibited, it was still unofficially pursued by some municipalities and housing associations (Shadid et al, 1984; Kruyt and Niessen, 1997). The municipalities of Utrecht and Eindhoven, for example, continued to pursue a fairly direct form of dispersal policy in the early 1980s (Kornalijnslijper, 1988), and Rotterdam tried to set out some form of dispersal policy again at the end of the 1970s (Ahmad Ali and Breunissen, 1980). Two questions arise from this historical account of measures to disperse immigrants. First, what reasons were given for introducing such policies? And second, how did central government justify banning local government dispersal policies when it was, itself, introducing dispersal policies for the Surinamese at a national level at the same time? These two questions will now be discussed in turn, since their answers will help us understand the later move to disperse asylum seekers. The reasons for introducing dispersal policies fall into four groups. 1.Since immigration is a national issue, central government has the right to put in place a national settlement plan. This implies a top-down approach and also suggests that central government can impose its will on local government, which is a matter of debate (Groenendijk, 1998). It also assumes that central government is spreading the burden and costs of immigration, and that municipalities simply have to put up with these externalities. In reality, as we know, immigration can bring benefits, such as the right to build extra new housing, as we saw most directly in the case of the Moluccans. 2.Municipal, or grass-root, arguments for dispersal. Municipalities have debated at length whether or not central government should promote and procure the dispersal of aliens (Van Praag, 1980). Unfortunately, there is not much documentation available on the Moluccan issue; however, with regard to the dispersal policy for Surinamese, the arguments proffered by the municipalities is well known. One of the most important reasons put forward by Amsterdam and Rotterdam for formulating a dispersal policy has been the growing tension between the local population and alien population (Spreekmeester

36

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

and Valkonet-Freeman, 1979). This tension has arisen not only because of xenophobia but also because of competition for scarce resources in the working-class neighbourhoods within which the Moluccans settled in Dutch cities. Intended as a solution to the tensions and rising racism, such a dispersal policy instead confirmed the autochthonic population in its opinion that ‘the aliens’ were the source of its housing and other problems (Huitzing, 1986, p 51). 3.Is dispersal or concentration in the best interests of the immigrants? While the large cities argued that dispersal would reduce tensions, Van Mulier (1982) felt that isolation could lead to socioeconomic deprivation, Furthermore, Bik and Van Gent (1998) claimed that a certain degree of concentration of minorities would stimulate and help them integrate into their new environment. Ethnic minorities, too, seemed to express contrasting opinions. Tuynman-Kret (1985) showed how Moluccans favoured the idea of concentration of their group, but, in his study on foreigners conducted in the early 1980s, van Praag (1981) concluded that many foreigners preferred to live among the indigenous population (see also Tesser, 1993; SCP, 1994). ACOM (1979) added another dimension to the debate when its research showed that public authorities would be better able to deal with the specific needs of minorities if they lived close to one other. Such an argument linked up with the debate on the pursuit of specific policies with regard to ethnic minority groups, which was very topical at that time. It is also related to the question of the desirability of polarisation among minorities (Kruyt and Niessen, 1997). 4.Ethical arguments for and against dispersal. Ethical arguments are mostly based on ideas about the individual’s freedom of choice and equality of opportunity (van Praag, 1980). For example, in 1983, the Minister of VROM (the Ministry of Spatial Planning, Housing and the Environment) issued a circular to municipalities saying that the national government would not tolerate any form of dispersal policy that was based purely on ethnic characteristics (Ministry of VROM, 1983). In the circular, the minister states the following: I consider the housing of minorities an ordinary local responsibility, in which the policy has to be aimed at helping all inhabitants on the basis of individual and/or family, regardless of nationality or ethnic origin. (Ministry of VROM, 1983, p 2)

Let us now consider the second question, that is, how central government justified banning local government dispersal policies when it was itself proposing the dispersal of the Surinamese at a national level. The answer to this question is likely to be found in the sort of dispersal measures that were operated. Rotterdam restricted the freedom of movement of some people, while at the national level the government only tried to influence the dispersal of Surinamese without ever limiting their freedom to choose where they wanted to live. The Rotterdam dispersal policy was disapproved of because the policy was

37

Spreading the ‘burden’?

inconsistent with Article 4 of the Housing Act of 1947, which stated that housing accommodation had to be offered to all who needed it. Moreover, the Dutch Crown argued that the policy was inconsistent with the treaty on expulsion of all forms of racial discrimination (Spreekmeester and ValkonetFreeman, 1979; Kornalijnslijper, 1988). It was the restrictive nature of the dispersal measures taken by the larger cities that encountered most protest, which matches the ethical argument discussed above. The answers to the questions raised are significant when investigating the manner in which asylum seekers and refugees are received in the Netherlands. As was mentioned earlier in this chapter, the asylum issue in the Netherlands has only recently become a topic of interest to policy makers. However, it will become clear that a lot of experiences from the practice of dispersal of earlier immigrant groups can also be recognised in the dispersal policy with regard to asylum seekers and refugees. It is to these that we now turn.

Housing asylum seekers and refugees The formulation of asylum policy really only began after the arrival of the Tamil refugees in 1984. Prior to that, policy was restricted to the issue of judging asylum requests and the refunding of 90% of the social security payments paid to refugees by the municipalities. Only invited, or quota, refugees (the term ‘asylum seeker’ was reserved for spontaneous refugees) were received in central reception centres, and between 1982 and 1987 nearly 40% of these were accommodated in the western part of the Netherlands. The figure for asylum seekers was even higher at 60% (Gooszen, 1988). Once admitted to the country, asylum seekers and invited refugees could claim certain general provisions. However, asylum seekers had to find their own housing, often with the help of private organisations, in particular the non-governmental organisation Vluchtelingenwerk, or Dutch Refugee Council (Van Beetz, 1997). Until 1993, admitted asylum seekers (that is, those asylum seekers that had received a permanent or temporary residence permit, and henceforth called ‘status holders’) could claim housing accommodation in accordance with the RVK regulation. Since the circular of 1985 (MG 85-18), however, this regulation only applied to refugees (that is, those asylum seekers admitted on the terms of the Geneva Convention) and no longer to other migrant groups. The arrival of the Tamils overwhelmed this system. Some local foreigner registration offices could not register the asylum seekers quickly enough. Organisations assisting with housing were also unable to meet the demand (Van Beetz, 1997). The pressure of numbers was exacerbated by the concentration of the newly arrived Tamils in the main cities, and the local authorities of the four largest Dutch cities complained to the national government (Wagenmaker, 1994). Subsequently, the government issued a socalled ‘bed, bath and bread regulation’, by which Tamil refugees were, during the consideration of their asylum requests, to be housed in specially erected

38

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

reception centres. They could no longer claim social security payments, but instead were given ‘pocket money’. This special regulation did not apply to asylum seekers other than the Tamils, which led to fierce protests by both Tamils and organisations that looked after their interests (Wagenmaker, 1994). These protests resulted eventually in a reformulated policy with regard to asylum seekers and refugees. The new housing policy, the Regeling Opvang Asielzoekers (ROA) or ‘Regulation reception of asylum seekers’, came into operation in November 1987 and was aimed at all asylum seekers (Hulshof et al, 1992; Muus, 1996; Van Beetz, 1997). Muus (1996) described 1987 as a turning point between two phases in the Dutch admission and integration policy for asylum seekers and refugees. The new policies were not only substantially extended, but also came increasingly under the control of central, rather than local, government. The ROA regulation also embodied a new mission statement for Dutch asylum policy, ‘austere but humane’, and this is still the official policy today. The main focus was on the reception of asylum seekers in municipalities. To meet this end, four policy goals were formulated, two of which can be directly linked to the dispersal of asylum seekers across the Netherlands. First, the ‘costs’ of the reception of asylum seekers should not be concentrated in the large cities; second, reception ought to take place as much as possible among the ‘ordinary’ citizens and in regular housing accommodation (Wagenmaker, 1994). The first goal clearly implies the national dispersal of asylum seekers and refugees, while the second implies that asylum seekers should not be concentrated and isolated from Dutch society. However, in the end, four reception centres (AZCs) were set up to act as a buffer in case the municipalities were not able to accept the required number of asylum seekers. However, this buffer was unnecessary in the end, not because the local authorities were uncooperative, but rather because the number of asylum seekers was growing so rapidly (see Table 3.3). The first emergency situation occurred Table 3.3: Figures on central and ROA accommodation, 1988-95 Central accommodation 1 January

Asylum seekers

Status holders

ROA accommodation Asylum seekers

Status holders

1988 1989

630 1,266

3 7

5,168 7,068

10 168

1990 1991 1992

3,972 7,880 10,158

50 67 241

9,917 14,143 16,920

480 540 1,511

1993 1994 1995

11,243 20,981 28,733

2,546 4,628 4,028

13,936 18,256 19,424

7,966 1,448 5,287

Source: Muus (1996); Data supplied directly by COA

39

Spreading the ‘burden’?

when the government was compelled to house groups of asylum seekers temporarily in tents during 1990. The government reacted to this situation by announcing a ‘two per 1,000 regulation’ for all municipalities (Ministry of WVC, 1989). This meant that every municipality was asked to volunteer two ROA accommodations per 1,000 inhabitants. The municipalities were not compelled to cooperate, since the national government failed to produce a legal basis to force the local authorities to put housing accommodation aside. However, even this two per 1,000 regulation failed to meet the demand for housing. Reception policy reached a new breaking point, which led to the introduction of an entirely new admittance and reception model in 1992. However, the remnants of the ROA regulation were visible well into the 1990s.

Contemporary dispersal of asylum seekers and status holders Reception policies for asylum seekers have been progressively centralised since the mid-1980s. Until 1984, the involvement of the national government with asylum seekers was limited to admission, with municipalities being responsible for reception. However, by the end of the 1990s, the situation had changed completely. The growing number of asylum seekers meant that municipalities were simply unable to cope. In addition, the media started to target the increase in asylum seekers as a topical subject, causing the asylum-seeker issue to become a political item at the national level as well. Therefore, the argument that concentration of asylum seekers could (or even would) lead to the socioeconomic deprivation of the asylum seeker lost out to the desire to simplify and streamline the asylum procedure by housing asylum seekers in special reception centres. The policy goals of the reception of asylum seekers were reformulated (Wagenmaker, 1994; Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of VROM, 1999). Most importantly, the asylum seeker would have to be available to the legal procedures at all times and, additionally, the government committed itself to offer integration programmes that were tailored to the stage in the legal procedure in which the asylum applicant found himself. This incremental integration was thought to accelerate full integration after residence had been granted. This is consistent with wider developments in alien resident policy. The new policy goals became part of the reasoning underlying the New Admittance and Reception Model, or Nieuwe Toelatings- en Opvangmodel (NTOM), which came into operation in 1992. Henceforth, anyone applying for asylum in the Netherlands would initially be received in reception centres managed by the national government. Asylum seekers would stay in these reception centres either until they had been granted a residence permit (that is, become refugees), or they had been told to leave the country. Once they had been granted status (that is, as ‘status holders’), their accommodation became the responsibility of local government. Therefore, the NTOM marked the beginning of a new phase in asylum policy, and offered two separate

40

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

opportunities for dispersal. Asylum seekers could be dispersed as they were distributed between reception centres and refugees could be dispersed to municipalities on their resettlement. Each of these dispersal policies is now discussed in turn, following a brief description of the contents and procedures of the NTOM and its evolution over time.

The New Admittance and Reception Model As a consequence of the ROA regulation’s inefficiency in dealing with the growing inflow of asylum seekers, a debate began concerning the streamlining of the system. Central to this debate was the discouragement of illegitimate use of the asylum route to immigration (Ministry of WVC and Ministry of Justice, 1991). Reception centres were introduced because they facilitated quick decision making on asylum claims, with government aiming to provide its first decision on cases within one month. In formulating the NTOM, it also laid down that the reception policy should vary according to the different categories of asylum seeker. Distinctions were made first on the basis of the stage of consideration of the request in the legal procedure, and second on the basis of the residence permit the asylum seeker acquired.

Residence permits At the time the NTOM came into operation there were two official residence permits and one unofficial status. First, asylum seekers who were admitted under the terms of the Geneva Convention and who could subsequently stay in the Netherlands for an indefinite period of time would be granted ‘A status’ (with permit). (In addition, two other types of permit were issued, which were aimed at asylum seekers who could also stay in the Netherlands, but only on a temporary basis.) The second permit was granted to those asylum seekers who could not be sent back to their country of origin for humanitarian reasons (such as traumatic experiences, medical care, and so on). This status – that is, ‘VTV status’ – was the Temporary Residence Permit. It was first introduced in 1980 and must be renewed annually (Böcker, 1998). Third was ‘tolerated status’ (no permit). This regulation had been developed to deal with asylum seekers who were ineligible for refugee status or a permit on humanitarian grounds, but who could nevertheless not be expelled for legal reasons. Such a legal impediment might be that the country of origin obstructed the asylum seeker’s return. In mid-1991, tolerated asylum seekers numbered about 12,000, a figure that led to increased demands for a legal base for ‘tolerated status’ (Böcker, 1998). As a result, ‘tolerated’ status was abandoned2 two years after the NTOM came into operation and it was replaced by ‘VVTV status’, or Temporary Residence Permit. Unlike the VTV permit that had been granted on the basis

41

Spreading the ‘burden’?

of individual circumstances (Böcker, 1998; see also TK 1992-93, 22735, no 5), the VVTV permit was a group permit, aimed at categories of asylum seekers. The permission was initially valid for one year but could be renewed twice for a further one-year period (Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of VROM, 1999; Ministry of the Interior, 2000a). After three years, VVTV status holders could apply for A or VTV status. In fact, a fourth permit was (and is) also issued. This was aimed at a special category of asylum seeker, namely unaccompanied minors and those under the age of 18. Prior to 1992, these minors were already received in a special reception centre (Valentijn in Nunspeet), while those aged under 12 were directly placed in foster homes. To be clear, these minor asylum seekers also have to apply for asylum, but if they do not qualify for A,VTV or VVTV status, they might still acquire the Unaccompanied Minor Asylum Seeker (AMA)VTV status if they cannot be guaranteed good reception in their country of origin (Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of VROM, 1999). However, further changes to the system have taken place since April 2001. Currently, no distinction is made between different permits. There is only one residence permit left – the permit to temporary residence, or Vergunning voor Bepaalde Tijd Asiel (VBTA), which is valid for three years. After its expiry, and should reception still be required, the asylum seeker can obtain a permit to permanent residence in the Netherlands, the Vergunning voor Onbepaalde Tijd Asiel (VOTA). If a permanent permit is not granted, the asylum seeker must leave the country. This system not only applies to new applicants, but has also been retrospectively applied to earlier applicants.

The asylum chain The core idea of the NTOM was the matching of reception programmes to specific categories of asylum seekers and stages of asylum seeking (Ministry of WVC and Ministry of Justice, 1991). Asylum seekers on the verge of expulsion would need special programmes to prepare them for their return, and those offered permanent residence would need the opportunity to integrate. Therefore, the two main policy goals of the NTOM were quick decision making and facilities adapted to the situation of each asylum seeker. The original basic structure of the NTOM, which still constitutes the core idea of contemporary reception policy, is depicted in Figure 3.2. However, since shortcomings have since become apparent, it has been modified. The application for asylum would pass through several legal stages – the ‘asylum chain’ in administrative terms (Ministry of the Interior, 1997). Each stage of the chain was to be matched to a certain type of reception centre (Ministry of WVC and Ministry of Justice, 1991). In the original model, two types of centre were introduced: Screening and Reception Centres (OCs), in which the asylum seeker would only stay for a maximum of a month, and AZCs, in which the asylum seeker would stay during the rest of the legal

42

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

Figure 3.2: The basic structure of the Dutch NTOM-model Central reception of asylum seekers Screening and Reception Centre (OC)

Asylum Seekers Centre (AZC)

Resident Permit

Accommodation in regular houses

Permit denied

Leave country

procedure. Whatever the type of reception centre, the national government would be responsible for the reception of the asylum seekers. What, then, of the subsequent changes to the original model? The contemporary asylum chain is illustrated in Figure 3.3 (overleaf). Although political responsibility for the asylum issue is in the hands of the Ministry of Justice, the implementation of reception policy is one of the core tasks of the specially created Asylum Seekers Reception Service (COA). Since 1994, the COA has been an autonomous administrative organ, which comes under the political responsibility of the Ministry of Justice (COA, 1999a). In 1994, Registration Centres (ACs) were added to the asylum chain. These were designed to allow the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) to make very early and quick assessments of the likelihood of an asylum claim being successful and therefore screen out ‘unfounded’ claims within 24 hours (this was extended to 48 hours in 1999). Registration Centres are supervised by the IND and are not to be confused with OCs. If the asylum seeker is allowed to apply for asylum, he or she has then to report to an OC. Here, the application for asylum is formally accepted, and it then (theoretically) takes the IND a maximum of one month to come to a first decision and inform the asylum seeker. During this time, asylum seekers also receive a medical examination. For those who have their application for asylum rejected, the OC also acts as a holding centre during the appeals procedure and during the period prior to repatriation. Asylum seekers whose claims are initially successful are then transferred to the second central reception facility, the AZC, or, if all AZCs are filled to capacity, to an Additional Accommodation for Asylum Seekers (AVO). The function of the AZC is to prepare asylum seekers for their integration into Dutch society by offering them programmes, such as Dutch language courses. The asylum seeker will stay in the AZC until a final decision on their claim is reached. The NTOM states that asylum seekers should stay no longer than six months in an AZC (Ministry of WVC and Ministry of Justice, 1991). Admitted

43

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Figure 3.3 The contemporary asylum chain

Registration Centre (AC)

Waiting list AC (pre-AC reception)

Screening and Reception Centre (OC)

Asylum seeker arrives in the Netherlands

Accommodation in OC

Asylum seeker is accommodated in AC

IND decides on admittance to asylum procedure Admitted

Turned down

Leave country or objection to decision

First decision by the IND Admitted to next stage of asylum procedure

Turned down

Leave country or objection to decision

Asylum Seekers Centre (AZC)

Accommodation in ACZ or AVO After a considerable stay in AZC or AVO: ZZA-housing KCO or COW-housing

Decision on residence permit by the IND Asylum seeker obtains a permit Permit denied and can stay in the Netherlands Asylum seeker now is ‘status holder’

Regular housing in municipalities

44

Leave country or objection to decision (if denied sometimes transfer to Departure Centre (VC) in Ter Apel

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

asylum seekers are accommodated in regular houses, and failed applicants are repatriated. In 1998, two new reception regulations were introduced: the ZZA arrangement (Zelfzorgarrangement, an arrangement for asylum seekers to live with family or friends already resident in the Netherlands) and the Central Reception in Dwellings (COW). Both regulations were introduced because of the shortage of reception places. The COW regulation, operative since June of that year, empowers national government to rent dwellings in municipalities that are then used to house asylum seekers (Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of VROM, 1999; COA, 1999b). However, in order to qualify for this type of accommodation, asylum seekers need to have already stayed in a central reception centre (AZC or AVO) for a considerable period of time (COA, 1999b). The COA always decides who should be transferred into rented accommodation (COA, 1999b), and it is done on a no-choice basis. If an asylum seeker’s behaviour subsequently elicits complaints from the local authority within with the COW housing is located, they can then be transferred back into an AZC or AVO. Again, if an asylum seeker refuses to be placed back in a centre, then his or her provisions are discontinued. In contrast, the ZZA arrangement allows asylum seekers to temporarily take up residence with their family or acquaintances who already live somewhere in the Netherlands, after a stay of at least six months in an AZC or AVO (Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of VROM, 1999; COA, 1999c). Such transfers are initiated by the asylum seeker and are voluntary. Asylum seekers who make use of the COW or ZZA regulations get the same package of facilities and services as those who live in OCs (COA, 2000). Although many asylum seekers have been housed through ZZA arrangements (see Table 3.4), this provision is to be discontinued and will Table 3.4: Total number of asylum seekers and status holdersa in reception facilities by category (1 May 1999; 1 June 2000) Reception facility

1999

2000

OCs

9,957b

10,411 750 34,020

On waiting list location (TNV) 36,365b

AZCs ZZA COW VC/Ter Apel AVOs Otherc Total on date of measurement

10,252 3,843 79 9,408 257 55,987

10,570 1,153 71,078

Notes: a Status holders are officially no longer asylum seekers, but are still counted for statistics. b

Includes subcategories.

c

Other facilities are those reception facilities that are not conducted by COA or IND.

Source: data supplied directly by COA

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Spreading the ‘burden’?

Table 3.5: Total number of asylum seekers in central reception facilities (1 January, 1995-2001) Year

Number

1995 1996 1997

32,809 30,166 29,800

1998 1999 2000

37,720 54,070 64,674

2001

78,200

Sources: data supplied directly by COA; Ministry of the Interior et al (2000a, 2001)

be replaced by the so-called Small-Scale Central Reception Facility (KCO) regulation. This regulation can be seen as an extended continuation of the COW (COA, personal communication). Since a substantial proportion of asylum seekers have their applications turned down, the government opened a Departure Centre (VC) in Ter Apel. Data on the total number of asylum seekers that have stayed in the central reception facilities are given in Table 3.5. The introduction of the central reception centres did not mean that the reception of asylum seekers in municipalities was abolished instantly. The ROA regulation remained effective, although asylum seekers would no longer go directly to the decentralised reception facilities. Only asylum seekers who had a good chance of acquiring a residence permit were accommodated in ROA dwellings. At the time the NTOM came into effect, the Netherlands had four OCs, 21 AZCs, 16,000 ROA accommodation places and nearly 2,750 emergency reception places, mostly in guesthouses, hotels and provisionally fitted-out buildings. These emergency places were due to be relinquished and replaced by an additional 19 AZCs by 1992. However, the growth in the number of asylum seekers has been a continuous threat to the NTOM. For example, emergency accommodation had to be retained, and by mid-1993 some 5,000 status holders were being forced to remain in central reception centres because of the shortage of accommodation for their resettlement. The government was also unable to acquire sufficient ROA accommodation, and this led directly to the intensification of the attempts by the government to end its dependency on housing acquisition by municipalities. This lead to the administrative ‘watershed’, agreed in 1994 and operative since 1996, by which the ROA regulation was finally abolished. From this point on, the reception of asylum seekers was entirely the responsibility of the state; the municipalities, on the other hand, take care of status holders. Nevertheless, a number of ROA dwellings continue to be used (COA, 1999a). The government admitted that, since the NTOM was based on an annual inflow of 24,000 asylum seekers, there was the risk that it would not meet

46

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

policy goals because of the extremely high numbers of newly arriving asylum seekers. It was conceded that if this were the case the model would have to be reconsidered (Ministry of WVC and Ministry of Justice, 1991). The high influx of asylum seekers eventually peaked in April 1994. One year before, the number of asylum seekers swelled to over 35,000 with no sign of the increase abating. This not only generated administrative problems but also began to undermine societal support for the asylum policy. As a result, the Geelhoed Commission was asked to prepare a report regarding how the policy might be implemented more effectively (Commissie Geelhoed, 1994). The Commission attempted to show that increasing the supply of reception facilities would not solve the problems, which were more closely related to the reception process than to shortage of supply. The report included a number of key criticisms of the NTOM: • The NTOM used the central reception centres as the ‘valve’ to release pressure on the asylum chain, through which reception accommodations were almost continuously expanded and policy became financially increasingly costly. • The NTOM spread responsibilities too widely. Three parties with divergent interests were responsible for the pursuit of different parts of the asylum policy: the Ministry of Justice supervised admission, the Ministry of Welfare, Health and Cultural Affairs (WVC) coordinated reception, and the Ministry of Housing, Regional Development and the Environment (VROM), in conjunction with the Dutch Association of Municipalities (VNG) and municipalities, carried out the accommodation of asylum seekers and status holders in houses and flats. • Local authorities too often considered the asylum issue a national affair for which the state held sole responsibility. • A shortage of cheap subsidised social housing was slowing resettlement out of the centres, and, consequently, voluntary residential mobility. Notwithstanding all the adjustments that have subsequently been made to policy, the basic tenet of the NTOM remains. Having outlined this, we are now in a position to discuss the issue of dispersal, which, as has been described already in this chapter, can take place either upon reception or during resettlement. Each of these opportunities for dispersal will be discussed in turn.

Dispersal and central reception: administrative mutterings An important motive for enacting the NTOM was to diminish the dependence of the national government on the local authorities regarding the provision of housing accommodation (Wagenmaker, 1994). The NTOM would change the balance of dependency considerably by making the state responsible for the initial reception of asylum seekers. They had to be accommodated in central reception centres, some of which already existed when the NTOM became operational. However, many more have since been added (Munniksma, 1999).

47

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Two questions arise about dispersal at this stage of the asylum chain: • What criteria have been used to pick locations for these centres? • How are decisions made about the distribution of asylum seekers between centres?

The location of reception centres In May 2000, there were a total of three ACs, 18 OCs, 85 AZCs, and up to 170 AVOs in use for the reception of asylum seekers. The AVOs included inns, guesthouses and camping sites. The Ministry of Justice acknowledges that around 1,000 houses or flats are also being used for the reception of asylum seekers as part of the COW housing. And finally, there is one VC. Reliable data are not available on the AVO, ZZA and COW facilities, but of these it is known that the AVO accommodation is widely dispersed over the country, while the majority of ZZA and COW accommodation can be found in the four largest cities (COA, personal communication). These maps are constantly changing, especially as far as the AZCs are concerned, but they give a snapshot of contemporary provision. Figure 3.4 shows very clearly that the ACs are presently situated near the Dutch borders. One is located at Schiphol airport (the ‘air’ border), one in Zevenaar (near the German border) and one in Rijsbergen (near the Belgian border). As already mentioned, a fourth AC was subsequently opened in July 2000 in Ter Apel, in the north of the Netherlands (COA, personal communication). In contrast, the OCs – the centres to which asylum seekers are transferred next – appear to be spread more evenly (Figure 3.5). Even so, a relatively large share of the centres is located in less populated areas of the Netherlands (the north and the east). The picture of the locations of AZCs also shows a fairly proportional dispersal (see Figure 3.6). Asylum seeker reception centres (AZCs) can be found in all the Dutch provinces, but only a few are located in the more densely populated areas, such as the Randstad area. While some centres are located in bigger cities, most of them are still to be found in small municipalities. Some of the provinces have condemned the contemporary dispersal of AZCs: the northern provinces claim that they have too many AZCs relative to their share of the national population. Most AZCs can accommodate about 400 asylum seekers. What cannot be read from the map is that several AZCs are located in some municipalities. Amsterdam, for instance, has agreed to accommodate a total number of 2,000 asylum seekers in AZCs. Finally, one VC is located in Ter Apel, in the northern part of the Netherlands. Asylum seekers who have exhausted all legal procedures, but who cannot easily be expelled or deported mainly due to incomplete or invalid travel documents, are accommodated in this centre (COA, 1999a).

48

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

Figure 3.4: The location of Registration Centres (ACs) in the Netherlands (May 2000)

Groningen

Friesland Ter Apel (AC/VC) Drenthe Noord-Holland

Flevoland

Schiphol

Overijssel

Utrecht

Gelderland

Zuid-Holland Zevenaar

Noord-Brabant Zeeland Rijsbergen Limburg

Note: The AC in Ter Apel was opened in July 2000. Source: COA

Figure 3.5: The location of Screening and Reception Centres (OCs) in the Netherlands (May 2000)

Ter apel Luttelgeest

Hoogeveen

Zwolle Ommen

Haarlem Leiden Wassenaar 's Gravenhage

Valentijn I

Schalkhaar

Apeldoorn

Valentijn II

Ede Dordrecht

Oisterwijk Gilze Rijen Eindhoven

Source: COA

49

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Figure 3.6: The location of Asylum Seekers Centres (AZCs) in the Netherlands (May 2000)

Geeuwenbrug

Rosmalen

Source: COA

In sum, different types of asylum centre have different distributions. However, reception centres are widely distributed across national space. How has this distribution taken shape? Although reception centres come under the responsibility of the national government, this does not mean that the government is free to situate such centres where it pleases. Although reception centres isolate asylum seekers from Dutch society, they have both links with and an impact upon the communities within which they are sited. Asylum seekers interact with local people and their presence impacts upon local service providers (Arnoldus et al, 2000). The problems that the COA encounters when looking for new locations for reception centres are not so much concerned with finding practicable sites or buildings, but rather persuading local parties to accept a centre in their locality (Arnoldus, 2001), Before this chapter considers the administrative problems that seem to dominate the actual choice of location for reception centres, it should be noted that the COA does have criteria for choosing preferred sites. On one hand, the government seeks to disperse centres across the entire country (Ministry of Justice, 1996); but on the other hand, it has a series of practical criteria for site selection. Furthermore, the COA is obliged by law to confer with the municipalities on the acquisition of a reception centre. However, municipalities do not have to comply with COA demands: rather, the local authorities can refuse the siting of a reception centre.

50

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

Furthermore, the COA has no right to construct a reception centre without the legal administrative agreement of the municipalities. This is where the problems start. Successful cooperation between the COA and the municipality often depends on the dedication of a few people, notably the COA representatives and the mayor of the municipality (Meloen et al, 1998). Where consensus can be reached, the COA and the local authorities enter into an agreement on these four subjects (COA, 1999a): • The exact location, the capacity and the function of the reception centre. In the past the COA sometimes pre-empted this by looking for and securing a suitable site before entering into discussions with the local authority within which the centre was to be located. While this freed up the COA to search widely for sites, it also upset the municipalities, which felt that subsequent negotiations were a fait accompli. Nowadays, when the COA approaches municipalities it first asks whether they can jointly look for suitable sites. • The duration of settlement. It is ironic that, with huge shortages and no prospect of decreasing shortage, one of the first topics local authorities raise with COA is how long a new centre in their locality will remain open. In the Netherlands, the spatial planning system recognises different levels of planning. Provinces are responsible for regional planning, which consists of maps marking the contours of the zoning allowed. Municipalities are responsible for zoning plans, which show in great detail the intended use of all the land in the municipality. The plans enjoy a strong legal base and are not easily altered. It takes years to enact a new zoning plan, not only because there can be many opportunities for public comment, but also because the province has to verify the proposed changes with the regional planning authority. Since no municipality in the Netherlands has ever foreseen the need for an AZC in its zoning plans, the advent of a reception centre has always to be preceded by an adjustment of the zoning plan. However, Article 17 of the planning procedure allows temporary changes to zoning for a maximum of five years, over which the province has no authority. Since it is so much quicker than changing the zoning plans, this procedure tends to be used, but it also means that AZCs can usually only stay open for a maximum of five years. • The creation of a consultative committee consisting of representatives of the COA and of the municipality. These are designed to resolve problems arising from the presence of the centre and also help educate local people about the purpose of the centre and the nature of its residents. • The costs of education and medical services. These are paid (at least in part) by the national government, either in the form of grants for set-up costs or regular payments for services supplied (COA, 1999d; COA, personal communication). The COA thus depends greatly on municipal cooperation, and municipalities are free to object to the selection of a particular locality on grounds that an AZC might overwhelm local services (such as healthcare). However, once the

51

Spreading the ‘burden’?

location has been chosen and the reception centre has become ready for operation, municipalities have no choice over which asylum seekers are accommodated within the centre (VNG, personal communication).

The dispersal of asylum seekers Asylum seekers have barely any choice with regard to where they will be accommodated. The COA allocates asylum seekers to centres; the asylum seekers must simply comply with their decisions. On what basis does the COA make these decisions? Such decisions are taken by the Afdeling Spreiding en Plaatsing (ASP) department of the COA. Reception centres themselves are not allowed to express much of a preference for a particular nationality or for a specific composition of the number of new asylum seekers that they can accommodate (COA, 2000). They are allowed, however, to express a preference for a particular mix of genders, nationalities and family groups, although the ASP is not bound to act on these preferences. In the case of AVOs, the preferences of the individual asylum seekers are taken into consideration. Needless to say, centres will only ever receive asylum seekers with their preferred characteristics if such people are due to be transferred out of an OC at that time (COA, 2000). Furthermore, the COA tries as much as possible to limit the distance over which an asylum seeker has to be transferred when moving from one reception centre to another. Therefore transfers tend to be within IND regions. These are purely administrative regions, and there are only four of them. Whereas there is no formal linkage between OCs and particular AZCs, the COA aims to have asylum seekers moving on from an OC to an AZC or AVO location in the same IND region. The COA emphasises that this procedure assists with integration (COA, 2000). However, it is not always possible to keep an asylum seeker in one region, as the total capacity of the OCs in any single region does not necessarily equal the AZC or AVO capacity for that region (COA, 2000). In some cases, particular groups of asylum seekers are deliberately concentrated. First, if it is suspected that asylum seekers have already applied for asylum in another country that is a signatory to the Dublin Convention of 1990, they are transferred to the OC in Luttelgeest, or to Ter Apel or Gilze-Rijen (COA, 2000). Second, unaccompanied minors aged less than 14 are either placed in OC Valentijn (located in Lochem and Nunspeet) or in OC Eindhoven. Those aged 14-17 are received in one of the other OCs, which are also (although not exclusively) directed at the reception of this group of asylum seekers (COA, 2000). Third, specific groups of asylum seekers that have come in relatively large numbers (a recent example being Kosovans) are often concentrated in particular centres. And finally, asylum seekers who display maladjusted behaviour are concentrated in two particular AZCs: Rosmalen AMOG and Geeuwenbrug AMOG.

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Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

In principle, the COA does not take any of the preferences of the asylum seekers into account (COA, 1999b). In practice, however, it is said that the presence of close family relatives is at times considered when accommodating asylum seekers in central reception centres (COA, personal communication). In all other circumstances and in all transfers between different types of centres, the asylum seeker cannot choose their destination. This is determined by the availability of vacancies and administrative procedures.

Dispersal of status holder and target setting Asylum seekers who are permitted to stay in the Netherlands (on a temporary or permanent basis) are housed in normal social housing. Such accommodation is subsidised by the government, but the accommodation is the property of the municipalities or housing associations. The initiation of the NTOM, therefore, did little to resolve the housing problems of status holders, since the state still largely had to depend on the goodwill and collaboration of the local authorities. Its aim was to house status holders immediately after the granting of their permit, but this policy goal proved difficult to meet. In addition, although refugees had the right to find their own accommodation, a crowded market coupled with a lack of knowledge concerning the housing market – and, since few refugees were working, their low incomes – made this very difficult indeed. The problem of decentralised housing was far from resolved. Eventually, the government introduced a mechanism of target setting to hasten the decentralisation of status holders. This was done step by step. In 1993 and 1994, the Ministry of VROM and the Ministry of WVC, in collaboration with the VNG, announced in a circular that municipalities were strongly encouraged to allot a certain number of houses for the housing of status holders every half year. These requests rested on the prevailing Housing Act, but had no legal basis themselves. They were very reminiscent, then, of the earlier ‘two per 1,000’ guideline. This guideline was still in existence in 1993 and 1994, so the new requests came on top of that existing request. Local authorities responded well to this new plea, but, even so, parliament decided that this voluntary arrangement needed to be replaced by new arrangements that had a legal basis (Ministry of the Interior, 1997). The two ministries sent the first circular (MG 93-12) on 29 April 1993. This circular stated that the large number of asylum seekers (at that time especially from former Yugoslavia), the accelerated procedures of the NTOM, and the elimination of arrears in the handling of asylum requests, had contributed to an increased demand for housing (Ministry of VROM and Ministry of WVC, 1993). At that time there were 7,000 status holders taking up ROA places, while another 4,000 status holders were still in the central reception facilities. The circular denounced this situation as ‘improper and undesirable’ (Ministry of VROM and Ministry of WVC, 1993, p 2). Negotiations between the state and the VNG had resulted in a new distribution formula, which aimed for “fair distribution of municipal exertion” to house status holders. This new formula

53

Spreading the ‘burden’?

was based on the total population of the municipality as well as the situation in each local housing market. The number of vacancies in the reasonably priced social housing stock was taken as an indicator of the state of the housing market in each locality. Three arguments were central to this system of target setting. First, the government wanted to spread the responsibility of housing refugees evenly across all municipalities. This would take the pressure off the largest cities that already had relatively large concentrations of migrants as a result of family formation and reunion. The second underlying argument was that the new system should take account of the recent achievements of local authorities with regard to regular housing. Third, targets were to be expressed in the form of the number of refugees that a municipality had to house, leaving it to each municipality to decide whether to take families or single people, according to the nature of its local housing stock (Ministry of VROM and Ministry of WVC, 1993, p 12). This left large cities free to make offers to single people, while many smaller localities could offer family dwellings. Although municipalities could not be forced to offer accommodation, some incentives were offered to encourage cooperation. Rewards for those who succeeded in meeting their targets included: • the right to build an equivalent number of new properties; • stimulation grants; • subsidies for equipping and preparing accommodation for use by refugees (a non-recurrent total grant of 40 million guilders to the municipal fund). In addition, the state could also penalise non-compliant municipalities. The new Besluit Beheer Sociale-Huursector (BBSH) and Housing Act were enacted on 1 July 1993 – both be used as instruments of legal pressure because they set the framework within which municipalities and housing associations could operate when distributing social housing. The first circular also set up mechanisms to implement the new policy. Responsibility for implementation fell to a project group consisting of representatives of the Ministries of VROM and WVC, of the VNG and of the national federations of housing associations, NCIV and NWR. Finally, the circular also drew attention to a pre-existing mechanism that had allowed local authorities to trade their quotas. (The provinces would later play an important part in these redistributions, but for now they appeared to have no authority in the matter.) The implementation of the new dispersal policy for refugees threw up some anomalies and inconsistencies. For example, and most importantly, it had become much more advantageous for local authorities to house asylum seekers who had already been dispersed but had now gained status, than those refugees languishing in the central reception facilities because of the shortage of social housing. Local authorities received a grant each time a new asylum seeker moved into a house even though this was only a temporary arrangement.

54

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

Therefore, it made sense to move asylum seekers out of these houses as soon as they gained status. In contrast, authorities received only a one-off grant if a refugee took on the same house permanently. It was more profitable, then, to take a steady stream of dispersed asylum seekers than it was to take one single dispersed refugee. Furthermore, resettled status holders were much more expensive to local authorities than asylum seekers whose applications were still under consideration. Once this situation had been noticed by the government, municipalities were requested to offer equal numbers of housing to dispersed and centrally housed status holders. Further changes to the dispersal policy were introduced in 1994. Negotiations between the state, the VNG and the collective administrative body of the provinces (IPO) resulted in circular MG 94-08, which was adjusted by circular MG 94-41 on 29 November 1994 (Ministry of VROM et al, 1994). These circulars were written in the light of the administrative ‘watershed’. Circular MG 94-41 introduced two ACs and further dismantled the ROA regulation. It also intended that a new act would be introduced to make the dispersal targets legally binding, making the Netherlands the only Western European country to employ legally elaborated target settings to house-admitted asylum seekers (Ministry of the Interior, 1997; Van Beetz, 1997). The explanation of this new act followed in circular MG 95-14, which was sent on 1 May 1995 and became operative on 1 July of that year (Ministry of VROM, 1995). The new act rested on the new Housing Act and the so-called VVTV Act3. It made it compulsory for municipalities to provide housing for status holders. The old ROA target setting would be abolished and replaced by two new and separate sets of targets, one for housing holders of A or VTV status, and one for housing holders of VVTV status. Both targets were calculated on the basis of, first, the share of the national population living in each municipality, and second, estimates of the likely number of A,VTV and VVTV status holders requiring housing in the Netherlands. The provinces would supervise the realisation of the targets, which were maxima (Ministry of the Interior, 1995). The targets would also include only those resettled by the state for the first time. They excluded refugees and asylum seekers who engaged in secondary migration and moved from one municipality to another (Ministry of the Interior, 1995). The introduction of two separate targets resulted from the fact that holders of A and VTV status holders were officially separated from VVTV status holders by means of the two new acts. The new Housing Act applied to A and VTV status holders, while a special act came into force for VVTV-status holders. Asylum seekers in possession of a VVTV permit could only stay in the Netherlands for a maximum of three years. They could not stay in the central reception centres, nor were they supposed to fully integrate in Dutch society. The profound difference in the housing of VVTV status holders and A or VTV status holders was that VVTV status holders had no right to general social security benefits and had only limited rights to work. The municipality had to pay the rents for the VVTV status holder, while A and VTV status holders who

55

Spreading the ‘burden’?

did have access to general provisions and the labour market had to pay for their own accommodation. However, since the distinction between A/VTV and VVTV permits has since been abolished, current policy no longer requires the setting of two separate targets. Once provinces were put in charge of implementing dispersal, they were also free to redistribute their quota internally (Ministry of the Interior, 1995, 1999, 2000b). The first two years of operation saw only one such redistribution, with the urban municipality of Leeuwarden in Friesland taking over the quota allocated to the isolated Wadden Islands (Ministry of the Interior, 1997). The new system of target setting was first evaluated in a report by the Cebeon research bureau in 1997 and commissioned by the Dutch parliament (Cebeon, 1997; Ministry of the Interior, 1997). It found that by 1 July 1997 all the old quotas (which came under the ROA regulation) had been filled, but that the larger municipalities had had fewer difficulties realising their targets than the smaller localities (Ministry of the Interior, 1998). Cebeon showed that during the period 1 July 1995 to 1 July 1997, nearly 35% of the municipalities had exceeded their targets, while 28% had realised between 75% and the full 100%. Thirty-seven per cent had therefore realised less than 75% of the compulsory targets (Ministry of the Interior, 1997). More recent analysis by the Ministry of the Interior (2000b) has shown that between the introduction of targets and 1 January 2000, a total of 119,650 status holders had been dispersed by means of target setting (Ministry of the Interior, 2000b). This equals about 94% of all the status holders that have had to be dispersed since 1995. The figures in Table 3.6 show the shortfall between the number of people dispersed and the targets or quotas set for dispersal.

Table 3.6: Cumulative target settings and realisation, July 1995-January 2000 Target Date of settings measurement A/VTV VVTV

Total

June 1995 January 1996 June 1996

55,000 64,000 67,200

3,400 5,000

55,000 67,400 72,700

50,000 58,100 62,800

1,700 3,400

50,000 59,800 66,200

–3,000 –5,000 –7,600

January 1997 June 1997 January 1998

69,300 73,600 78,500

6,100 10,700 13,500

75,400 84,300 92,000

68,000 73,600 80,000

5,800 8,200 11,400

73,800 81,800 91,400

–6,000 –1,600 –2,500

June 1998 January 1999 June 1999

89,300 96,000 96,100

15,100 16,700 24,000

104,400 112,700 120,100

85,530 89,000 91,450

14,220 17,800 21,800

99,750 106,800 113,250

–600 –4,650 –6,850

January 2000

97,550

32,950

130,500

no data

no data

no data

Source: Ministry of the Interior (1999, 2000b)

56

Realisation of target settings A/VTV VVTV Total

Surplus

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

Some of this shortfall is due to inaccuracies in the advance state forecasts concerning the numbers to be dispersed.

Dispersal within target setting In principle, a status holder can be accommodated anywhere in the Netherlands. Thus, a status holder who stays in a central reception centre in the north of the Netherlands might be offered living accommodation in the south of the country. The COA makes only one offer of housing to a status holder. Four criteria guide the COA in its offer: • Where are close family members (if any) located in the Netherlands? • Has the status holder gained a job offer in any particular municipality? • Has the status holder been accepted by an educational institute in a municipality? • Has the status holder any particular medical needs (COA, 2000)? These criteria apart, the main determinant of which offer a status holder will receive is the length of time that they have been resident in the central reception centre – the so-called ‘first in, first out’ principle. However, it is important to note that status holders are free to search for housing accommodation themselves, and in recent years nearly 30% have rehoused themselves (Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of VROM, 1999). These people are then counted against the target for the municipality within which they have chosen to settle. All of this indicates that the system of dispersal by target setting is a mechanical exercise created by administrators. What then has become of the philosophical debate about the wisdom of dispersal that raged in the late 1970s and early 1980s regarding ethnic minorities and migrants? The Dutch Refugee Council, or Vluchtelingenwerk, seems to have taken up the ethical arguments on behalf of the status holders. In its published memorandum Vluchtelingen en Integratie (‘Refugees and integration’) (Vluchtelingenwerk, 1997), attention is drawn to the contradiction between the Housing Act – under which dispersal was implemented, and which argues for freedom of choice – and the reality – that status holders have little choice under the target-setting regime. Nor can they easily transfer after initial resettlement (Van Rossum and Visser, 1999). The Dutch Refugee Council has also drawn attention to the negative consequences of target setting for holders of A and VTV status. Those status holders are relocated often and over (relatively) g reat distances (Vluchtelingenwerk, 1997). Consequently, they are in danger of losing the contacts they have built up and having to rejoin language and integration courses in other locations (where the content of the courses may differ). According to the refugee council, the COA has investigated the possibility of housing asylum seekers near the reception centres that they have stayed in. Problems with this proposal include the uneven and isolated distribution of

57

Spreading the ‘burden’?

AZCs in the Netherlands. Most of them are not situated near the centre or central town of any municipality. Since dispersal offers status holders the same opportunities for self-settlement and residence as enjoyed by the indigenous Dutch population, the philosophy of dispersal can also be criticised since they cannot avail themselves of these opportunities. Few status holders are sufficiently informed about their rights and duties. Furthermore, the mechanisms of allocation of social housing accommodation are sometimes unfavourable to newcomers. For a long time, many housing associations have operated allocation mechanisms on the basis of duration of registration or some kind of bond with the region (such as employment or having lived there for a number of years). In recent times, however, many housing associations (especially in the larger municipalities) have begun to switch towards a supply model, whereby anyone may apply for the housing accommodation that the corporation offers (Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of VROM, 1999). However, in many municipalities, even the supply model also includes mechanisms of giving preferential access to those who have collected most ‘points’, for instance on income or duration of residence. Although status holders are still among the weakest parties in the housing market, according to the Dutch Refugee Council they have benefited from the shift towards a supply model (Vluchtelingenwerk, 1999).

Some concluding remarks It is clear that the system is still largely housing-led. The Minister of the Interior (1997) states that the purpose of target setting is not to disperse status holders spatially – if this is true, then what is its purpose? The minister explicitly argues that the pressure on the housing market has to be proportionally dispersed, making the accompanying dispersal of status holders a side effect. Moreover, this argument does not imply any priority to integration issues. According to Cebeon (1999), about one quarter of all status holders housed by the targetsetting system move house within one year. Yet more than half of them remain in the same municipality. In the long run, secondary migration in the direction of the larger municipalities (and notably the Randstad) can be observed, which may come as no surprise considering the demographic profile of many of the status holders – young and single (see also SGBO, 2000). Too little is done to take into account the wishes of the asylum seekers, although the debate continues and new regulations are still being set out. No doubt the COA has the goodwill to take into account a lot of other criteria when rehousing status holders. However, the growing number of asylum seekers and increased pressure on reception facilities have dominated, and continue to dominate, the minds of the policy makers and the system of housing of asylum seekers and refugees.

58

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

Dispersal policies: evaluation and appraisal This chapter has so far reviewed programmes and procedures to disperse asylum seekers, refugees and other immigrant groups, and a number of problems and bottlenecks in, and objections to, these programmes and procedures have also been described. In this final section, an attempt is made to arrange and evaluate the problems and objections and to sort out the general arguments underlying the policies in order to identify good practice in the dispersal of asylum seekers.

Dispersal measures and goals If, for any reason, public authorities feel that dispersal or concentration of a specific group of people is required, there are many instruments and measures at their disposal to realise this requirement. Dispersal and concentration can be achieved on different spatial scales, but at any level the policy involves either a deliberate attempt to alter an existing spatial living pattern, or the prevention or creation of a specific spatial living pattern. In many cases, it involves a combination of these goals. It also makes a difference whether the target group to be concentrated or dispersed consists of newcomers, or people who are already living in, in this case, the Netherlands. Dispersal policy regarding asylum seekers and refugees can be clearly located under ‘newcomers’, while the latter group embraces de facto a kind of resettlement policy. Two kinds of instrument can be used to disperse or concentrate a group: positive measures and negative measures. Positive measures do not involve compulsion and individuals preserve their freedom of choice of location. These measures can also be aimed at organisations such as municipalities or housing associations. Dutch experiences with positive dispersal policy include the RVK regulation under which some groups have the right to apply for housing accommodation under the terms of this regulation. Another example of positive measures is the distribution of additional house building permits to municipalities that agree to accept repatriates. This measure can be seen to be aimed at local authorities, and not directly at the actual target group, that is, repatriates. Negative measures involve coercion and the restriction of people’s freedom of choice. The attempts by housing associations in Rotterdam and Amsterdam to limit the number of foreigners in some parts of the cities can be characterised as a negative dispersal policy, aimed at the prevention of a specific spatial living pattern. The use of the term ‘dispersal policy’ for the operation of these ‘ceilings’ could even be questioned (Huitzing, 1986). If ‘dispersal’ is defined in the narrowest sense, referring solely to the pursuit of a dispersal pattern, it is probably better to speak of ‘anti-concentration’, rather then dispersal, measures. In the case of such anti-concentration measures, policy makers do not possess a complete picture – or master plan – of the dispersal pattern they strive for. Rather, they try to remove local concentrations that might be seen as problematic

59

Spreading the ‘burden’?

(Van Praag, 1980). Very often, dispersal policy involves the combined use of positive and negative measures to realise its goals. Dutch attempts to disperse population groups such as asylum seekers and refugees have been based on three key issues. The main argument in favour of dispersal and against concentration or segregation seems to have become the idea that concentration of socially deprived people produces additional negative consequences for the individual households of these neighbourhoods (Musterd and Ostendorf, 1996). Policy makers may try to prevent such negative effects by aspiring to dispersal, but also by pursuing compensation policy (SCP, 1995; Musterd et al, 1998). This territorial approach can still be recognised in the ‘big cities policy’ of the Netherlands (Penninx et al, 1995; TWCM, 1995). The second issue relates to whether or not a group is seen as permanent residents and therefore in need of integration. Repatriates were dispersed across the country since it was felt that they would integrate better this way. The Moluccans, on the other hand, were never thought of as permanent settlers and were therefore allowed to congregate in clusters. The same logic initially applied to the recruited labour migrants, who were largely ignored by government (Shadid et al, 1984). The companies they worked for were expected to look after them, and as most of these were located in the larger cities, so they were housed in these cities. The third issue is the belief that all parts of a country should shoulder the ‘burden’ of immigration, since this is, after all, a national issue.

Appraising the dispersal of asylum seekers Following the rise in the number of asylum applications since the first half of the 1980s, asylum policy in the Netherlands has developed into a major policy field. The problems arising from the ROA regulations led to the reformation of parts of policy and to a shift in responsibility from the local to the national authorities. The introduction of the NTOM in 1992 and the watershed of 1994 (operational since 1996) have been the most important breaking points in subsequent asylum policy. However, they have not been the only developments in, and alterations of, asylum policy. All these alterations are rooted in problems that arose from the actual operation of asylum policy. Although the NTOM is still referred to as the basis for current Dutch asylum policy, the model is now outdated, according to a spokeswoman from the Dutch Refugee Council. Many asylum policy elements have been changed since 1992 and many new policies have been added. Examples include the addition of pre-OC (AC) and AVO locations, the ZZA arrangement and COW options, and the Dublin agreement of 1990. The government is currently preparing a reformulated asylum policy, which is more in line with the New Foreigners Act that was enacted in April 2001 (Ministry of Justice, 2000a). According to theVNG, the major points of departure of the new policy are fivefold:

60

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

1. The number of different types of reception centre should eventually be reduced to one. 2. Reception centres should be able to operate in the same location permanently. 3. The length of the stay of asylum seekers in reception centres should be limited to a maximum of one year. 4. Additional reception centres will have to be built to act as buffer capacity. 5. There should be limited COW-like housing in municipalities. It seems the idea of ‘spreading the burden’ will also continue to underpin future policies (Ministry of Justice, 2000b). The pressure on the reception facilities has always been the main driving force behind developments in asylum policy, and this can be clearly observed in the dispersal of the asylum seekers. The variables contributing to the pressure on reception facilities are, first, the inflow; second, the duration of the procedure; and third, the outflow (either through expulsion or settlement in social housing). One of the major problems is the structural lack of capacity in the reception centres, and this problem has grown worse over time (Ministry of the Interior et al, 2000a, 2000b). An already high occupancy rate makes it difficult to deal with fluctuations in the influx of asylum seekers. In order to meet the fluctuating needs for reception facilities, the COA has increased capacity by adding new (but often temporary) options for accommodation, such as the AVO and ZZA accommodation as well as the COW option. The introduction of ACs in 1994 was meant to decrease the inflow. So far, however, the capacity problem has remained unsolved. The structural lack of capacity is also related to another problem: that is, the slow speed with which asylum seekers are moving through the asylum chain. The legal system cannot cope with demand, and asylum applications are often held up, causing delays in the transfer of asylum seekers between the centres. In order to help clear the backlog, the number of Immigration and Naturalisation Service staff was increased considerably in 1999 (Ministry of the Interior et al, 2000b). A third reason for the lack of capacity in reception centres is that a substantial number of asylum seekers stay far too long in the reception centres (see Algemene Rekenkamer, 1995). This problem is nothing new. The ROA regulation states that residence of asylum seekers in AZCs should not exceed nine weeks. In 1991, the average length of stay in AZCs, however, was 145 days (Hulshof et al, 1992). According to the COA, asylum seekers are currently staying an average of 15+ months in AZCs, including the time taken to find suitable housing. Moreover, the duration of stay is still increasing. One of the main (though contested) shortcomings of the contemporary policy is that asylum seekers have very little influence on where they will stay during the asylum determination procedure. The ZZA and COW arrangements suggest a degree of freedom of choice – but this is illusory. The COA decides which asylum seekers are housed in a COW facility, and asylum seekers who refuse to be rehoused are denied reception services (COA, 1999b). The ZZA

61

Spreading the ‘burden’?

arrangements do offer some choice of location to asylum seekers but this arrangement is being run down. Furthermore, it was not introduced to increase asylum seeker choice but as an emergency measure to help solve the capacity issue in the central reception facilities (COA, 2000). The ZZA arrangement will be replaced by a new facility, the Small-Scale Central Reception Facility (KCO), but nothing is yet known about the degree of freedom the asylum seeker will have under that regulation. It needs to be acknowledged that systems have been devised to ensure efficiency in processing asylum claims, not to offer choice or uphold personal liberty. These issues are not the priority of the COA, the IND or the government. Central reception regulations have only been developed to house asylum seekers temporarily and keep them available to the asylum procedure. At present, the issue of freedom of choice only plays a part once asylum seekers receive a permit and have to be housed in regular houses. The contemporary system of dispersing status holders (refugees) is mainly based on administrative arguments and the idea of ‘spreading the burden’ fairly among the municipalities. Driving this are the fears of the larger cities that big inflows of immigrants would result in segregation and social deprivation among the newcomers. However, this simple equation of ‘concentration = deprivation’ ignores the complexity and variability of local labour and housing markets. In some places, concentration might produce deprivation but in others it might not. It also ignores the fact that dispersal of refugees from areas where they have already found work and accommodation might actually be the main cause of deprivation for those individuals. It seems that the COA is increasingly recognising these more sophisticated explanations and is acting accordingly. The intention to reduce the number of types of reception centres, and the move towards extended reception in the same IND region, will probably provide a more solid base for the integration of asylum seekers in Dutch society. The COA is also moving to a more regionalised structure and way of operating, with each cluster region having reception centres of all types so that reception, settlement and integration can take place within the same geographical location.

Conclusion Asylum seekers constitute a special category of immigrant. Special policies have been set out to deal with their specific situations. However, the situation admitted asylum seekers find themselves in, especially if they are recognised as refugees, is not all that different from that which other foreigners have to deal with. They are in a country that is, most probably, strange to them, and they will soon get to learn what stereotypes and misunderstandings circulate about them in the host society. Although the Netherlands has an extensive system of integration courses and minority interest groups, asylum seekers will have to do a lot for themselves. Finding a place to live in can be one of those tasks. Asylum seekers are accommodated in special reception centres, and if they obtain a residence permit, they have the right to be housed in a regular house.

62

Dispersal policies in the Netherlands

This is an important positive aspect of the Dutch policy. The ECRE (2000), for example, argues that the system of target setting allows status holders to circumvent discrimination that might otherwise prevent them from finding adequate accommodation within a biased housing market. Under contemporary conditions, accommodation can turn out to be anywhere in the Netherlands. This system is based on administrative arguments, while some geographically informed criteria are apparently not taken into consideration. Apart from some individual criteria linked to personal characteristics (such as the residence of family members in the Netherlands, or medical grounds), arguments such as the presence of employment possibilities rarely play a part in the selection of locations to house status holders. The only employment criterion that is operated is based on personal characteristics as well: if the status holder has already found a job, then the COA will take the employment criterion into account. The housing–employment mismatch that might arise from contemporary dispersal policy has already been noted (Musterd and Muus, 1995). Considering the high-skilled profile of many asylum seekers and the shortage of highskilled labour in (notably) the economic core areas of the Netherlands, it seems logical to direct policies at this potential match4. In this respect, the current dispersal policy may be counterproductive (Musterd and Muus, 1995). This chapter has argued that developments in dispersal policy should be considered within the scope of wider developments in minority and alien policy. One of the recent developments in alien policy has been the shift towards the integration issue – with priority given especially to education and the labour market. Foreigners have to join integration programmes so as to increase their chances of successful participation in Dutch society. The basis of the asylum policy, the NTOM, was even founded on the assumption that asylum seekers should be offered courses to stimulate and facilitate possible integration even during the period when their asylum claim was being determined. Although asylum seekers have only limited rights to participation in Dutch society, they do become familiar with the environment surrounding the reception centre in which they stay. Therefore, the many transfers during their stay in the central reception centres and the final transfer to regular housing in cases where a residence permit is granted are considered problematic not only by asylum seeker interest groups but also by the COA. What happens to status holders when they are regularly housed, on the other hand, is of no concern to the COA at all – this is how the policy works. The COA is responsible for the central reception of asylum seekers; municipalities, rather, are responsible for the settlement of status holders. The contemporary mechanisms and criteria used to disperse status holders over the municipalities do not take account of factors that may contribute to the successful integration of status holders in Dutch society. Sadly, the real underlying logic is still concerned with coping efficiently with the inflow of these people, and proportionally distributing the ‘costs’ of the reception of asylum seekers.

63

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Notes 1

A subtle difference exists in the Dutch language between the notion of ‘foreigner’ and the notion of ‘alien’. Foreigners (vreemdeling, buitenlander) are understood as first generation migrants; an alien (allochtoon) can be first, second or third generation immigrants.

2

The status had been lifted in Article 9a of the Herziene Vreemdelingenwet (Revised Foreigners Act) 1994.

3

Housing Act: Wet van 30 maart 1995 tot wijziging van de Huisvestingswet, Stb 1995, 159. VVTV Act: Wet gemeentelijke zorg voor houders van een voorwaardelijke vergunning tot verblijf.

4

The COA estimates that approximately 25% of asylum seekers are highly educated.

64

Dispersal policies in Sweden

FOUR

Dispersal policies in Sweden Roger Andersson and Dennis Solid

Introduction This chapter describes Sweden’s refugee dispersal policy and analyses its outcomes. The explicit dispersal policy, often referred to as the ‘Sweden-wide’ or ‘All-of-Sweden’ policy, began in 1985 and, in principle, is still guiding the settlement of new refugees in Sweden, despite the fact that a policy change in 1994 turned out to strongly affect its basic prerequisites. By the end of December 2000, only 137 out of 289 municipalities had made agreements with the Swedish Migration Board to engage in the local reception of refugees for 2001. (In 1991, the number of municipalities was twice as high, at 277 out of 289.) This chapter also examines the background factors that resulted in the formulation of this policy. Therefore, postwar immigration to Sweden and the major political decisions that were developed to cope with this immigration are summarised. The first part of this chapter is based on compilations by Jonas Widgren (1980) and Maria Appelqvist (1999, 2000), and on reports from several state commissions that have analysed immigration issues over the years (for example SOU 1982:49, 1996:55). The second part of the chapter outlines the ‘Sweden-wide’ policy of refugee reception and is divided into three sections. The first deals with the policy’s first and more radical dispersal phase. The second focuses on the effects of a modification introduced in 1994. The third section describes the main tasks of the two state boards involved in the reception of refugees, namely the Migration Board and the Swedish Integration Board (SIB). The policy’s effects on the settlement pattern is analysed in the third part of the chapter, while in the fourth part an attempt is made to evaluate the dispersal policy and to suggest improvements to the programme. The evaluation and discussion draw upon earlier research (Andersson, 1996, 1997, 1998; Sandberg, 1998) and several evaluations undertaken by state commissions and different state boards, such as the Swedish Migration Board (SIV) and the Swedish National Audit Office (Riksrevisionsverket). This chapter is based on secondary sources – research reports, public investigations, local evaluations, statistics – as well as interviews and correspondence with key individuals at the SIV (Migration Board) since

65

Spreading the ‘burden’?

1 July 2000), the Swedish Integration Board (SIB), municipalities, and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). A huge corpus of written documentation exists, published in Swedish, and which is concerned with immigration, refugee and integration issues. Only a fraction of this literature is referred to in this chapter.

The Swedish context for dispersal policies Background Until only half a century ago, Sweden was one of Europe’s ethnically most homogenous countries. Prior to this, cultural conflicts caused by mass migration mainly affected countries to the south and east of Sweden (Widgren 1980, p 9). In Sweden itself, some ‘elite immigration’ occurred during medieval times and later. This included the arrival of merchants from Germany between the 12th and 14th centuries, and in the 17th century, businessmen and craftsmen from Scotland, the Netherlands and France and Valonian blacksmiths from Belgium. Also, during the 16th and 17th centuries, Savolax Finns settled in Sweden. These forest farmers settled in sparsely populated areas close to the Norwegian border. From 1780, some Jews were entitled to settle in Sweden; by the end of the 19th century they had increased in number to around 1,000. Roughly speaking, in 1880, about one per 1,000 of Sweden’s population was a non-Swedish citizen. The period 1800-1930 was marked by substantial emigration from Sweden. In total, some 1.3 million people left the country, most of them settling in the US. In 1910, three of the world’s top 10 Swedish-speaking cities were located in the US: New York, Chicago, Minneapolis (SNA Population, 1991). When the US immigration policy changed during the 1920s, the Swedish net emigration gradually shifted towards an immigration surplus. This surplus initially consisted of returning Swedish-Americans, but soon thereafter – and

Table 4.1: Foreign citizens in Sweden, 1880-1950 Year

Number

% of total population

1880 1890

4,299 10,112

0.1 0.2

1900 1910 1920

15,281 21,708 22,811

0.3 0.4 0.4

1930 1940 1950

16,475 35,111 123,720

0.3 0.5 1.8

Source: SOU (1982:49, p 44)

66

Dispersal policies in Sweden

as a result of developments to do with the Second World War – Sweden became a more permanent net-receiver of international migrants (see Table 4.1). Widgren (1980) points out three basic reasons for this shift.

Immigration to Sweden Phase 1 (1945-63) First of all, Widgren (1980) cites foreign policy: Sweden did not take part in the Second World War and had ‘a moral obligation’ to keep its borders open for refugees from the neighbouring countries (all of whom had been involved in the war). Some 30,000 refugees from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania came to Sweden between 1943 and 1945, as did a further 60,000 from Denmark and Norway, and 70,000 children from Finland. Somewhat later, the so-called ‘Bernadotte action’ resulted in an influx of about 34,000 refugees from the continent (many from concentration camps). By summer 1945, many of the war refugees had either returned home or had moved on to the US or elsewhere. However, a large number remained in Sweden. Second, Widgren cites a ‘population policy’ factor. During the 1930s, birth rates in Sweden had dropped to a very low level, resulting in a changing age structure. As Sweden’s manufacturing industry was left unaffected by the war, demand for Swedish goods was at a very high level after the war. Despite the wartime refugees, a rapid increase in female labour market participation rates, and the rapid rationalisation of production methods in the rural sectors (leading to urbanisation), the industry faced a growing labour shortage (Widgren, 1980, p 12). The third factor, closely related to the second, was of an economic nature. Postwar unemployment had decreased to about 2%, and the demand for Swedish goods (primarily investment goods, such as machinery) increased rapidly. Firms and employers’ organisations identified labour import as the only possible way of controlling inflation and sustaining economic growth. Immigration began and the most important instrument was the step-by-step introduction between 1946 and 1954 of a free movement space within the Nordic region. This resulted especially in increasing mobility between Finland and Sweden. It is estimated that about 60% of all intra-Nordic migrations that took place between 1954 and 1980 (about one million registered moves) were between Finland and Sweden (Widgren, 1980, p 12). At the same time, immigration from non-Nordic sources also increased. In 1947, a special labour market commission was established by the Swedish government and it immediately started to recruit workers in Italy, Hungary and Austria. In the 1950s, recruitment also took place in West Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Belgium and Greece. However, numbers were rather small and only around 5% of the total influx in the 1950s – or 12,000 out of 258,000 – came from non-Nordic countries. It is important to point out that this non-Nordic immigration is the starting point for the modern history of Swedish immigration

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policy. At the time, very few thought about the potential consequences of immigration for the immigrants, their families or for Swedish society in general. In short, Sweden had immigration but no immigrant policy. It was not until the early 1960s that Swedish population forecasts took immigration into account. By then, the country had had an immigration surplus for 30 years with a total surplus of 279,000 people – 39,000 in the 1930s; 134,000 in the 1940s; 106,000 in the 1950s (Widgren, 1980, p 13).

Phase 2 (1964-73) During the second phase of postwar immigration, the number of immigrants increased and the ‘immigrant issue’ became more widely discussed. In 1965, a public inquiry argued that Sweden should commence a more active ‘guest worker’ strategy, having forecast a scarcity of labour in Europe. However, that same year many Yugoslavs and Turks arrived in Trelleborg in southern Sweden, and the country also went rapidly into an economic recession. The trades unions reacted to this by demanding a regulated labour immigration policy. The Social Democratic government introduced such regulations in March 1967, and thereafter all non-Nordic immigrants needed a work permit, a secure job and accommodation before entering Sweden (SOU, 1982:49). This meant that permits were only granted when the country was in need of a particular type of foreign labour. Where unemployed persons in Sweden were capable of performing the job in question, no permit was granted. However, the following groups were exempt from labour market checks: • Nordic citizens, who since 1951 had enjoyed the right to settle and work wherever they liked in the Nordic area without special permission of any kind; • refugees; • close relatives wishing to be united or reunited with their families in Sweden. Even if the 1967 decision made non-Nordic immigration more regulated, the government continued to favour collective labour recruitment abroad. Agreements were signed with Yugoslavia in 1966 and with Turkey in 1967 (SOU, 1982:49, p 77) and Swedish firms continued to recruit labour, assisted by the Board for Labour Market Issues, or Arbetsmarknadsstyrelsen (AMS), and the Ministry of Labour (Lundh and Olsson, 1994; Appelqvist, 2000, p 185). In fact, the regulations did not reduce the number of immigrants coming to Sweden. On the contrary, the economic boom of the late 1960s brought with it an all-time high in immigration numbers. Between 1968 and 1970, some 100,000 Finns arrived in Sweden, causing a net loss in Finland’s population (although many of them returned soon afterwards). The Swedish debate on immigration and immigrants took off in the mid-1960s. The spark was not only the big influx of immigrants but also a series of newspaper articles concerned with the issue of assimilation of the immigrant population and

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Dispersal policies in Sweden

their living conditions. Should immigrants be assimilated, integrated, or anything else (Widgren, 1980, pp 14-15)? The debate resulted in the first steps towards an explicit formulation of Swedish immigrant policy, taken in 1965 to 1968. In 1965, the government made the decision to subsidise adult education organisations that provided Swedish language courses for immigrants. In 1966, the government set up a working group that later proposed how information and interpretation services should be organised. In the same year, the first municipal bureau for immigrant services was established in Stockholm, soon to be followed by many more in other municipalities. Somewhat later decisions were taken in order to improve opportunities for immigrant children to learn Swedish in schools. In 1969, the SIV was established in order to take care of many immigration and immigrantrelated issues. One of its mandates was the responsibility to organise the reception of refugees. Finally, a new public investigation was launched in 1968, with the directive to propose a coherent immigrant policy. This second period of immigration and immigration reforms ended in 1972. By then, the active labour market immigration policy of collective recruitment had been abolished. However, Sweden continued to have rather generous rules for admitting people on other grounds, such as family reunification and refugee status.

Phase 3 (1974-84) The long-term integration issue was investigated by the Immigrant Investigation, set up in 1968. The third phase of immigration began with the public dissemination of its proposals (SOU, 1974:69, 1974:70). In 1975, the Swedish Parliament (Riksdag) voted in favour of a government bill based on the proposals made by the commission, and Sweden thereby declared itself a multiethnic country. The policy was based on three concepts: • Equality. This concept underlines that immigrants should have the same opportunities, rights and obligations as the rest of the population (this is structural integration). It also means that everybody is entitled to preserve and learn his or her native language and cultural affiliation. The state should be neutral with respect to issues of identity. • Freedom of choice. This means that everybody can make a choice with respect to assimilation (this is cultural pluralism). Assisting immigrants in maintaining their traditions is said to make a future decision on staying or returning easier. • Cooperation. This concept is primarily concerned with reciprocal tolerance and solidarity between immigrant groups and the native population. This multicultural policy was followed by a series of reforms. One of these was the ‘home language’ reform of 1976. This gave all children and parents the right to demand from a municipality some education in the children’s first (or

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Spreading the ‘burden’?

home) language, and introduced the right for foreign citizens to take part in local elections (Widgren, 1980, p 16). Political reforms are one reason for identifying the mid-1970s as the beginning of a new phase in Swedish immigration. Beside this important shift, however, immigration was changing, and changing dramatically.

Refugee immigration to Sweden: a summary (1900-1984) Although Sweden had received political and religious refugees for centuries, the volume was very small prior to the First World War. The Russian revolution and political developments in Finland (1917-18) resulted in the influx of a few thousand political refugees. In the 1930s, refugee issues became more focused: at this time, the term ‘refugees’ meant persecuted people from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. However, Sweden did not accept persecutions on ‘racial ground’ as a reason for a permission to enter and remain in Sweden. Many Jews seeking refuge in Sweden were denied entry. Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, Sweden had permitted only 5,000 people from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to enter the country. After the war had begun, the Swedish policy became somewhat more generous, and from 1941 onwards a clear shift in refugee policy came about, leading to refugee immigration from Norway (43,000), Denmark (18,000) and Finland (70,000), including children coming over the Baltic Sea and some 40,000 who crossed over from Finland in the north. In the autumn of 1944, 30,000 people from Estonia (some having a Swedish background) and Latvia managed to cross over the Baltic Sea in small boats. By the end of the war, close to 200,000 foreign citizens were residing in Sweden. A new phase in Swedish refugee policy began with the ‘Bernadotte action’. This was an attempt to save as many people as possible from the Nazi concentration camps in Germany and Nazi-occupied countries (primarily Austria). About 34,000 people were brought to Sweden in this way during the final months of the war and for a time thereafter. A further 10,000 refugees arrived individually between 1945 and 1949, many of whom later moved on to other countries. By the 1950s, Europe still had about one million refugees on its hands as a consequence of the Second World War. The Swedish parliament decided in 1950 that Sweden should contribute to this problem’s solution via collective transfers of such refugees (displaced persons staying in refugee camps). Every year between 1950 and 1976 a so-called refugee quota was set, and a select committee of Swedish authorities selected and received 22,500 of these refugees. The majority of these refugees were of an Eastern European background (about 8,000 from Hungary and 5,000 from Yugoslavia). About 90% of the refugees that were being collectively transferred to Sweden were fit to work according to medical reports (SOU, 1982:49, p 125). However, Sweden was one of the first European countries to admit refugees with tuberculosis (1,000 persons

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Dispersal policies in Sweden

plus relatives to these in the 1950s) and, throughout the postwar era, Sweden has also received a quota of disabled persons. Between 1950 and 1969, the administrative responsibility for collective transfers of refugees to Sweden was placed on the authority of the Swedish National Labour Market Administration (AMS) in cooperation with the Swedish Board for Health and Social Affairs (Medicinalverket/Socialstyrelsen), a commission on foreigners (since 1969, the SIV) and the police. Their duties included the selection and transportation of refugees, and their reception and labour market integration in Sweden. Those not fit for work were received by the Board for Health and Social Affairs, which provided for their basic needs. In 1954, Sweden signed the Geneva Convention, and in 1967 it ratified the New York protocol (regulating the legal status of refugees). Swedish labour immigration policy effectively ended in 1972. This was in part due to changing policy and in part due to the economic recession of 1973. However, 1972 also witnessed an increased influx of a new type of refugee: non-European political refugees. This influx had already begun in 1966, when the UN High Commissioner asked Sweden to accept a group of Lebanon-based Assyrians. They were soon followed by Asians from Uganda, who in late 1972 were expelled by Idi Amin and were compelled to leave the country within 90 days. The vast majority of these Asian Ugandans ended up in the UK, but 800 arrived in Sweden via the UK and refugee camps in Italy and Austria. The following year, 1973, the world witnessed a brutal military coup in Chile, during which president Allende was murdered and many thousands of socialists were killed or persecuted. The Swedish Embassy played an important role in trying to assist people in Santiago immediately after the coup, and the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme played a key role in the decision to invite and accept Chileans and other Latin Americans to remain in Sweden as political refugees. Between 1973 and 1978, 6,000 to 7,000 Latin Americans came to Sweden, who would later be followed by their families. The 1970s also witnessed an increase in the arrival of ‘spontaneous refugees’. It is estimated that between 1968 and 1981 the total number of such nonplanned refugee immigration was in the range of 36,000 (SOU, 1982:49, p 127). Until the early 1980s, Hungary, followed by Chile,Yugoslavia, Poland, and Turkey, had been the primary source of refugees that were admitted to stay in Sweden (see Table 4.2).

Geographical imbalances leading up to the introduction of the ‘Sweden-wide’ strategy for refugee reception Statistics Sweden has been collecting data on immigration and emigration flows since about 1875. However, it was not until 1968 that population registers were improved to allow for special analyses of employment and housing statistics based on citizenship and country-of-birth information. The regional distribution of immigrants was seldom discussed or analysed before the late 1970s. In its report of 1982, the Commission on Immigrant Policy (appointed

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Table 4.2: Refugee immigration to Sweden, 1950-81a 1950-67 Q

1968-77 S

1978-81

Q

S

1950-81

All refugees Total

Yugoslavia Poland Czechoslovakia

6,296 371 327

677 2,700 3,100

6 2,000

7,000 410 320

5,500 3,750

Hungary Rest of Eastern Europeb

8,237 1,227

1,663 512

3,000

953 425

13,900 2,160

26

39

5,000

65 508 243

5,150 500 250

202

189

1,000 4,700

148 3 558

150 1,400 5,250

152 2,300 623

150

45 18 1,300

50 650

2,000

941 2,635 1,213

950 9,150 1,200

37

50

1,000

1,000

5,000 24,000

878 13,760

Greece Iraq Iran Syria Lebanon Turkey Kampuchea Vietnam Ethiopia

2,281

Somalia Uganda Argentina

634 1,293

Bolivia Chile Uruguay

4,500

Rest of Latin America Deserters and war refusals: US/Portugal Not specified Total (approx)

246 17,000

7,000 7,000

168 14,000

650

13,300 76,000

Notes: Q = quota; S = spontaneous. a

Only people with admissions to stay on refugee or refugee-like reasons are included. Accompanied children are excluded. Children aged under 16 are not included; if these were included, the total number admitted would be about 82,000 (39,000 on quota).

b Rest of Eastern Europe: Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Rumania, Russia, Ukraine, East Germany.

Source: SOU (1982:49, Table 7.1, p 124)

by the government in 1980), summarises almost every aspect of immigration to Sweden and the development in migration and immigrant policy up to that date. It is difficult, however, to find any information in the report indicating that the intra-national geographical dimension of labour or refugee immigration was ever considered. The issue is mentioned briefly at times, and especially in relation to aspects of housing, for example, in a government bill of 1968:

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Immigrants should have the same housing standard as the native population. This has not always been the case so far; the development has sometimes resulted in a concentration of foreigners in special districts, especially in the larger cities. This trend must be reversed. (Government Bill 1968:142, cited in SOU 1982:49, p 80. English translation)

This bill regulated labour immigration policy and was approved by the Swedish Parliament. Among other things, it stipulated that decent accommodation had to be arranged before permission to enter Sweden for work could be issued by the regional labour market authorities (Länsarbetsnämnden) that were responsible for deciding on such applications. Although many cities faced severe housing shortages in the late 1960s, this rule hardly affected the geographical distribution of immigrants. The guidelines concerning the treatment of refugees on the housing market were repeated in a government bill of 1975: Improvements of the housing conditions for immigrants should be handled within the general housing policy framework and not by selective treatment. (Government Bill 1975:26, cited in SOU 1982:49, p 235. English translation)

By and large, both labour and refugee immigrants were concentrated in Sweden’s metropolitan regions, and this concentration was even more pronounced among refugees. Labour immigrants were often recruited for specific jobs in specific firms in particular cities or towns. This resulted in an influx of immigrants not only into the major cities but also to smaller urban sites, predominantly in the southern and central parts of the country, that relied on textile, pulp and paper, mechanical and/or iron and steel production. Refugees normally stayed in or close to the points of entry (in particular, the airports and ferry harbours in the south of Sweden), leading to a growing concentration of refugees especially in the Stockholm and Malmö region. Table 4.3 is based on data from police districts. Although the period covered by the table is very short – a snapshot of registered files in September 1981 – it gives an indication of the geographical Table 4.3: Refugee files by police districts, September 1981 Region Stockholm (Stockholm, Uppsala and Södermanlands County) Malmö (Malmöhus and Kristianstads County) Gothenburg (Göteborg and Bohus, Hallands and Älvsborgs County) Rest of Svealand (Västmanland,Värmland, Närke and Dalarna county) Rest of Götaland (Östergötlands, Jönköpings, Kronobergs, Kalmar, Gotlands, Blekinge, and Skaraborgs County) Norrland (all five northern counties)

Number

%

2,664 1,106

48 20

741 254 563

14 5 10

188

3

Source: SOU (1982:49, Appendix 8, Table 1, p 372)

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pattern that can be estimated to be valid for refugees received by Sweden in the 1970s and early 1980s. The 1980 Commission on Immigrant Policy report pays particular attention to ‘waiting refugees’; that is, persons waiting for a decision on their application for permanent residence in Sweden. “Although it is not a result of immigrant policy considerations, the municipalities have the responsibility for taking care of waiting refugees”, declares the commission, and continues: “Waiting refugees are very unevenly distributed over the country, which implies that some municipalities carry a large share of the responsibility” (SOU, 1982:49, p 226). A bit further on, the commission also tries to explain this unevenness: Several factors guide the refugee’s choice of residence. The Board of Immigration has investigated this (based on interviews with local professionals within the Police and the municipalities) and draws the conclusion that the primary reason for the residence decision seems to be the existence of fellow countrymen in a municipality. It is normal that waiting refugees find their first accommodation where they have a relative or friend. Furthermore, it is natural that many end up in or nearby the arrival site. Finally, it seems like education opportunities can play a significant role for the choice of residence. (SOU, 1982:49, pp 228-9. English translation)

The commission also concludes that the housing issue is indeed very difficult for those municipalities that receive many refugees. Arlanda International Airport lies within Sigtuna municipality, north of Stockholm. The municipality complained in 1980 that it had big problems finding housing and providing for the many refugees who settled there. Table 4.3 indicates that around 80% of the refugees settled in the three metropolitan regions that otherwise comprise about half of Sweden’s population. If one also takes into account that the distribution within each one of these regions was very uneven, the distortion takes on greater proportions. This is one important background factor for the increased local and national concern over the immigrant’s settlement pattern that eventually led to the dispersal policy that was launched a few years later. Another factor, however, was the growing gap between the native and immigrant population with respect to labour market participation rates. A growing unemployment rate in recently received refugee groups especially hardly affected the overall Swedish economy; but it definitely produced noticeable local effects. It used to be the case that both refugees and labour immigrants had an even higher labour market participation rate than the natives (about 20% higher in 1950 if differences in age and gender distribution are taken into account). In the 1970s, the values were similar for foreign and Swedish citizens (Ekberg and Gustavsson, 1995). Table 4.4 shows the overall situation in 1980. Although foreign citizens had a lower labour market participation rate than natives in all age groups, the advantageous age structure of the immigrants often results in a higher total rate of labour market participation.

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Table 4.4: Employment rates by citizenship in 1980 Citizenship

Women

Men

Sweden Finland Rest of the Nordic countries Yugoslavia

76 83 72 84

88 90 87 89

Greece Poland Rest of Europe

84 70 68

88 82 88

Turkey Latin America Rest of the world

60 57 57

84 69 80

Source: SOU (1982:49, p 276)

At the beginning of the 1980s, the organisation of refugee reception was reconsidered. The AMS, which had been responsible for reception of quota refugees since the early 1945, wanted to concentrate its efforts on the core issue of labour market policy measures. The board proposed to the government that the responsibility for refugee reception should be taken over by another authority. As was mentioned earlier in this chapter, many larger municipalities had received increasing numbers of asylum seekers and had demanded that the state take more responsibility for these people. The Working Group with the Responsibility for Refugees (with the Swedish acronym of AGFA) was established within the Ministry of Labour and proposed a model for ‘local reception’. The suggestion had two basic components. First, the municipalities should be responsible for the introduction of refugees who had received their permission to stay in Sweden. Second, the SIV should be the state authority in charge of and responsible for accommodating asylum seekers and for negotiating their placement in a municipality after a residence permit had been issued (SOU, 1996:55, pp 201-2). The AGFA proposals were realised through a 1983 parliament decision, and the ‘Sweden-wide’ policy of refugee reception commenced in 1985.

The refugee dispersal policy, 1985-94 One of the basic aims of ‘local reception’ was to direct refugees away from the metropolitan areas. The point of departure for the AGFA board proposal was to achieve a balance between municipalities. The reception should be based on the ‘needs of the refugee’ and it should take place in a municipality where the person could stay put and find employment. The board calculated an estimated annual need of between 3,000 and 5,000 municipal places (based on the situation at the beginning of the 1980s). During the early 1980s, Sweden had received about 1,000 quota refugees and 2,000 to 3,000 spontaneous

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refugees annually. The AGFA report stated that this volume could be handled by 50 to 60 municipalities (SOU, 1996:55, p 202). Facing the new responsibility, the SIV calculated that a maximum of 5,000 refugees would be received during the first year (1985). SIV invited about 60 municipalities that were thought to be able to match the requirements formulated by the AGFA group. The choice of municipalities fell upon large and mediumsized municipalities in the southern and central parts of Sweden that were judged to have good educational and labour market opportunities. In the north of Sweden, only three municipalities were asked to take part in the reception programme (Umeå, Sundsvall and Gävle). Despite the selection criteria, it turned out that many of these municipalities had had very few refugees before, and that some had little experience of other immigrants (labour immigrants). In the autumn of 1984, before the new reception organisation was in place, the influx of asylum seekers increased substantially. In response, the SIV initiated negotiations with another 30 municipalities. Metropolitan municipalities were also asked to engage in the reception programme, but responded that they did not want more refugees to enter their already immigrant-dense neighbourhoods. Those who eventually signed agreements were all considered to meet the basic criterion of good integration opportunities. The SIV’s position was not comfortable. Step by step it had to expand its plans during late 1984. By 1985, the first year of the new system, calculations pointed at a figure twice as big as the one initially estimated (10,000). Negotiations with another 80 municipalities were initiated, and the SIV abolished the criterion that receiving municipalities should have good employment opportunities. This was criticised by AMS (SOU, 1996:55, p 203). The other option – to extend waiting times at the refugee camps – was not an attractive alternative for the refugees and a poor choice with respect to the state budget. Faced with growing difficulties carrying out the board’s obligations, the SIV began to look upon the reception programme as a two-stage process. In the first stage, refugees would learn Swedish and receive some introductory orientation with regard to Swedish society; in the second stage, refugees would move to another municipality for work or further education. Such a model would also enable small rural municipalities with less optimistic labour market outlooks to play a role in the reception programme (SOU, 1996:55, p 203). In the spring of 1985, the SIV signed agreements with 137 of Sweden’s 284 municipalities, providing for the reception of 8,800 refugees. However, refugee immigration continued to increase (many refugees came from the war between Iran and Iraq), and a majority of these people received (permanent) permission to stay in Sweden. Plans, therefore, needed to be expanded once again, for in 1985 alone, the municipalities received 14,000 refugees. For the following year, agreements were signed with 210 municipalities concerning the reception of 12,500 refugees. The actual receptions turned out to be somewhat greater (14,000). At the beginning of 1987, it was obvious to the SIV that agreements

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Dispersal policies in Sweden

in the range of 9,000 to 14,000 would be inadequate due to the continuing increase of asylum seekers. The situation was problematic since waiting times at the SIV camps were increasing dramatically. The agency turned to the Minister of Immigration for a reaction at the top political level in order to increase the number of reception places in the municipalities, but no such actions were taken. (Ministers in Sweden do not have the right directly to intervene in the work of the various state boards.) The number of recipient municipalities increased during this year. About 14,400 places were negotiated, and 18,600 refugees were finally received. It was only in 1987 that almost all Swedish municipalities became involved in the reception programme. In the mid-1980s, asylum seekers from Iran and Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Eritrea had begun to increase in number throughout Western Europe. Towards the end of the decade, people from Somalia, Kosovo and several of the former states of Eastern Europe began to join the queue. The number of Swedish municipalities taking part in the local reception strategy increased annually. However, waiting times for decisions on asylum cases in Sweden grew ever longer, more and more refugee centres were established, and more and more people had their applications turned down, since it was not always persecution that had caused them to flee their countries. Figure 4.1 presents the general organisational structure of the SIV and the reception organisation in 1990. The top part of the figure (italics) describes the SIV’s administrative structure, while the lower part shows the physical, refugeehandling structure. The number of refugee camps had grown over the years: there were eight such camps in 1985, a number that had risen to 24 within five years. These were dispersed throughout the country. The municipalities that signed reception contracts with the SIV numbered between 270 and 280 during most years of the first phase of the ‘Swedenwide’ policy (1985-94). It is important to note that what would later become known as the ‘Sweden-wide strategy’ was only partly an intended policy. The idea was to disperse new refugees but not to involve all municipalities throughout the country. The shift in organisation and launching of the new placement strategy occurred at a time when the number of asylum seekers expanded beyond all planning-based estimates. The term ‘All-of-Sweden’ or ‘Swedenwide’ was coined by the Swedish National Audit Office in an evaluation of the local reception of refugees published in 1988. Among other factors, the rather extreme degree of dispersal that characterised the reception was primarily caused by increasing numbers of refugees. Many municipalities own a substantial rental housing stock (public housing but not social housing). During the 1980s, many municipalities had vacant dwellings, leading to high costs and budget constraints. By placing refugees in these dwellings (with the rent paid by the state), the refugee-receiving municipalities also solved part of their financial problems, at least in the short term (SOU, 1996:55, p 203). Refugee immigration showed no sign of declining. The SIV made plans for 22,000 to 24,000 municipal placements per year, corresponding to about 3.5 per 1,000 inhabitants on a national basis (the SIV claims 2.8 per 1,000, which

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Figure 4.1: The administrative structure of Swedish refugee reception in 1990 BOARD OF IMMIGRATION Refugee and immigration unit Integration bureau

Coordination bureau

Coopera- Develop- Implemen- Economic ment tion tation support section section section section

Regional Offices

South: Alvesta

West: Mölndal

East: Flen

North: Sundsvall

STATE ADMINISTRATION REFUGEE IMMIGRATION

South: Malmö

West: Mölndal (Kållered)

East: Flen

East/North: Karslund

Quota-refugees 1990: 1250

REFUGEE CAMPS South (six): Alvesta Karlskrona Landskrona Markaryd Moheda Tranåls

West (four): Falkenberg Lesjöfors Svenshögen Säffle

East (nine): Degerfors Fagersta Flen Gimo Hallstahammar Laxå Oxelösund Surahammar Valdemarsvik

Municipal Placement 278 municipalities out of 284 recepted refugees in 1990. Refugee immigration comprised 34% (12,800) of total non-Nordic immigration. Fifty nine per cent (22,000) were given permission to stay by reason of family ties. Source: Andersson et al (1992, p 16)

78

North (five): Kristinberg Fagerdal Svappavaara Timrå Ånge

Dispersal policies in Sweden

is incorrect). The SIV declared that such a quota was a fair target for all municipalities (with some exceptions). On the basis of economic scale, municipalities with a small population were to receive at least 30 to 40 refugees per year. The vast majority of municipalities accepted the idea of a solidaritybased, proportional distribution, and the handful of exceptions that emerged were heavily criticised in the national media (the most well-known example being Sjöbo in southern Sweden). However, municipalities soon began rejecting the requests on the basis of reasons other than ideology, such as, and perhaps most importantly, the growing lack of housing. At the beginning of 1989, the SIV faced ever-growing problems in its attempts to find enough municipal places for refugees. And despite the fact that almost all municipalities were engaged in the 1989 reception programme, the number of places was reduced to 17,800. The SIV tried (often unsuccessfully) to convince some municipalities to establish temporary housing in institutional buildings that were no longer in use. The interest for doing exactly this increased, however, as labour shortage soon became a big problem in many local labour markets – the open unemployment rate in Sweden was below 2% in 1990. Some 30 municipalities thus responded positively to the SIV request, and many refugees were soon temporarily housed on cruise ships, hotels and in military tents. Growing labour shortage led to proposals to establish a more labour-oriented reception strategy (refugees were not entitled to work during their waiting time). With the assistance of the AMS, the SIV started to develop a system of occupational classifications that could be used already at the refugee camps. The autumn of 1989 saw an even greater influx of new asylum seekers. Refugee camps were crowded, the municipalities became more reluctant to further increase receptions, and the political and media coverage of refugee-related issues was intense (SOU, 1996:55, p 204). At the beginning of the 1990s, asylum immigration reached the proportions of the Second World War. War in former Yugoslavia caused some 84,000 people to apply for asylum in Sweden in 1992. The SIV ran eight camp facilities in 1985, 24 in 1990 – but an astonishing number of 290 in 1993 (SIV, 1997, p 25). However, the reception circumstances and opportunities for finding a job and integrating into Swedish society became worse than ever before due to economic stagnation, a financial crisis and rapidly growing unemployment between 1991 and 1993. Sweden reacted by demanding a visa for people coming from ‘refugee-producing countries’, and by trying to convince transit countries (such as Poland) to increase controls and to stop the transit traffic of asylum seekers. The number of asylum seekers dropped radically from 1993 onwards (for example, figures hardly exceeded 5,000 in 1995). The government also decided to change the asylum procedure in 1991. The SIV is the central agency in charge of alien affairs, and its tasks include examining applications for asylum, residence permits and Swedish citizenship. Appeals against the SIV’s decisions are reviewed by the Aliens Appeals Board, which was established on 1 January, 1992. Prior to that, such appeals were reviewed by the government, which caused much media coverage and criticism since people ordinarily

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Figure 4.2: An outline of the Swedish asylum procedure introduced in 1992 Asylum application procedure Border control (basic investigation) YES NO Expulsion Investigation (SIV/asylum procedure) YES NO Expulsion Supplementary details (SIV) YES NO

PUT = Permanent residenceship PUT

Expulsion Appeal (SIV) NO

YES PUT

Aliens Appeal Board YES NO PUT

Expulsion Revised application to the Aliens Appeal Board NO

YES

Expulsion

PUT

Source: SIV (1997, p 23)

opposed expulsions. Figure 4.2 outlines the basic stages in the asylum application procedure introduced in 1992 (and which remains in place, the only difference being that the SIV changed its name into Board of Migration on 1 July 2000).

Reforming the ‘Sweden-wide’ strategy, 1994-2002 The 1991 General Election led to a bourgeois majority for only the second time since the 1930s (the first was 1976-82). More surprising was the number of votes for a new right-wing populist party making anti-immigration issues part of its profile. This ‘New Democracy’ party attracted about 6% of the national vote and took seats in parliament. Immigration and immigrant issues had seldom before separated Swedish voters or political parties. With the emergence of this new party (which did not manage to get enough votes in the 1994 election and subsequently dissolved), immigration and immigrant issues became more politicised and they remained so throughout the 1990s. Among the political decisions taken during the period 1991-94, one had such effects on refugee reception policies that it must be mentioned here.

80

Dispersal policies in Sweden

From the very start, the ‘Sweden-wide’ policy was discussed from many points of departure. One issue was its moral dimension: was it democratic and just to command or influence refugees to settle in places they had not themselves chosen? Even if the answer is ‘yes’, it was nevertheless obvious that the state’s control was only temporary, and perhaps illusionary, since the refugee could choose to migrate whenever (s)he wanted. Secondary migration had already been analysed and evaluated in 1988 by the Swedish National Audit Office (Riksrevisionsverket, 1988). Both the government and parliament decided to increase the individual refugee’s responsibility for his or her settlement decision, and from 1 July 1994 any refugee that could arrange his or her own accommodation was entitled to do so. This soon turned out to be a radical change, since more and more refugees managed to find their own housing, avoiding long waiting times at a refugee camp and – having eventually received a positive reply on the permission to stay application – a placement in an unknown or undesired municipality. In the investigation preceding the new asylum reception law, or Lagen om mottagande av asylsökande (LAM), it was suggested that perhaps 10% of the refugees would choose this option. In fact, it turned out to be more than 50%, an outcome that made the situation in the metropolitan areas very problematic. The introduction of this ‘own housing’ option was criticised by metropolitan municipalities, but was welcomed by the refugees. Furthermore, it reduced costs for the state. The allowance given to a person arranging his or her own housing was SEK 112 per day in 1996 compared to SEK 192 for refugee camp accommodation. For 1995 this meant that the state saved approximately SEK 200 million if administration costs for EBOs (that is, refugees arranging for housing themselves) were not taken into account (SOU, 1996:55, p 209). The number of receiving municipalities remained high even after the LAM (Table 4.5). However, the number of refugees declined sharply after 1994 and half or more of them chose the EBO option. Figure 4.3 illustrates the influx of asylum seekers and permissions of stay issued to refugees and others during the entire dispersal period (1984-2001). Table 4.6 gives an overview of the origin of refugees received since 1980. The table shows that refugee immigration makes up less than half of the total amount of Swedish immigration (with the exception of the period 1991-93). Asia was the origin of most refugees in the 1980s, but the wars in former Yugoslavia changed this trend, with large numbers of refugees arriving in Sweden between 1991 and 1993. Table 4.7 displays a list by country of origin for asylum seekers to Sweden 1980-2000.

81

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Table 4.5: Municipal places and received refugees, 1985-96a Year

Municipalities with SIV agreement

1985b 1986

137 197

1987 1988 1989

Places according to agreement

Reception outcome

Recepted per 1,000

8,800 12,400

14,000 14,800

1.5 1.6

245 265 275

14,400 16,900 18,300

18,600 17,900 21,200

2.2 2.1 2.5

1990 1991 1992

278 277 271

22,800 22,100 21,800

22,300 19,000 18,500

2.6 2.2 2.1

1993 1994 1995

271 272 265

21,400 49,900 22,400

25,300 62,300 15,900

2.9 7.1 1.8

1996c

251

10,000

6,700

0.8

a

Total number of municipalities: 284-8. Based on SOU (1996:55). c Preliminary estimates. b

Source: SIV (1997, p 28)

Figure 4.3: Number of refugee permissions (all permissions and asylum seekers), 1984-2001 90 Refugees 80

Number of permissions (000s)

70

All permissions Asylum seekers

60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Year

Source: SIV (www.migrationsverket.se)

82

Dispersal policies in Sweden

Table 4.6: Residence permits to Geneva Convention refugees, war refugees and de facto refugees in need of protection, and refugees on humanitarian grounds Nationality

1980198919921995199888 91 94 97 2000 2001 a (9 years) (3 years) (3 years) (3 years) (3 years) (1 year)

Total % of (22 years) total

EUROPE of 11,476 which Bulgaria 174 Former 329 Yugoslavia, of which Bosnia Herzegovina 0 Yugoslavia, Federal 0 Republic of Poland 5,413 Romania 2,875 Russian 0 Federation Czech Republic 780 Hungary 1,605

6,513

69,044

8,894

8,066

2,217

106,210

39

1,120 2,342

187 67,576

4 8,598

6 7,598

1 2,036

1,492 88,479

1 32

0 0

47,796 18,742

3,461 4,036

2,336 3,966

503 1,507

54,096 28,251

20 10

544 1,448 0

20 311 515

8 21 137

19 10 240

8 3 95

6,012 4,668 987

2 2 0

363 618

6 10

0 4

2 3

0 0

1,151 2,240

0 1

AFRICA Ethiopia Somalia Uganda

5,510 4,396 243 277

8,565 4,417 2,854 275

5,627 449 4,120 305

996 68 497 98

1,774 166 942 46

558 32 213 1

23,030 9,528 8,869 1,002

8 3 3 0

LATIN AMERICA Chile Cuba Colombia El Salvador Peru

11,370

7,833

1,729

535

673

186

22,326

8

7,406 10 130 840 195

5,908 17 352 918 372

48 337 259 219 705

13 88 122 15 266

36 149 144 3 285

14 7 113 – 36

13,425 608 1,120 1,995 1,859

5 0 0 1 1

ASIA Afghanistan Bangladesh Iraq Iran Lebanon Vietnam Sri Lanka Syrian Arab Republic Turkey China

40,052 27,361 213 340 256 414 5,617 6,015 22,854 9,060 1,854 3,969 4,847 2,277 100 343 762 1,985

16,551 336 212 8,673 3,159 907 747 151 781

9,176 596 116 5,726 1,964 148 51 16 152

13,387 1,069 82 9,100 1,840 85 32 13 267

4,817 554 31 3,040 606 70 21 8 136

111,344 3,108 1,111 38,171 39,483 7,033 7,975 631 4,083

40 1 0 14 14 3 3 0 1

777 112

239 37

261 58

101 15

5,603 565

2 0

2,236 49

1,989 294

83

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Table 4.6: contd.../ Nationality

OTHERS TOTAL of which

1980198919921995199888 91 94 97 2000 2001 a (9 years) (3 years) (3 years) (3 years) (3 years) (1 year) 3,825

6,109

72,233 56,381

Women Men Average per 8,026 year Refugee permits, 43 % of all permits

1,197

469

436

163

12,199

4

94,148 20,070

24,336

7,941

275,109

100

9,479 10,591

10,366 13,970

3,362 4,579

18,794

31,383

6,690

8,112

7,941

1,250,495

45

55

20

20

18

38

172,732 100,715

121,314

44,505

730,369

All 166,789 124,314 residence permits Family ties 78,968 61,480 Thereof: 17,488 28,173 refugee family ties Labour market 4,466 730 Guest students 5,041 2,933 Child adoptions 6,081 2,790 EES treaty

65,433 15,733

57,433 12,272

66,194 4,104

24,524 77,770

354,032

501 3,930 2,680 6,040

897 5,651 2,295 14,369

1,139 8,540 2,559 19,205

442 3,989 758 6,851

8,175 30,084 17,163 46,465

Notes: a until November 1991; EES=European Economic Space. Source: SIV (www.migrationsverket.se)

84

Total % of (22 years) total

Dispersal policies in Sweden

Table 4.7: Countries of origin of those seeking asylum in Sweden, 1984-2001 Country of origin

1984- 198786 89

Bulgaria

199092

199395

199698

0

5067

662

187

63

Former Yugoslavia 957 of which Bosnia-Herzegovina 0

3,160

84,898

41,764

8,984

9,658 288,188

Total

% of total

490

6469

2

15,460 155,223

39

2,335

7,505

48,316

12

0

0

59,359

7,093

6,197

6,969

79,618

20

Poland 2,442 Romania 880 Russian Federation 0

1,446 2,299 0

1,834 3,689 331

178 669 843

273 113 663

101 194 1,880

6,274 7,844 3,717

2 2 1

Ethiopia Somalia Uganda

1,710 0 284

4,446 974 213

2,695 6,445 847

157 2,541 591

170 1,026 29

216 1,074 25

9,394 12,060 1,989

2 3 1

Togo Cuba Chile

0 0 4,107

16 4 7,570

117 222 241

457 1,635 71

10 28 78

2 71 89

602 1,960 12,156

0 0 3

0 38 465

328 218 558

1,612 345 739

1,125 688 354

190 654 150

259 1,318 321

3,514 3,261 2,587

1 1 1

3 250 2,662

121 228 3,729

160 283 7,412

118 167 5,774

109 72 8,457

164 155 13,281

675 1,155 41,315

0 0 10

12,529 3,064 761

15,072 4,506 232

6,342 4,147 192

1,172 320 199

1,370 244 223

2,373 496 514

38,858 12,777 2,121

10 3 1

0 563

134 1,589

913 1,786

373 340

117 459

243 1,083

1,780 5,820

0 1

1,582 2,514

2,515 4,087

2,852 3,248

830 708

674 628

907 1,396

9,360 12,581

2 3

2,230

9,532

8,777

4,007

3,475

8,937

36,958

9

0 0 68,044 140,789

0 65,268

0 28,259

0 4,059 51,049 394,509

1 100

Yugoslavia, Federal Republic of

Peru Afghanistan Bangladesh China India Iraq Iran Lebanon Pakistan Sri Lanka Syrian Arab Republic Turkey Stateless/ unknown Other countries Unclear data Total

4,059 41,100

0

19992001

Source: SIV (www.migrationsverket.se)

85

Spreading the ‘burden’?

As the next section of this chapter makes clear, the policy had a noticeable geographical effect during its first phase (1985-94). Thereafter these effects have been less noticeable for the following reasons: • fewer refugees entering Sweden; • a smaller number of asylum seekers being given permission to stay; • at least half of the asylum applicants choosing the EBO option (that is, to search for their own housing); • secondary migrations continuing to concentrate refugees to the larger cities.

In 1997, the Riksdag decided to divide up immigration affairs and immigrant integration. The latter is now a part of overall integration policy, with the National Integration Office, created in 1998, as the responsible government authority. The Swedish Immigration Board continued to deal with immigration issues and in the 1990s gradually took over various duties from the police. Completely new tasks also cropped up, such as working with return migration, introducing migration support measures in former East Europe and coordinating the activities of the various authorities involved. … As the new millennium approached, Sweden was one of the many countries that evacuated fleeing Kosovo Albanians from Macedonia in a joint action under UNHCR auspices. The aim was to provide the 3,600 evacuated to Sweden with temporary protection pending the time when their native country would become a safe haven and reconstruction could begin. (SIV, www.migrationsverket.se, English translation)

Issuing ‘temporary protections’ was yet another sign of a new era. During the course of the 1990s, it has gradually become more obvious that Sweden would like to see refugee issues handled at the EU level; an independent Swedish stand on these issues is unlikely in the years to come. As the number of asylum seekers has been slowly increasing since the mid1990s, and since more municipalities state that they will not sign agreements on new refugee receptions with the SIB, the situation is becoming very problematic for both individual refugees and for the SIB.

The current organisation of immigration and integration issues in Sweden The most important reform at the central level has been the split of responsibility in 1998 between the SIV (asylum procedure and the permission evaluation of each application) and the SIB (municipal placements and supervision of the reception and integration process at the local level). Their basic functions are summarised below1.

86

Dispersal policies in Sweden

The Board of Migration (SIV) The SIV is Sweden’s central government authority for aliens’ affairs. As such, it is responsible for: • permits for people visiting and settling in Sweden; • the asylum process, from application to a residence permit or to a voluntary return home (återvändande); • citizenship affairs; • helping out with voluntary return migration (återvandring); • international work in the EU, UNHCR and other collaborative bodies; • ensuring that all the relevant public authorities work together satisfactorily. The SIV’s head office is in Norrköping, and there are local offices and separate investigative units and reception centres around the country. At present, the board’s employees number almost 1,700. The main task of the head office is to provide goals and frameworks for board activities and to check that these are developing as intended. The head office also operates support and service functions for the organisation as a whole. The day-today work of the SIV is run and supervised from five regions. All decisions on citizenship cases are taken by a couple of departments at the central region offices in Norrköping. Local board offices in the various regions accept applications for residence permits, aliens’ passports and travel documents, grant extensions to residence permits and provide information on various matters (SIV, www.migrationsverket.se).

The Swedish Integration Board (SIB) The Swedish government and parliament have drawn up three overall goals for Sweden’s integration policy. • Equal rights and opportunities for all, irrespective of ethnic and cultural background. • A sense of community based on diversity in society. Diversity must be reflected both in the shaping of policies and in the way they are pursued. • A form of community development characterised by mutual respect and tolerance. The SIB has been given the task of communicating these goals to the general public. According to the government and parliament, the board shall: • monitor and evaluate developments in society from an integration policy perspective; • promote equal rights and opportunities for all irrespective of ethnic and cultural background;

87

Spreading the ‘burden’?

• prevent and combat xenophobia, racism and discrimination (where such issues are not dealt with by some other public authority); • further ethnic and cultural diversity in the various spheres of public life; • seek to ensure that local authorities are properly prepared and equipped to take in people in need of shelter or people granted asylum or residence permits on humanitarian grounds, and where required to help out with municipal settlement; • seek to ensure that newly arrived immigrants’ need of support is properly met as well as their need for specially tailored community information; • be the decision-making body in respect of government grants to local authorities and county councils; • provide funding for organisations active in the integration field; • ensure that appropriate statistics are compiled; • promote a closer understanding of the issues in the integration policy field overall. Responsibility for special measures on behalf of newly arrived immigrants rests with the local authority in the area where the newcomer chooses to live. The SIB’s job is to collaborate with each local authority in ensuring that the prerequisites for refugee reception exist and to provide information that can help refugees in their choice of domicile. The board is also responsible for disbursing government grants for refugee reception as well as for following up municipal introduction programmes and funding the development of introduction methods. Responsibility for promoting equal rights and opportunities rests with the democratic community as a whole. The task of the National Integration Office, in collaboration with other public authorities, organisations and those active in community life, is to spotlight obstacles, anomalies and shortcomings, and to eliminate them. Everyone in the community is to have equal rights and opportunities irrespective of their ethnic and cultural background (SIB, www.integrationsverket.se).

The geographical impact of the ‘Sweden-wide’ strategy The ‘Sweden-wide’ strategy was extraordinarily effective, in the sense that it encompassed far more municipalities than were ever considered when the strategy was launched in the mid-1980s. Immigration is (almost by necessity) a key issue for most nation states, but in geographical terms it normally affects only small parts of a state and a state’s population, the larger cities in particular. The ‘Sweden-wide’ strategy definitely contributed to making most regions and localities in the country more multicultural. This section summarises the basic geographical outcomes of the dispersal strategy. It focuses on population distribution and migration issues from an ethnic perspective. Therefore, it is important to remember that not all immigrants during the period 1984-2000 settled in Sweden under the regulations of the refugee policy. The number of people given permission to stay on other grounds

88

Dispersal policies in Sweden

has been larger than the number of refugees (if one considers family reunions as a separate category). In the available statistics, it is normally not possible to separate these categories from one another. Although this must be borne in mind, available data are helpful when judging the overall impact of the strategy. Let us start with the long-term characteristics of the dispersal period (Figure 4.4). Sweden has three cities/counties that traditionally are viewed as ‘metropolitan regions’. These are Stockholm (the capital region), Gothenburg (on the Swedish west coast) and Malmö (in the south, close to Denmark). Data on immigrants stretches back to 1875, and these show that all three metropolitan regions, for almost each time period, have had a larger share of the immigration than of the country’s population. Between 1875 and 1880, Stockholm received 2,100 immigrants – this corresponds to 11.9% of the total influx of immigrants to Sweden. During this period, Stockholm county held 6.8% of Sweden’s population, giving an overrepresentation of 76% (the value 1.76 in Figure 4.4). Malmö’s overrepresentation during this period of rapid industrialisation stood at 3.5. A closer look at Figure 4.4 shows that the metropolitan regions’ overrepresentation was historically very low in the very last period (1991-95). Figure 4.4: Immigration to Sweden by regions in relation to each region’s share of the country’s population, 1875-1995a 4 Stockholm Malmö Gothenburg National average

3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0

1875- 1881- 1891- 1901- 1911- 1921- 1931- 1941- 1951- 1961- 1971- 1981- 199180 90 1900 10 20 30 40 50 60 80 90 95 70 a

1 = immigration corresponds to the population share.

Source: Based on Statistics Sweden (1999)

89

Spreading the ‘burden’?

For Stockholm, only the 1891-1900 value is comparable; for Gothenburg, the 1941-60 values; and for Malmö, the 1931-40 and 1951-60 values. The longterm Stockholm County value has normally been in the range of 1.5 to 2.0. This constant overrepresentation of immigrants settling in the metropolitan regions has of course produced a geographical pattern where these regions hold a substantial part of the country’s foreign-born population. This is shown in Figure 4.5, displaying municipalities with over- and under-representation of foreign-born people in 1980 and 1995. The overall distribution of the Figure 4.5: Relative representation of the foreign-born population in Sweden, 1980-95 Relative representation of the foreign-born population in Sweden 1980 and 1995 (national average = 100)

Number of municipalities 1980 20 99 56 56 46

Number of municipalities 1995

10.00-25.00 25.00-50.00 50.00-75.00 75.00-125.00 125.00-555.00 (above national average

1980

Source: Andersson (1998, p 402)

90

Relative change in the distribution of the foreign-born population in Sweden 1980 and 1995 (100 = no change)

7 85 90 58 37

10.00-25.00 25.00-50.00 50.00-75.00 75.00-125.00 125.00-471.00 (above national average

1995

Number of municipalities 1980-95 46 46 46 46 46 47

1980-95

51 82 94 105 118 134

Dispersal policies in Sweden

immigrant population did not change much during the ‘Sweden-wide’ policy period, although there were fewer municipalities with very small and very large proportions of the immigrants in 1995 compared to 1980. The relative change is displayed in the map in Figure 4.5. This map clearly shows that many areas with small proportions of the country’s immigrants in 1980 (and in 1995) made substantial gains over the period 1980-95. Another way of showing this is to contrast population developments at the municipal level for Sweden-born and foreign-born respectively. This is done in Table 4.8, where the municipalities are divided into quintile groups (20% of the municipalities per group) according to population change for the municipalities’ Swedish-born population. Thus, in the first quintile we find 57 municipalities having the weakest population development during a certain period. The table is composed of three parts where the top part shows data for the 1984-92 period, the middle part for the 1992-98 period, and the lower part for the entire 1984-98 period. As can be seen, a substantial number of municipalities experienced population decline during this period. The second column shows relative growth rates (index) for the foreign-born population for each quintile. The third and fourth columns show gain or loss (in absolute numbers) for the Sweden-born and foreign-born population respectively. The fifth column indicates each quintile’s share of the Sweden-born population, while the sixth column shows the same for the foreign-born population. Several conclusions can be made: • Municipalities marked by substantial decline with respect to their nativeborn population (first quintile) increase their number of foreign-born during the first seven to eight years of the ‘Sweden-wide’ strategy. This increase (6,500) cannot, however, fully compensate for the loss of Sweden-born inhabitants (-37,000). In the subsequent period (1992-98), municipalities grouped into the first quintile experience an absolute loss also of foreignborn people. • Municipalities belonging to the second quintile make a loss of 29,000 Sweden-born during the first period. A 30% increase in the number of foreign-born inhabitants (+44,000) fully makes up for this decrease. Although the second quintile has a net influx of immigrants also during the second period, numbers are much smaller and cannot compensate in any way for the loss of Sweden-born inhabitants. • It is clear that the dispersal policy had substantial effects in terms of redistributing immigrants during the first eight years. When the influx of new immigrants decreased and the policy change was introduced in 1994, the balanced growth of the foreign-born population was broken. Despite the fact that the growth pattern in the period 1992-98 more closely mirrors the overall population development – meaning that for each step upwards in the quintile hierarchy, growth rates for the foreign-born increase – the distribution of immigrant population growth nevertheless mitigates some of the population losses in the second, third and fourth quintiles.

91

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Table 4.8: Population change for Swedish- and foreign-born inhabitants 1984-98 according to relative change for the Swedishborn population Swedish population change 1984-92 Municipal groups according to Swedishborn population development

Foreign- Absolute Absolute born gain/loss gain/loss % of all % of all 1984-92 Swedish- foreign- Swedish- foreignIndex born born 92 born 92 born 92

First quintile (Index 89-96,9) Second quintile (Index 96, 9-99, 7) Third quintile (Index 99,7-101,6)

115 130 125

–37,029 –28,762 17,577

6,543 44,471 53,766

9 21 26

6 23 32

Fourth quintile (Index 101,6-10) Fifth quintile (Index 105,4-132,0) Total

133 137 129

59,253 149,383 160,422

40,649 43,541 188,970

23 21 100

20 19 100

Swedish population change 1992-98 Municipal groups according to Swedishborn population development

Foreign- Absolute Absolute born gain/loss gain/loss % of all % of all 1984-92 Swedish- foreign- Swedish- foreignIndex born born 92 born 92 born 92

First quintile (Index 89,6-94,4) Second quintile (Index 94,4-96,0)

98 104

–40,945 –40,313

–785 2,204

7 11

4 6

Third quintile (Index 96,0-97,9) Fourth quintile (Index 97,9-101,3) Fifth quintile (Index 101,3-123,2)

110 117 120

–30,024 –8,283 145,023

7,470 2,5764 102,198

13 23 47

8 19 62

Total

116

25,458

136,851

100

100

Swedish population change 1984-98 Municipal groups according to Swedishborn population development

Foreign- Absolute Absolute born gain/loss gain/loss % of all % of all 1984-92 Swedish- foreign- Swedish- foreignIndex born born 92 born 92 born 92

First quintile (Index 81,3-92,3)

113

–77,437

5,450

8

5

Second quintile (Index 92,3-95,7) Third quintile (Index 95,7-100,2) Fourth quintile (Index 100,2-10)

133 157 152

–51,811 –27,887 59,776

14,466 70,598 100,526

10 20 29

6 20 30

Fifth quintile (Index 105,4-161,3) Total

155 150

283,239 185,880

134,781 325,821

33 100

39 100

Source: Population databases 1987-98, Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University (provided by Statistics Sweden)

92

Dispersal policies in Sweden

Figure 4.6: Inter-municipality migration frequencies according to country of birth, 1980-95 24.0 1980

1984

1988

1992

1995

20.0 16.0 %

12.0 8.0 4.0 ey rk Tu

ria Sy

no

n

ia

ba

go

sla v

Ira Yu Fo

rm er

Le

n

q Ira

d

ia

lan Fin

op

hi

le

Et hi

rn bo

C

en Fo

re

ign

Sw ed

To

ta l

po

pu

lat io

n

0.0

Source: Andersson (1998, p 404)

We have been able to show in earlier research that the ‘Sweden-wide’ strategy did not increase the level of immigrants’ geographical mobility (Andersson, 1998). Inter-municipal mobility levels are clearly higher for immigrants (on average 50% higher), but the level as such does not seem to be higher after 1985 compared to prior to that date (Figure 4.6). Another way of assessing the placement policy’s impact on the geography of immigration is, first, to group municipalities according to their population numbers, and then to analyse whether or not smaller municipalities gain or lose immigrants over time. The basis for such an analysis is given in Table 4.9. The lower part of the table contains yet another way of assessing the impact: grouping the municipalities according to immigrant density. Both these types of aggregation further confirm the conclusions made above: the ‘Sweden-wide’ policy for refugee reception was very effective in dispersing immigrants prior to the 1994 EBO decision, but has been clearly less effective since this policy change. The data displayed in the lower part of Table 4.9 are perhaps the ones that best match the dispersal notion used in the introduction of the ‘Sweden-wide’ policy. The idea was to avoid further concentration of immigrants to the most immigrant-dense municipalities and neighbourhoods. Although densities continued to grow in these municipalities – primarily due to the very high number of refugees arriving, but also due to secondary migrations – Table 4.9 nevertheless confirms that the most immigrant-dense municipalities had the smallest relative increase in both the periods 1984-92 and 1992-98. Thus, one must draw the conclusion that the dispersal goal of the ‘local reception’ strategy has been achieved.

93

94

Number of municipalities

23,222 47,171 55,894 286,961 232,314 645,562

Total number of foreignborn 1984

Number of municipalities

Very small (3,100-9,999) 66 Small (10,000-14,999) 70 Medium-sized (15,000-24,999) 52 Large (25,000-99,999) 86 Largest 10 (100,000-700,000) 10 Total 284

Municipality groups by population size, 1984 (inh)

463,969 818,065 948,464 3,558,651 1,907,910 7,697,059

Total number of foreignborn 1984

30,721 64,103 76,670 415,560 384,329 971,383

459,546 831,757 975,410 3,656,596 1,934,172 7,857,481

440,099 803,060 963,783 97,945 1,994,665 7,882,939

Total Total number number of foreign- of foreignborn born 1992 1998

30,530 60,564 71,242 362,075 310,121 834,532

Total Total number number of foreign- of foreignborn born 1992 1998

Population change by municipality size, Sweden-born

Very small (3,100-9,999) 66 Small (10,000-14,999) 70 Medium-sized (15,000-24,999) 52 Large (25,000-99,999) 86 Largest 10 (100,000-700,000) 10 Total 284

Municipality groups by size, 1984 (inh)

Population change by municipality size, foreign born

–4,423 13,692 26,946 24,736 26,262 160,422

Gain foreignborn 1984-92

7,308 13,393 15,348 75,114 77,807 188,970

Gain foreignborn 1984-92

–19,447 –28,697 –11,627 122,681 60,493 25,458

Gain foreignborn 1992-98

191 3,539 5,428 53,485 74,208 136,851

Gain foreignborn 1992-98 131 128 127 126 133 129

–23,870 –15,005 15,319 103 86,755 185,880

99 102 103 101 101 102

Gain Relative foreign- growth born index 1984-98 1984-92

7,499 16,932 20,776 128,599 152,015 325,821

Gain Relative foreign- growth born index 1984-98 1984-92

132 136 137 145 165 150

96 97 99 103 103 100

105 102

95 98 102

Relative Relative growth growth index index 1992-98 1984-98

101 106 108 115 124 116

Relative Relative growth growth index index 1992-98 1984-98

Table 4.9: Population change by municipality groups based on total population size and immigrant density (lower part)

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Number of municipalities

72 113 58 86 12 284

Municipality groups by immigrant density 1984 (inh)

Very low (1-3%) Low (3-6%) Average (6-10%) High (10-15%) Very high (15-33%) Total

27,084 128,034 137,249 271,257 81,938 645,562

Total number of foreignborn 1984

Population change by immigrant density

Table 4.9: contd.../

40,578 178,469 178,492 341,616 95,377 834,532

44,730 208,350 206,792 407,634 103,877 971,383

Total Total number number of foreign- of foreignborn born 1992 1998 13,494 50,435 41,243 70,359 13,439 188,970

Gain foreignborn 1984-92 4,152 29,881 28,300 66,018 8,500 136,851

Gain foreignborn 1992-98 17,646 80,316 69,543 136,377 21,939 325,821

150 139 130 126 116 129

Gain Relative foreign- growth born index 1984-98 1984-92

110 117 116 119 109 116

165 163 151 150 127 150

Relative Relative growth growth index index 1992-98 1984-98

Dispersal policies in Sweden

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Spreading the ‘burden’?

We doubt, however, that politicians and refugee-handling departments and organisations in the metropolitan areas would agree with our conclusion. A constant and increasing housing shortage, overcrowding in rental dwellings in immigrant-dense neighbourhoods, extremely high costs for social welfare allowances and for educational programmes, increasing levels of segregation and inter-ethnic conflicts have all led to widespread criticism of the refugee settlement policy. Critics would like to see more effective instruments being introduced in order to better control the geography of refugee settlement in Sweden. In the final section of this chapter, we try to weigh the pros and cons of the dispersal strategy, and also try to judge whether or not it can be improved, and if so, how?

Evaluating the dispersal policy This section draws upon our own research as well as several other evaluations done over the years by state committees and state boards. Let us begin with a brief summary of these evaluations. The first comprehensive evaluation was undertaken by the Swedish National Audit Office, which reported its conclusions in 1988 (Riksrevisionsverket, 1988). It noted that the ‘local reception strategy’ had both advantages and disadvantages with respect to the handling of the great variation in refugee numbers. On one hand, it is clear that operating with a large number of municipalities gives more capacity and better flexibility to manage situations of rapidly increasing numbers of refugees. On the other hand, it is difficult to maintain the organisation locally (competent language teachers, interpreters, accommodation facilities) if the number sharply decreases from one year to another. The audit office also questioned the argument put forward by the SIV, namely that the fast expansion of the number of receiving municipalities was the only way to increase the overall capacity. The audit office stated that the ‘Sweden-wide’ strategy really was makeshift and that, by defending it, the SIV made a virtue of necessity. The Swedish National Audit Office also drew several more positive conclusions: that smaller municipalities offer more intimate social contacts between refugees and the native population; that surplus of housing can be used; and that the local reception results in some additional workplaces in municipalities suffering from high unemployment. Despite this, the audit office’s overall conclusion was basically negative, in particular from an economic point of view. Dispersing refugees reduces the possibility of gaining from scale economics, and leads to high administrative costs both centrally (SIV) and locally. Furthermore, the implementation of this new policy led to a more centrally controlled reception system with a certain amount of force being introduced vis-à-vis the refugees. Too little emphasis was placed on integration conditions when the agreements between the SIV and municipalities were made. Finally, the evaluators were of the opinion that too many refugees were

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thrown into an ‘educational spiral’, where they found themselves further away from a job for each new study course they had to accomplish. A few years later, in 1992, the Parliamentary Audit Office published a report concerning the management and organisation of the immigration policy (Riksdagens revisorer, 1992). The main conclusion drawn was that one particular problem – long waiting times in several phases of the reception chain – was the single most important shortcoming of the entire reception system. This problem, the report stated, was not due to SIV shortcomings, but was a direct consequence of the rules and regulations imposed upon the SIV by governmental and parliamentary decisions. In 1996 the Commission on Immigrant Policy published its final report. It contains a thorough analysis of many different aspects of this policy field, and it also addresses the refugee reception policy. The commission concludes that the overall goals guiding the reception activities had not been achieved. The primary goal is labour market integration, but very few immigrants were economically independent within three to four years of immigration. Even fewer had a job after having passed through the 18-month introductory programme. Unemployment was very high due to structural changes in the Swedish economy and because of skill mismatches. The latest incoming refugees originated in parts of the world linguistically and culturally very different from Sweden, the committee said (SOU, 1996:55, p 232). Another conclusion was that there were tensions between the public authorities and different NGOs. The NGOs reported a gap of confidence vis-à-vis public authorities, a gap that prevented the development of more fruitful cooperation (SOU, 1996:55, p 240). The most comprehensive evaluation done so far was published by the SIV itself (SIV, 1997). The evaluation was based on more than 400 reports analysing all aspects of the local reception strategy and its regional and local implementation. Among other sub-studies, the SIV – having access to individual files – was able to calculate the volume of secondary migrations. This particular analysis covered the period 1991-96; it transpired that in early 1997, close to half the 1991 refugee cohort had left the municipality of reception (see Table 4.8). Whether or not this is perceived as a failure has to do with expectations. (One could also be surprised by the fact that after five years close to 55% were still in their placement municipality, although residence in a particular place was not normally a decision made by the refugees themselves.) One important part of the board’s self-evaluation is its own admission that the placement strategy failed, qualitatively speaking, due to a lack of understanding of which mechanisms might enhance integration. It is difficult to meet demands on integration if one does not know what fosters or prevents a successful integration process. And it is even more difficult, continued the evaluators, if the staff working with the matching of refugees and municipalities lack sufficient information about either the refugees or the municipalities, or both. It is like a blind date (SIV, 1997, pp 52-3). In most cases, the refugees had to start ‘all over again’ when they settled in a municipality after having stayed one or two

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Figure 4.7: Percentage of received refugees 1991-96 (by year of reception) who had left the reception municipality by 28 February, 1997 % 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

Source: SIV (1997, p 67)

years at a SIV refugee camp. This led to ‘fragmentation’ and ‘incoherence’ and “devastating consequences for the individual refugee” (SIV, 1997, p 53). The evaluation report also summarises the financial dimension of the local reception strategy. It reports that for the period 1991-96 the state’s costs were approximately SEK 22.5 billion (€2.5 billion). In two thirds of all municipalities, the local reception has been organised by the municipalities’ social board (socialnämnd), assisted by the Swedish-language Educational Unit (svenska för invandrare), the employment exchange bureau (Af) and various NGOs (Red Cross, the Church of Sweden, and so on). The NGOs often organised meeting places, cultural activities and guided tours, and assisted individual refugees on different matters. Each contract-signing municipality received a sum of money simply in order to accept refugees (SEK 441,600 [€49,100] in 1991). They also got paid per refugee (SEK 147,200 [€16,400] per adult and SEK 90,300 [€10,000] per child). Sometimes, especially in crisis-like situations when the refugee influx was overwhelming, a special allowance was used to persuade municipalities to accept a greater number than had been negotiated. The SIV evaluation report welcomes a reform launched on 1 January 1996, whereby the municipalities were paid in several stages to allow for more flexibility, necessitated by (among other things) secondary moves. The proposals for improvement made by the SIV evaluators were all in the direction of introducing more individualised practices in the reception chain.

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This was already underway, however. Individual introduction plans are the key element in the present reception programme. Finally, over the past couple of years, several studies have been made that focus both on secondary migrations and on the costs related to the reception and introduction of refugees. The latest report was commissioned by the SIB (October 2002) and conducted by the economist Mats Hammarstedt of the University of Växjö (Hammarstedt, 2002). By using a standard classification of Sweden’s 289 municipalities, Hammarstedt was able to show that costs for new refugees are higher than average in the metropolitan regions. This variation can be explained by the varying degrees of labour market participation. The lowest costs (SEK 82,000 [€9,100] per capita during the period 1998-2001 for the 1998 refugee cohort of 14,000 people) can be found in municipalities classified into the manufacturing type (at least 40% of the workforce). Compare this to the costs of SEK 152,000 (€16,900) in the core metropolitan municipalities; 122,000 in metropolitan suburban municipalities; 125,000 in other larger cities; 110,000 in medium-sized cities; and 100,000 in the most rural municipalities. Interestingly, the relatively high costs in the core metropolitan municipalities are due to a labour market failure in relation to those refugees that were formally accepted by these municipalities. Those settling in metropolitan municipalities after a move (secondary migrants) clearly have a better level of labour market integration. Therefore, high per capita costs are not due to secondary migrations. The overall national picture is that refugee ‘movers’ have a similar degree of social welfare dependency rate as refugee ‘stayers’ (Table 4.10). However, the tendency is that secondary refugee migrants reduce the level of welfare dependency somewhat faster than ‘stayers’ (lower right part of Table 4.10).

Table 4.10: Social welfare dependency rates 1997-2000 for the 1997 refugee cohort in Sweden

Stayers Movers

% entirely or partially depending on social security

% entirely depending on social security

1997

1998

1999

2000

1997

1998

1999

2000

53.8 54.5

57.4 57.6

53.9 53.8

50.2 49.9

37.5 37.8

27.5 24.6

21.3 19.3

17.2 14.7

Source: Hammarstedt (2002, Table 9, p 21)

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Conclusion From an administrative point of view, the reception of refugees is a very difficult task. The main reasons for this are: • The volume of refugees is normally unknown and tends to vary substantially from one year to another. • Reception resources (labour, housing, and so on) – but not the influx of refugees – vary with the general economic situation in the country. • The linguistic, cultural, educational and skills composition of the refugees may vary substantially from one year to another. Each one of these characteristics makes it difficult to plan the reception organisation (both centrally and locally) in a rational way. Taken together, one may very well ask whether it is at all possible to successfully manage the influx of refugees. It is our opinion that without the ‘Sweden-wide’ strategy for refugee reception it would not have been possible for Sweden to receive several hundreds of thousand of refugees during the period 1985-2000. This conclusion does not imply, however, that the policy was successful in terms of providing the refugees with the best possible conditions for integration. Due to different time-specific factors, it turned out that a majority of them never were able to find a job. As has been shown recently, this was primarily due to the economic downturn and an overall lack of demand for labour – at least for some refugee groups (Ekberg and Ohlson, 2000). Ekberg and Ohlson were able to show that employment rates for Bosnian refugees received in 1993 varied substantially from one local labour market to another and that this variation was caused by differences in the dynamics of the local labour market (2000). Table 4.11 shows that the top five municipalities (located in southern Sweden) all have small, dynamic labour markets characterised by high levels of demand for manual workers. The economic downturn of the early 1990s, in conjunction with historically high levels of refugee immigration, made it virtually impossible for the SIV to restrict the reception agreements to municipalities offering relatively good employment opportunities. The situation in 2000-01 was indeed very different, with an upcoming labour shortage noticeable in many local labour markets. If the SIB, now in charge of the placement policy, fails in placing the newly arrived refugees in better accordance with integration opportunities, criticism will be vociferous, and rightly so. The present lack of labour market integration is the biggest threat to a continuation of the refugee policy as such, and especially to the now semiregulated local reception policy. Should the placement strategy remain insensitive with respect to local integration opportunities, or inadequate in steering the refugees’ settlement pattern – either by placing refugees in localities having labour market problems or by allowing them to settle in immigrant-dense

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Table 4.11: Labour market participation (LMP) rates 1997 for Bosnian immigrants arriving in Sweden, 1993-94 Municipality

Men

Women

Total

Five highest frequencies of LMP Gnosjö 79.5 Vaggeryd 85.1

54.9 46.4

67.6 65.4

Gislaved Värnamo Mark

47.9 43.3 37.7

58.6 55.0 41.9

Five lowest frequencies of LMP Landskrona 13.5 Uddevalla 12.0

5.9 6.9

9.7 9.5

Olofström Norrköping Borlänge

7.3 6.0 7.7

9.5 8.6 7.9

67.9 65.6 46.2

12.1 11.2 8.1

Source: Ekberg and Ohlson (2000, p 248)

municipalities in segregated neighbourhoods – one can easily foresee the reintroduction of regulation similar in type to that of the period 1985-94. During 2002, this became even more obvious as the number of asylum seekers expanded and many more municipalities stated that they were not going to sign agreements with the SIB. Presently, only 142 municipalities have a contract with the SIB. In October 2002, one member of its staff stated that were the trend to continue, the state would have to intervene so that a collapse in the reception and integration system could be avoided. Politicians are faced with a difficult dilemma when they aim to balance, on one hand, the rights of refugees and, on the other hand, the long-term goal of integration and the desire to maintain Sweden’s acceptance of refugee immigration. They judge that the latter can more easily be achieved if refugees are fairly well dispersed over the country (which also somewhat mitigates the effects of a constant net out-migration of younger Swedes from sparsely populated municipalities). However, this cannot be achieved without a certain amount of force and possibly rather strong force being imposed on individual refugees. This ends up in a moral dilemma, in the sense that the goals of the state conflict with the rights of individuals to make their choice of residence. This is, of course, a very common conflict; but when it can be resolved only by imposing restrictions for certain groups of people (those seeking protection and refuge in Sweden), the dilemma turns out to be a real obstacle for pursuing a radical dispersal policy. For the dispersal policy to last in the years to come, the Swedish state has to find means of better convincing refugees that a placement in a certain municipality has such positive outcomes for them that they should accept the offer immediately. Working with carrots rather than sticks is probably the only

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way of finding a way of matching the interests of the individual refugee and the state. Compared with most other countries, Sweden’s NGOs are relatively little involved in the reception of refugees. This has historical and political reasons. Throughout the postwar era, the ambition of the Social Democratic Party has been to construct such a dense web of public support systems that the individual can maintain a certain level of economic security, housing, and social life even if he or she is struck by unemployment, sickness or other personal crises. This general welfare policy has been constructed at a local level, making the municipalities the most resourced and powerful element in the Swedish public sector. On the other hand (and beside other possible effects such as causing passivity, an often-repeated accusation from the political right), this has resulted in the relative marginalisation of socially oriented NGOs, such as church, voluntary aid organisations and so on. With the downsizing of the public sector in the 1990s, and the introduction of more private insurance solutions in many social fields, the situation is slowly changing. NGOs now take on a more important role in supporting relatively marginalised groups of residents, such as homeless people and refugees. If this trend continues – it is indeed a political debate over these changes of the welfare state ambitions – the state and the municipalities have to find new ways of cooperating with them. Should the NGOs play a more central role with respect to refugee reception in Sweden, it is probable that local variations in organisational forms will be much greater in the years to come. Finally, one of the most discussed issues in the Swedish political debate is the ethnic residential segregation issue. Due to the fact that this problem is believed to present severe obstacles for integration processes, not only in housing but in many other fields, combating segregation is now a top priority2. The dispersal of immigrants, therefore, has two connotations in contemporary Sweden. On the one hand, the ambition is to distribute immigrants and new refugees more evenly over the country. On the other hand, dispersing minorities more evenly within the metropolitan regions is probably the most important current priority. For politicians in immigrant-dense regions, the issues are highly connected: if a more effective refugee dispersal policy is not realised, they see no realistic way of combating ethnic residential segregation. Counteracting segregation is a goal that all political parties, and the immigrants themselves, see as crucial for improving living conditions and the level of integration of refugees in Sweden. Notes 1

The information provided in the summaries of these two boards has been provided by these authorities themselves, and is valid for the year 2000.

2

See, for instance, the homepage of the Office of Metropolitan Affairs website (www.storstad.gov.se).

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FIVE

Dispersal policies in the UK Vaughan Robinson

Immigration to Britain: the long view The continual ebb and flow of migration has forged the British nation. While millions of Britons left the UK to colonise the New World, 500,000 Irish men and women arrived in England and Wales between 1800 and 1851. As British administrators, merchants and soldiers left for India and the West Indies, so Indian nannies, princes and seamen headed for Britain (Visram, 2002), alongside black African slaves, who numbered some 20,000 in London alone by 1764 (Walvin, 1984). And people did not simply come and go for work; rather, Britain developed a reputation prior to the 20th century as a place of refuge. In the last years of the 17th century, as many as 50,000 French Huguenots fled to London. And from 1881 onwards, Eastern European Jews began arriving in large numbers to escape the pogroms in the Pale of Settlement. As a result, by the turn of the 20th century, only the US had resettled more Eastern European Jews than England. While the 1905 Aliens Act effectively ended that particular migration, other voluntary and involuntary migrants continued to arrive in the UK in sizeable numbers: Chinese seamen settled in the major ports (Watson, 1977; Peach and Robinson, 1988); 60,000 middle-class Jews fled Nazi Germany and took up residence in the UK between 1933 and 1939; and around 250,000 Italians migrated to the UK between 1861 and 1991 – the earliest migrants walked from the valleys of northern Italy. However, it was the migrations linked to the long economic boom of the postwar period that generated perhaps the greatest social impact. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Britain was a spent force, heavily burdened with debt, ravaged by war-time destruction, living off Victorian infrastructure, and fading in global political and military significance. Her continued competitiveness and economic health depended greatly upon the speed and scale of postwar reconstruction. Central to this task was the need for labour. Initially, Britain turned to Ireland for workers, but this source proved inadequate. The government had to look further afield, notably towards the displaced persons of continental Europe and the exiled communities that had sought temporary sanctuary in the UK during the war. In total, some 100,000 Irish workers entered Britain between 1946 and 1951, and the number

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had swelled further to 352,000 by 1959 (Walvin, 1984). An additional 100,000 European Volunteer Workers were recruited by the mid-1950s, and some 284,000 Poles were given settlement rights in the UK after the war, although many chose not to stay (Robinson, 1999). However, the scale of reconstruction and restructuring was such that economic growth still continued to be stifled in the mid-1950s by persistent labour shortages. Rapid economic growth created localised labour shortages (Peach, 1968) and in other places cheap labour was needed to transform industries fighting for their survival against international competition (Fevre, 1984). Unable to fill vacancies from traditional sources, employers and government turned to the Commonwealth. After the arrival of the liner Empire Windrush in 1948, migration from the West Indies soon gathered pace, and grew to its natural peak of 23,000-30,000 people per annum in the period 1955-57. The actual peak of immigration from the Caribbean came, however, in 1960 when net migration rose to 50,000 and in 1961 when it reached 66,000 people, as potential migrants rushed to enter Britain before the much-heralded introduction of immigration controls in 1962. Mass migration from the Indian subcontinent to the UK was also in response to the needs of the British economy. However, South Asian migration was later to develop than West Indian migration and was more voluntaristic, with far less direct or officially organised recruitment. The migration had also only really begun to get underway as immigration controls were introduced. Prior to the ‘Beat the Ban’ rush, Indian net immigration had not exceeded 6,600 in any one year, and net immigration from Pakistan alone had been no more than 5,200. Again, however, fear of missing out on the opportunity of emigration produced a sharp rise in migration to the UK, with 49,000 people migrating from India and Pakistan in 1961 and 47,000 in 1962. This migration was initially highly selective, made up of young males, travelling without dependants, who would join them later in the 1960s.

Setting the context Britain, then, is a country with a long tradition of emigration and immigration. One might even say it has been a multiethnic nation for centuries. Not surprisingly, then, Britons have for some time seen, lived in and lived next to ethnic quarters in major cities. Some of these have become causes for popular concern, with hostility being evident towards the development of Chinatowns (Wong, 1989), and dockland black quarters (Holmes, 1991) even as early as the first two decades of the 20th century. Given public concern about ethnic concentration, it is not surprising that the state has taken a view on the issue and has even intervened to engineer desired spatial outcomes. Consequently, Britain already had considerable experience of compulsory dispersal of ethnic minorities and refugees, long before the introduction of dispersal measures in the 1999 Asylum and Immigration Act. This chapter, then, considers and

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evaluates these earlier policies in order that the evolution of policy can be understood and contemporary policy seen in its full context.

Previous dispersal of ethnic minorities Until the recent Home Office report on community cohesion (Cantle, 2001), there has really never been any explicit public discussion about the form of ethnic settlement most suited to Britain and its minority groups. In the 1960s, both casual observation and academic analysis (for example, Jones, 1967; Peach, 1968) began to indicate that concentrations of West Indians and Asians were developing in the inner quarters of major British conurbations. Public opinion, and later official pronouncements, labelled such clustering undesirable. This reaction sprang from the xenophobia of many Britons, and their fears about threats to British national identity. While these sentiments had existed in certain parts of the UK much earlier in the 20th century (for example, see Husbands, 1983, on the East End of London), what was different about the 1960s was its scale. Migrant settlement began to touch a greater proportion of the British population and affect many more cities and neighbourhoods. Thus, while there had been sporadic violence against black people in major ports throughout the first two decades of the century (Panayi, 1993), by the 1960s racial exclusion was a feature of most parts of the UK. This was legitimated to a degree by the politicisation of the race issue in the 1964 General Election and an earlier byelection in which the successful Conservative candidate had been voted in under the slogan ‘If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Labour’. From that point on, ethnic residential concentration became a matter of political and popular concern. Public and official debate about the issue was neither extensive nor particularly illuminating, but it did serve to lend credence to the notions that concentration was both undesirable and problematic and that it retarded ‘assimilation’. In 1963, a group of white parents in Southall (London) had objected very publicly to the number of black children attending the local school. In response, the then Minister for Education, Edward Boyle, made a speech in the House of Commons that claimed that it was educationally desirable that no school had more than 30% of its pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds, a proportion that later became known as ‘Boyle’s Law’. He also argued that the school in Southall had become “irretrievably an immigrant school” (speech in House of Commons) and that this should be prevented from happening elsewhere. The Department of Education and Science (DES) responded with Circular 7/65, which stated that residential concentrations produced problems in schools, and it even suggested critical thresholds of immigrant numbers beyond which problems were thought to develop: It is evident that, as the proportion of immigrant children in a school or class increases, the problems will become more difficult to solve and the chances of assimilation more remote …. Experience suggests [that] up to a

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fifth of immigrant children in any one group fit in with reasonable ease, but that, if the proportion goes over about one-third either in the school as a whole or in any one class, serious strains arise. (DES, 1965, p 4)

The DES’ diagnosis suggested several policy responses. First, school catchment areas should be gerrymandered to prevent the build-up of ethnic concentrations. Second, if gerrymandering was not successful, then ethnic children should be bussed from their homes to schools in other parts of the city where ‘immigrant’ numbers were much smaller. And third, the number of immigrants in individual schools should be counted and monitored so that authorities would know when to intervene, for example through bussing. Schools were therefore required to count the number of ‘immigrant’ pupils they had on their registers annually from 1966 onwards. By the time that Deakin and Cohen wrote their article ‘Dispersal and choice: towards a strategy for ethnic minorities in Britain’ in 1970, in which they reviewed the pros and cons of ethnic concentration, support for the dispersal of ethnic minorities was almost universal. The authors were even able to state that: In a situation in which clear guidelines for policy are often almost impossible to discern, the notion of dispersal of immigrants stands out as a clear-cut policy goal to which assent has been given at one time or another by almost all those concerned with policy in the field of race relations. (Deakin and Cohen, 1975, p 307)

They summarised the benefits of dispersal thus: The core of the argument for dispersal is that residential dispersal of minorities, by reducing the strain on social services in city-centre areas and by allowing encounters between black and white to take place in a context free from the friction endemic in such areas, will greatly accelerate the dispersal in education and thereby slow down the growing trend towards ‘ghetto schools’. (Deakin and Cohen, 1975, p 307)

Dispersal was therefore seen as a way of improving the access of black people to better life chances, and also as a way of reducing prejudice through the deconstruction of stereotypes that linked black people with neighbourhoods characterised by overcrowding, poverty and environmental decay. In addition, mixed neighbourhoods would encourage casual contact between neighbours of different races who might then begin to see each other as individuals rather than as stereotypes. Deakin and Cohen’s review also flagged up a significant change in academic thinking, albeit one that was not incorporated into policy until much later. They argued that “the compulsory dispersal of newcomers … however humanely administered, should make democrats a shade queasy” (1975, p 309), and that

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the rapid growth in Britain’s ethnic minority population in the 1960s had also made such a policy practically impossible. Instead, they proposed that voluntary dispersal should be the ideal, with movement being accelerated by material inducements and the removal of obstacles. Very similar arguments were rehearsed by the Cullingworth Committee in 1969, which had been asked to investigate the state and functioning of public housing in the UK. The committee devoted one chapter of its report to the position of ethnic minorities within the public housing sector; some 16 paragraphs of this related to dispersal (Cullingworth Committee, 1969). Cullingworth and his associates outlined their concerns about the negative aspects of ethnic residential concentration, alluding to the problems of the American ‘ghetto’, the need to reduce inner-city overcrowding, and the potential impact of concentration upon educational standards. The committee stopped short of recommending compulsory dispersal, arguing instead that: ... under present circumstances the coloured communities are able to maintain their cinemas, shops, temples and meeting places which cater for their present special needs and provide an important focus for community life. It would require a great deal of convincing and incontrovertible evidence to purposely destroy this for the sake of a theoretical appraisal of some future unknown situation. (Cullingworth Committee, 1969, p 135)

In other words, “there must be very strong evidence indeed of the importance of dispersal, before compulsion could be contemplated” (Cullingworth Committee, 1969, p 136). Instead, the committee proposed a sensitive policy of voluntary dispersal. However, while this might have been the view of one committee, other policy makers still persisted with policies designed to disperse ethnic minorities compulsorily. Between 1969 and 1975, Birmingham City Council Housing Department operated a policy that prevented new West Indian council tenants from being housed any nearer than five houses to existing black tenants. This system of quotas denied new West Indian tenants access to those estates that had proved most popular with their fellow countrymen. Instead, their choice was limited to accepting an immediate offer of accommodation on less popular (white) estates or a long wait for a vacancy on their first-choice estate. Although the policy was later declared illegal, it did produce a measurable dispersal of ethnic minority tenants to less central council estates, albeit through restricting their freedom of choice (see Flett et al, 1979, for a fuller account). Once the policy was abandoned, choices – and the spatial concentration resulting from them – reverted to their previous patterns. However, during the 1970s the concept of assimilation (which had been one of the rationales for compulsory dispersal) became outmoded, politically incorrect and associated with ethnic supremacist thinking (Glazer, 1993). It was replaced decisively by notions of integration and plurality; and so, the advisability of consciously destroying ethnic communities also came to be

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questioned. Few governments or policy makers dared risk being tainted by association with assimilationist ideology, and only when minorities represented real objects of hatred or were clear ‘outsiders’ could manipulation of their settlement patterns be even considered. One such group was the travellers or gypsies. Successive governments have tried to settle this group compulsorily by preventing its free movement between localities and denying gypsies the right to park caravans where they wished (Halfacree, 1993).

Previous dispersal of refugees Introduction This section reviews six of the most important attempts made by British governments to disperse refugees during the postwar period. Each of these groups were ‘quota’ refugees, accepted en bloc by the governments of the day for temporary or permanent settlement on humanitarian grounds. Numbers could therefore be controlled, and the state could exercise maximum control over the reception and settlement of such groups, which were politically powerless and unorganised and which, in the eyes of the electorate, had already been the recipients of British generosity by virtue of their admission to the UK. The Polish resettlement programme The Poles in Britain began life as a military exile community (Sword et al, 1989). However, additions through other types of migration eventually saw some 300,000 Poles migrate to the UK between 1940 and the early 1950s (Tannahill, 1958). Britain’s resettlement policy for the Poles had to take account of several factors. These included: • reported hostility towards the settlement and employment of Poles in certain regions of the UK; • the fact that the Poles were mainly young military men; • the delicate relations that existed with the new Communist regime in Warsaw; • the devastation of Britain’s housing and industrial base wrought by German bombing; • the need to resettle the Poles over a relatively short period of time. The imaginative response to these constraints was to create the Polish Resettlement Corp (PRC), a non-operational unit of the British Army, funded by the War Office. Enlistment to the PRC was voluntary, and while it offered recruits a guaranteed salary and accommodation (as well as assistance with finding work on demobilisation), it also ensured that they remained under strict British military jurisdiction. Since the corp was to be lead by Polish

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officers, the PRC also gave the Poles an opportunity to become involved in their own resettlement. Furthermore, it allowed the government to phase their demobilisation over a number of years. There was doubt, however, as to whether or not the PRC could receive and resettle such a large number of people. In response, the government embarked upon a parallel policy of encouraging the repatriation or onward migration of the Poles. This concept of smoothing the acceptance of permanent settlers by deterring the arrival of others has since become a central tenet of British immigration and ‘race relations’ policy, with most administrations in the past 25 years linking ‘community relations’ with tough admission criteria. The government opted to resettle the Poles from military bases that were given over to the PRC, thereby establishing a further precedent that has been followed in subsequent refugee episodes. It seems likely that the idea of using camps resulted both from the postwar housing crisis and the Home Office’s belief that uncomfortable reception facilities would encourage many Poles to consider repatriation or rapid onward migration. Two hundred and sixty-five camps were eventually opened in the UK, their distribution being determined by the location within the UK of the main Polish military units during the Second World War and the outcome of a struggle between two government departments. The Ministry of Labour wished to see the camps (and therefore the Poles) sited near the main centres of industry and population where they could most easily find work; the Foreign Office, on the other hand, wanted to see them dispersed as widely as possible. In the end, the Foreign Office prevailed, and the camps were dispersed, both to weaken the grip of Polish military headquarters and to prevent the development of ghettos of Poles who might pose a security threat. The dispersed location of camps – and the fact that Poles were expected to find work and then accommodation nearby – meant that the Poles were successfully dispersed throughout the UK. By 1951, even relatively isolated counties such as Anglesey, Merioneth, Northumberland and Cornwall possessed resident Polish populations. However, the fact that London had been the location of the wartime ‘free’ Polish government meant that that city continued to exert a powerful attraction for those Poles choosing where to settle within the UK after the war. As a result, London and the adjoining county of Middlesex contained over one third of all Polish-born people living in England and Wales (Zubrzycki, 1956). Research on the subsequent progress of Poles in the UK (Patterson, 1977) has described how they gradually shed their exile status and became more accommodated to the notion of permanent settlement in the UK. With this shift in self-perception came a degree of spatial mobility. London attracted secondary migration, as did other cities with sizeable Polish communities such as Manchester, Bradford, Birmingham and Nottingham. However, Patterson (1977) argues that once it had recrystallised around these nodes in the 1950s, the Polish distribution ossified. After this time, migration tended only to comprise movement within cities for status or life-cycle reasons, rather than

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inter-regional movements. In South Wales, for example, nearly all the current Polish residents initially resided in the two resettlement camps in or near South Wales and most had then simply found the nearest available accommodation and employment (with British Steel). Many of these people still live in towns such as Newport 55 years later. The Poles thus provide an excellent example of a group that had its resettlement geography shaped directly by central government intervention, which sought to disperse that group across the country. It also provides an early and clear indication of how important the location of resettlement camps are in shaping subsequent patterns of permanent settlement. The Ugandan Asian programme Although the Ugandan Asian case study shares many similarities with the Polish example, there are also some significant differences. Both groups contained highly educated and successful people, were admitted as a matter of honour by Conservative governments, and arrived during periods of economic recession. However, the Ugandan Asians, who arrived late in 1972, were a much smaller group than the Poles, were more conversant with the English language, and had no ‘myth of return’, because of the circumstances of their expulsion. They were thus ‘settlers’ rather than ‘transients’ (Robinson, 1986). Above all, however, they were black and they were British citizens. The issue of ‘race’ is critical since the arrival of Ugandan Asians in Britain came some 10 years after the peak of West Indian and South Asian labour migration, by which time the issue of ‘coloured’ immigration had become highly contentious and highly politicised. The speeches of Enoch Powell MP had warned of civil war between whites and non-whites and ‘rivers of blood’. Race and immigration policies had become vote-winning issues and extreme right-wing groups had started to make local electoral progress in particular parts of Britain’s inner cities. Public opinion against further ‘coloured’ immigration was being expressed not only through the ballot box, but also through opinion polls (Kohler, 1973) and racial violence on the streets. Thus, while the British government felt it had an international moral obligation towards the Ugandan Asians, it also had to respond to its (white) domestic constituency. This had profound implications for the reception and resettlement programme and, again, this established precedents that have since become integral parts of refugee policy. The Asians in East Africa were successful middlemen, many of whom were relatively affluent and had taken the opportunity to use their wealth to educate their children for professional employment (Delf, 1963). They eventually became victims of their own success since they were expelled as a result of the Africanisation policies of the newly independent former colonies of East Africa. In 1972, President Amin of Uganda precipitated a crisis by announcing that he was giving the 80,000 Asians then thought to reside in Uganda 90 days to leave the country (see Marett, 1989; Robinson, 1995).

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Britain’s response to the challenge of resettling the 29,000 Ugandan Asians who came to the UK was in some ways formulaic. The government again opted to distance itself from reception and resettlement activities by establishing an intermediary body, the Uganda Resettlement Board (URB). Once again, reception camps were established, both to process refugees and hold them while they were matched to offers of accommodation. It used military camps for this purpose, and little attempt was made to plan the location of these camps or ensure that they were sited in areas of economic potential. It opted for a dispersal policy, designed to steer the Ugandan Asians away from areas of existing Asian settlement (see Robinson, 1995). And once again, the government refused to provide purpose-built accommodation for the new arrivals in the dispersal zones. In some respects, however, the Ugandan programme marked a new departure. Since the immigration debate in Britain had been racialised, and ‘coloured’ immigrants had been cast as ‘problems’, the government sought to ensure the rapid integration of the Ugandan Asians without appearing to be overly generous. It consequently distanced itself from the implementation of dispersal and from resettlement by introducing a strong voluntaristic element to the programme. Local authorities were under no obligation to resettle Ugandan Asian families, but were instead asked to volunteer vacant housing stock. This would mean that any members of the public who felt aggrieved by the use of public accommodation in their locality for ‘coloureds’ would direct their criticism to local (and not central) government. A further voluntaristic element was introduced by handing the running of reception centres over to charities and their volunteer helpers. The Women’s Royal Voluntary Service was particularly active, as was the Red Cross and St John Ambulance (Swinerton et al, 1975). In some cases, camps also appealed directly to the public for volunteers. The government also drew back further from targeted integration measures and relied upon ‘mainstreaming’, where support and welfare services were provided to refugees to the same level and through the same administrative channels as would be the case for indigenous residents. Mainstreaming allowed the ‘headline’ cost of resettlement to be kept as low as possible. The PRC spent about £160 on each Pole, whereas nearly 25 years later the URB spent almost £210 on each Ugandan Asian. There was one further element in the government’s effort to ensure the smooth acceptance and dispersal of the Ugandan Asians: positive media intervention. It is not clear whether this was deliberate media manipulation by the government or a Conservative-biased press supporting its party during a time of electoral danger. Nevertheless, Adams and Bristow (1979) comment upon the widespread reporting of the atrocities allegedly experienced by Asians as they tried to leave Uganda. Furthermore, Swinerton et al (1975) describe both how the press focused on the middle-class background and occupational skills of the Ugandan Asians, and how television news emphasised the basically British way of life the Asians had experienced in East Africa. President Amin’s widely reported admiration for Hitler, and Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, sealed

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the stereotyping of the Asians as innocent and helpless victims of the actions of an irrational despot. The final area of difference between the Ugandan Asian and earlier programmes was the new emphasis upon the acquisition of housing as the preeminent measure of successful resettlement. For the first time, resettlement agencies had as their main objective the relocation of refugees out of reception camps and into houses. Once housed, refugees could be supported by mainstream welfare benefits. This was in sharp contrast to the Polish programme, where refugees were found work and often then remained resident in the camps for extended periods until they eventually decided that they wished to move into the wider community. This new emphasis on housing has remained a central feature of resettlement policy in the UK ever since. Once the URB was established and the Ugandan Asians were arriving regularly, the board turned its attention to the geography of resettlement. It committed itself to a policy of voluntary dispersal in which Ugandan Asians would be steered away from ‘red’ areas and towards ‘green’ areas. According to the URB,‘red’ areas were those localities already experiencing excessive pressure upon their welfare services and housing. In contrast, some commentators have since suggested that the main criterion employed to define no-go areas was the presence of an existing Asian community. In practice, this zoning of the country was somewhat academic, since refugees could only be resettled where housing had been offered, and families were not compelled to move to areas against their wishes. Many Ugandan Asians had relatives or friends already living in the UK who were in a position either to help with accommodation or employment. As a result, some 23% of the refugees who passed through the hands of the URB made their own arrangements for accommodation without entering a camp – most of these went straight to ‘red’ areas. In addition, a further 39% ultimately found their own accommodation despite a period of residence in a resettlement camp, and again most would probably have gone to ‘red’ areas. Bristow (1976) therefore argues that, despite the public utterances about dispersal, only 38% of the Ugandan Asians were actually settled in ‘green’ areas. The net geographical impact was to ensure that the East African Asians were more concentrated within the UK than either the Indian or Pakistani labour migrants that had preceded them, with particular concentrations being found in London and Leicester (Robinson, 1986). The use of longitudinal data has allowed commentators to chart the socioeconomic progress of the East African Asians in the UK. Some research assessed their status within the UK immediately after resettlement, and the results of these assessments were decidedly pessimistic. McCart (1973) noted that 25% of household heads in Wandsworth, London, were still unemployed; 75% were housed unsatisfactorily; and three quarters were living below the poverty line. Dines (1973) commented on the social isolation of those who had been dispersed, and Kumar (1973) described how almost all the Ugandan Asian businessmen in Manchester were still looking for work and how those few refugees who had found work had experienced considerable loss of status.

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According to subsequent longitudinal research (Robinson, 1994; Robinson and Valeny, 2003), East African Asian refugees have: • acquired better formal qualifications than their Indian or white British counterparts; • moved heavily into self-employment; • transformed their socioeconomic profile more rapidly than any other black or Asian minority in the UK; • found better residential accommodation than their counterparts from India; • achieved all of this without wholesale secondary migration. Thus, by the 1991 National Census, Asians born in East Africa (the nearest census category) had maintained the patterns of settlement established 18 years previously, albeit with increasing concentration into the two main cores of Leicestershire and London. The Ugandan Asian case study exemplifies the gradual refining of refugee resettlement policy in the UK, and also the evolution of dispersal policies. In summary, dispersal was still seen as desirable, housing was the main measure of successful resettlement, voluntarism was preferred to state intervention, mainstreaming replaced tailored provision and central government distanced itself even further from the procedures of reception and resettlement. Chilean refugees Although there was never an official government ‘Chilean programme’ as such, Britain did receive and resettle some 3,000 Chilean exiles between 1974 and 1979. Although the first arrivals were (by default) taken care of by Ockenden Venture and the British Council for Aid to Refugees, these two organisations lacked the resources to manage such a large programme. They consequently informed the government that, without additional funding, the number of admissions would have to be reduced (Browne, 1979). The government responded that it was not willing to fund the organisations to expand accordingly (Browne, 1979). Critical to the reception and resettlement of the Chileans was the mood of the general public. Kay commented that: ... [the Chileans had garnered] widespread sympathy and support from the labour and trade union movement. The military juntas’s overthrow of a democratically elected regime and its widespread violation of human rights also outraged liberal and humanitarian opinion. (Kay, 1987, p 51)

This broad alliance of public support led to the formation of the Chile Solidarity Campaign (with local branches), the Chile Committee for Human Rights, and Academics for Chile. Shortly afterwards, in July 1974, these three groups

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came together with Christian Aid, the British Council for Aid to Refugees, and the World University Service (WUS) to form the Joint Working Group for Refugees from Chile (JWG). This organisation and the WUS, which also continued to act independently of the JWG, then took over responsibility for receiving and resettling all subsequent refugees. The WUS had a mandate to resettle the 1,000 or so who came to complete or continue their education, meeting them at airports and then chaperoning them to the university towns where they had been offered academic places. The JWG met all the other refugees as they were released from Chile and flew to the UK. They were then taken to a reception centre in London, where, over a period of about four weeks, they received medical assistance (including counselling if needed), basic orientation, and were given the opportunity to adjust. The reception phase was funded by an initial grant of £100,000 from the Voluntary Services Unit (VSU) of the Home Office in September 1974, and a subsequent rolling programme of funding for periods of six months. After initial reception, refugees were then allocated accommodation and handed over into the care of one of the eight full-time regional coordinators who oversaw all aspects of resettlement in the short term, and who were funded by the charities. As ever, accommodation was a major problem for the JWG. The government refused to intervene and instruct local authorities to offer housing (Joly, 1987). Instead, the JWG had to rely upon local branches of the Solidarity Campaign or the labour movement to lobby and pressure local authorities to offer surplus council accommodation. Not surprisingly, given that there were 40 such branches, offers of housing were widely scattered throughout the UK, although the concentration of active left-wing support meant that offers were skewed towards the major conurbations and the old industrial regions of the North, Scotland and the Midlands. The JWG therefore adopted a dispersal policy by default, rather than out of any deeply considered belief in the merits of dispersal or a fear of what Joly (1987) termed ‘saturation’. The outcome of this informal dispersal policy was profound. The JWG noted that by 1979 Chileans had been resettled in Scotland (13%), Yorkshire and Humberside (13%), the North West, the South East and the West Midlands (9% each), East Anglia and Wales (4% each), and the East Midlands, the South West and the North East (3% each). However, the pattern of housing offers, difficulties in finding family accommodation in London, and the desire of many metropolitan Chileans to live in a capital city also meant that many Chileans were initially resettled in London (31%). Although the ‘programme’ was never fully evaluated, researchers have since pointed out its failings. Prime among these was the government’s failure to guarantee short-term funding for the programme or provide mid- to longterm support. For example, in 1977 the Home Office denied that it had any responsibility for funding English as a Second Language classes and claimed that the DES should pay for these. The DES disagreed, and it was not until the financial year 1978/79 that the Home Office finally allocated funds to this vital service. The VSU of the Home Office also claimed that the basis of its

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grant to the JWG “has always been that it is to help with the immediate problems of resettlement of refugees on arrival. Thereafter it is government policy that they … shall depend upon the regular statutory services” (VSU, quoted in Browne, 1979, p 43). The programme has also been criticised for its reliance upon voluntary offers of housing, the lack of familiarity with the rights and entitlements of refugees in the provinces and weaknesses in the provision of language teaching in the regions (Browne, 1979). Levin (1981) recorded secondary migration of Chileans into London and to other centres where Latin Americans had already created communities, and Browne (1979) commented on the isolation of those who had been dispersed and how half of them had received little training or counselling and had become long-term unemployed. Perhaps more importantly, critics have charged policy makers with the disempowerment of Chilean refugees by taking away their right to decide where they wanted to live, as well as leaving many people isolated in areas where there were few other Chileans, and few opportunities for them to find work or pursue training. Kay commented that: ... although the JWG aimed to make the exiles’ destination a matter of mutual agreement, many exiles related their accounts of their assignment to Scotland in terms of “we were told” or “we were informed” and saw themselves as having had little say in the matter. (Kay, 1987, p 59)

In fact, one of Kay’s respondents commented: I played no part in the decision to transfer to Scotland. I felt I had no right to complain …. I didn’t come here of my own free will. I considered myself an object which could be put down wherever was decided. (Kay, 1987, p 59)

For Kay, the significance of this was that the Chileans had already been disempowered by becoming refugees: • they had lost the right to live in their country of birth; • they had had to leave behind relatives and friends when they were sent to the UK; • they had lost their jobs and homes; • many had lost their raison d’etre – participation in the political struggle in Chile. It is easy to see how, for some, being told where to live was the final straw. Vietnamese quota refugees The circumstances that led to the expulsion of the Vietnamese and their subsequent arrival in the UK (via camps in Hong Kong) have been covered

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elsewhere (Robinson, 1993b). Suffice to note that the initial quotas of 12,500 arrivals came to the UK only after prolonged periods in camps in Hong Kong, and that British criteria for admission were less stringent than those used by other western countries. As a result, Britain was less successful at attracting refugees with occupational skills, qualifications and good spoken English or French, than, for example, the US. The British entrants were, instead, very youthful, largely uneducated and often illiterate even in their own languages, and they were predominantly Chinese Vietnamese from what had been North Vietnam. They had few transferable skills and were largely ignorant of western ways (Robinson, 1993b). Britain only became involved in a refugee episode with which it had little direct connection because of the arrival of ‘boat people’ in the colony of Hong Kong. Hong Kong proved to be a significant destination for the boat people, and as numbers in camps there increased and public sympathy fell away, Britain offered to take a quota of 10,000 Vietnamese as part of an international ‘burdensharing’ initiative. The Vietnamese programme was clearly modelled upon the Ugandan Asian programme. The government again distanced itself from both reception and resettlement through the creation of an intermediary body, the Joint Committee for Refugees from Vietnam (see Robinson, 1985). Voluntarism was again a central policy imperative. Charities were responsible for the camps and for the administration of resettlement, with each being given a territory within which to operate. Local authorities were not required to offer public housing for resettlement, and it was made clear to them that, if they did, funds would not be forthcoming to cover any additional long-term costs arising from the needs of Vietnamese families in their locality. Housing was again taken to be the main barometer of successful resettlement, with the result that very little attempt was made to match the employment skills of individual refugees with local labour markets. ‘Front-end loading’ was also practised again, with £21 million out of a total expenditure of £23 million being assigned to reception. Reception was operated through the opening of camps, many of which were, again, old military bases, often located in isolated areas (see Hale, 1993). And, lastly, the government committed itself firmly to mainstreaming rather than group-specific policies. The Vietnamese programme did, however, mark the further development of policy in at least two respects. First, the day-to-day responsibility for resettlement was delegated even further to volunteer support groups that consisted of members of the public drawn from charities, religious groups and other voluntary associations. It was they who often decorated houses and acquired furniture for refugees before their arrival and then undertook unofficial liaison between the family and school authorities, social services, benefit agencies and the health services. They also provided emotional support and friendship in the critical first months after arrival. (However, volunteers were expected to do all of this without training, payment or knowledge of Vietnamese culture or languages.) Second, theVietnamese programme marked a further extension of policy towards

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dispersal (Robinson, 1993a). Since the Vietnamese were acute refugees, had little spoken or written English and no prior knowledge of Britain, and had no pre-existing ethnic community to which they could turn for advice, they were particularly vulnerable to manipulation. In addition, the Conservative government had just been elected with a manifesto that committed them to further reductions in (non-white) immigration. The combination of a political imperative and an easily manipulated group produced one of Britain’s most extensive experiments in spatial engineering, prior to the current policy of dispersing asylum seekers (discussed later in this chapter). The Home Office recommended that the Vietnamese should be dispersed throughout all parts of the UK in small and separate clusters of between four and ten families per locality. The government again chose not to requisition or build homes specifically for refugees; this meant that the Vietnamese could only be resettled in local authorities where housing was on offer. This produced a dualistic geographical pattern of settlement, with refugees located in far-flung parts of the country as well as within large cities such as London, Birmingham and Bristol. Vietnamese unemployment levels of up to 85% in parts of Britain, and the psychological toll of isolation, were clear indicators of the failure of the dispersal policy for those dispersed, as was the scale and speed of secondary migration (Robinson and Hale, 1989). For example, research showed that fully 51% of dispersed Vietnamese refugees had left their resettlement addresses within five years of being placed there (Robinson and Hale, 1989). As Figure 5.1 illustrates, this was overwhelmingly towards selected parts of London, with refugees moving not only directly from parts of Wales and Scotland, but also step by step up the urban hierarchy, to be with friends and relatives. The long-term effect of secondary migration and the subsequent additions to the Vietnamese population through family reunion and a small second quota of arrivals has been to solidify the group’s distribution around London where access to employment is at its greatest and where the housing rental market is well developed. Community associations and community infrastructure now reflect this. Bosnian refugees Between late 1992 and late 1995, Britain received some 2,585 Bosnian detainees and their families. Many were young, single males aged between 18 and 30. Most were from rural communities and few had professional or advanced educational qualifications. The Bosnians arrived in Britain with little advance warning, and the initial phases of the programme for their reception and resettlement had therefore to be organised with great haste. The government followed precedent by delegating responsibility to the British Refugee Council and the British Red Cross, having first set down principles to which subcontractors had to adhere. The continuation of previous policy can be seen in seven of the objectives that were set for the programme:

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• refugees should remain in reception centres for a relatively short period of time; • each reception centre should feed refugees to particular regions within the UK; • housing for resettlement was to be volunteered by local authorities, not requisitioned from them; • refugees were not to be housed by recourse to provision specifically targeted at homeless people; • refugees should be rehoused in a range of accommodation types and tenures; • Bosnians were to be dispersed across the whole of the UK, to avoid placing “undue burdens on individual local authorities” (Home Office, 1993); • resettlement in London was to be especially avoided. Figure 5.1: Flows of Vietnamese secondary migration within the UK after dispersal

Households 1 2-5 6-10

Glasgow

10+ Newcastle

N

Liverpool

London

100 km

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In other respects, however, the Bosnian programme marked an evolution in policy. Successful resettlement was defined much more broadly than had hitherto been the case: it was expanded to cover access to housing, employment, healthcare, education and training, language support, translators/interpreters, and mechanisms for community development. Furthermore, Bosnians were to be resettled only in areas thought to have tolerant and accepting local communities. However, the government did not achieve all of its aims, either because they conflicted with the beliefs of the contractors employed to implement them or because implementation itself was flawed. Three examples illustrate this. First, the Refugee Council refused to disperse Bosnian refugees across the whole of the UK and forced the government to amend its policy. Bosnians were resettled in six cluster areas that were spread across the UK. Cluster areas were defined in such a way that they offered access to: a local refugee council; other refugee communities; appropriate housing; statutory agencies that were sensitised to the needs of refugees; appropriate healthcare facilities; and a local economy that had the capacity to sustain a sizeable and growing community of refugees. Second, while the government had envisaged offering refugees no choice in the cluster area to which they were sent, different practices in the reception centres ensured that some Bosnians, in some centres, at some points in time were given a choice of accommodation and destination. Third, and contrary to the government’s wishes, Bosnians were eventually resettled in London, simply because a reception centre had already been opened there before policy had been confirmed. In the event, 90% of all arrivals on the programme were resettled in the six cluster areas, which was remarkable in light of previous failures. However, the clusters varied greatly in size – the smallest contained only 185 Bosnian residents, and the largest 700. The greater willingness to allow clustering (albeit in dispersed clusters) and the creation of Mid-term Support Teams designed to develop active Bosnian communities with their own support infrastructure in the cluster areas was also reflected in the limited scale of secondary migration after resettlement. The Refugee Council estimated that by the end of 1997 fewer than 200 Bosnians had engaged in secondary migration. Independent academic research corroborated this. Robinson and Coleman (2000) demonstrated, for example, that in West Yorkshire, only nine of the 106 households had moved after resettlement, and all these moves had been within the West Yorkshire cluster or to another designated cluster, often in search of better housing within the same town. Overall, then, the relative geographic immobility of resettled quota Bosnians stands in stark contrast to that of previous refugee arrivals. This perhaps suggests that the locations to which Bosnians were sent were both appropriate for, and deemed acceptable by, the refugees, and that carefully selected clustering was a superior policy to indiscriminate dispersal. It also emphasises that because there was no settled Bosnian community in the UK prior to the arrival of

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programme refugees, government policy could not therefore be undermined by the attraction of pre-existing communities. The Kosovan programme In 1999, the UK government responded positively to requests from UNHCR to accept Kosovan refugees from the camps on the Macedonian and Kosovan border. On 5 April 1999, the government asked the Refugee Council to coordinate an arrival and reception programme, based on a contingency plan that had been devised in the aftermath of the Bosnia programme. The first evacuees flew into the country on 25 April. By the time that evacuation halted on 25 June, Britain had given temporary refuge to some 4,346 Kosovans. The major difference between this and previous programmes was that the Kosovans were only expected to be temporarily resident in the UK; long-term resettlement was therefore never really part of the programme. The £13.7 million programme has not yet been fully described or evaluated by independent researchers, nor have the detailed outcomes of the programme really entered the public domain. Despite this, the Home Office’s commissioned review of the effectiveness of programme management and structures (Compass Partnership, 2000) does provide us with a brief description of the geographical elements of the programme. The Refugee Council coordinated the programme and four charities – the Refugee Council, Refugee Action, British Red Cross and the Scottish Refugee Council – were tasked with implementing it. Liaison between them was facilitated by the Inter-agency Management Group (IaMG). Each charity was given responsibility for a specific geographical area, which became cluster areas de facto: Scotland, the East Midlands, the North West and Leeds. In the first phase of arrivals (April-May 1999), the charities were solely responsible for the Kosovans. Their Arrivals Team met them at the airport, passed them through immigration, and then took them to one of eight reception centres, four of which were located in Scotland, two in Leeds, one in Derbyshire and one in Leicester. These dealt with all aspects of evacuees’ needs following their arrival in the UK. A second phase of the programme was prompted by the government’s decision to increase sharply the size of the intake. Estimates of the total intake rose to 20,000; consequently, the programme had to be moved onto a different footing. The IaMG gave responsibility for this phase to local authorities, and the charities became specialist consultants and advisers to the authorities, which were now acting as providers. Local authorities opened and managed 42 reception centres across the UK; these eventually serviced 85% of the total intake. With the ending of the war in Kosovo on 25 June, the evacuation was terminated abruptly. Whereas initially there was intense pressure to move people quickly out of the reception centres and into more permanent accommodation in order to free up beds in the centres for new arrivals, the ending of the war took away this immediate pressure. However, while the local authorities were

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prepared to use reception centres to provide relatively per manent accommodation, the charities felt that this was unwise. They argued that lengthy stays in centres would lead to the progressive institutionalisation of the Kosovans. Therefore, they pressured the local authorities to move people into mainstream accommodation and to close the centres. The Compass Partnership (2000) notes that this had not been entirely successful since, by 25 April 2000 (that is, one year after arrival), some 952 refugees were still in local authority reception centres. In cases where people were moved on from reception centres, local authorities found them alternative accommodation. In Leicester, for example, the City Council provided housing for all those 124 people moving out of the Cygnet Hotel Reception Centre, and in Derbyshire all the Kosovans were housed by Derby City Council in the same neighbourhood of the city. The Compass Partnership report shows that a clear effort was made to cluster the Kosovans, although no information is provided that might allow us to see whether this was deliberate policy or a casual by-product of the location of reception centres. The partnership indicates that about 1,700 Kosovans were “dispersed” (Compass Partnership’s word) to the North West, about 1,600 to Yorkshire and Humberside, and a further 380 to both Scotland and the South East. Summary This brief review has demonstrated that, over the past 50 years, Britain has developed and progressively refined policies of refugee reception and resettlement. These are based upon a continuity of implicit assumptions about what the British public will accept and what should be Britain’s contribution to the international refugee crisis. These continuities far outweigh the specifics of policy towards any one group. Furthermore, as the nature of the refugee crisis has changed in more recent years, policy has been increasingly shaped by a new political ideology, based more upon markets and voluntarism. Underpinning all of this has been a persistent belief in the efficacy and morality of the idea of ‘burden sharing’. This principle, which is well established as a basic tenet of the international refugee regime, has increasingly been woven into national policy towards the internal distribution of those quota refugees who have been formally accepted for settlement by government.

The current programme to disperse asylum seekers Context In the 1990s, the context within which the UK government planned the settlement of asylum seekers changed radically (see also Chapter Two of this volume). The number of asylum seekers had increased sharply and public opinion had turned against them, racialising the issue, and labelling them as ‘bogus’ and undeserving. In addition, the scale and cost of asylum seeking had

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encouraged the government to link settlement policy with immigration control, such that the former was seen as part of a broader strategy of deterrence. And finally, the concentration of spontaneous asylum seekers in London and the South East generated localised social and economic costs that those areas were unwilling to bear.

Early local authority-inspired dispersal As a result of local tensions and the practical problems of housing and supporting large and unexpected numbers of extra residents, some local authorities began to formulate dispersal strategies of their own. From 1996 onwards, London boroughs began to disperse asylum seekers to other parts of the South East of England, coming to individual and tactical agreements with sister authorities that had vacant housing stock. The Borough of Harrow, for example, set up a private contract to send asylum seekers to a hostel in Teignmouth, Devon. In December 1998, the Home Secretary encouraged the Local Government Association (LGA) to formulate a more strategic and formal policy of dispersal. The LGA decided to operate this through the establishment of regional consortia that would bring together a variety of statutory and voluntary agencies in the destination areas. Due to the number of agencies involved, negotiations took longer than expected; for instance, the Asylum Seekers Voluntary Dispersal Scheme did not become operational until December 1999, by which stage 10 consortia had been established (eight of which were in England, with the remaining two being Wales and Scotland). The LGA planned to have control of 10,000 units of accommodation by March 2000 and to disperse about 2,600 asylum seekers per month. In the event, this ‘voluntary’ dispersal programme proved unsuccessful. By mid-March 2000, only 4,400 housing units had been sourced in the areas to which asylum seekers were to be dispersed, and too little of this was suitable for families (LGA, 1999). Less than 1,900 people had been dispersed, with 62% having been sent to the North West of England (especially Liverpool) and Yorkshire (LGA, 2000c). By this time, Kent County Council had also dispersed 2,000 more asylum seekers under its own dispersal programme, and London had dispersed a further 1,000 under its own scheme (LGA, 2000c). The LGA’s inability to forecast the number of asylum seekers that were referred to it made planning difficult; additionally, several elements of the programme had not been properly thought through. It was not clear, for example, how asylum seekers would be moved from one part of the country to another, nor was it clear who would pay for this. The exchange of information was flawed: some local authorities offered places, but asylum seekers never took them up. Furthermore, local authorities were rarely informed of the language spoken by the asylum seekers being sent to them, and some asylum seekers were sent to inappropriate areas since they had been inadequately screened prior to dispersal. And insufficient accommodation was being offered that was suitable for families. Many of

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these issues were also picked up by the media – according to its view of the situation, all was chaos. Stories abounded of near-empty buses transporting asylum seekers long distances through the night, of asylum seekers arriving in new destinations that were not expecting or prepared for them, and of asylum seekers returning to London within a few days of having been dispersed. And finally, the asylum seekers themselves showed little enthusiasm for dispersal, with 37% of the initial 921 referrals to the London Asylum Seekers Consortium refusing assistance, if this meant having to live outside the capital.

The 1999 Asylum and Immigration Act Given the failure of the informal dispersal programme, and the LGA’s view that “the burden of the current ad hoc system is intolerable for some local authorities” (LGA website, www.lga.gov.uk), central government stepped in during 1999 with a new compulsory policy, first outlined in the Immigration and Asylum Act of that year. The 1999 Act was a bold redrafting of the entire system that determined whether asylum seekers would be allowed entry to the UK and how they would be supported while their claims were being assessed. For our purposes, the most significant change ushered in by the act was the new policy of offering financial support to asylum seekers on the condition that they agreed to be dispersed. While dispersal was thus not compulsory for all, it was mandatory for those who were unable to support themselves. Describing the new policy The key objectives of the 1999 Act were: • to control further the number of asylum seekers entering the UK; • to accelerate the decision-making process for asylum claims; • to revamp the financial support mechanisms in such a way that welfare benefits were controlled and ceased to act as a reason for coming to the UK. The act led to the formation of a new National Asylum Support Service (NASS), which was charged with deciding which asylum seekers were eligible for state benefits, providing these benefits, and dispersing asylum seekers from London and the South East. The new system was to work as follows: • Asylum seekers apply for asylum to the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, which then decides whether they should be allowed temporary admission to the country (while their claim is heard) or detained if their claim is manifestly unfound or if there is a strong chance that they might abscond. • Those given temporary admission are then referred to a NASS-funded reception assistant, who ascertains whether they have any means of support.

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If they do not, they are then found emergency accommodation while the reception assistant helps them prepare a claim to NASS for support. • NASS then decides within seven days whether the applicants are eligible for support. If this is the case, it then allocates them to accommodation in one of the cluster areas outside London and the South East. • Once relocated there, destitute asylum seekers are given free housing (including the cost of utilities) and support equivalent to 70% of income support rates for adults and 100% of income support rates for children1. • Once temporarily settled, asylum seekers should eventually expect to receive a decision on their claim for asylum within an average of two months, with a possibility of appeals in the subsequent four months. The full determination procedure should therefore be completed within a maximum of six months. Rather than replicate the errors of the LGA dispersal scheme, the Act proposed that local organisations and authorities should come together into consortia that would be expected to provide the full range of services needed by asylum seekers, including 40% of all housing. Each consortium would be given £100,000 per annum to organise, coordinate and administrate provision, and promote positive media images of asylum seekers. Consortia are also expected to make provision for the long-term integration of those asylum seekers granted refugee status or Exceptional Leave to Remain. This includes measures to help refugees into employment, provide them with language skills and ensure appropriate educational provision. Ten consortia were eventually contracted to provide this service: the North West of England,Yorkshire and Humberside, the West Midlands, the East Midlands, the North East of England, the South West, South Central England, Eastern England, Wales and Scotland (Figure 5.2). NASS would also negotiate directly with other organisations for the provision of specific elements of support. Sixty per cent of all accommodation, for example, was expected to come direct either from local authorities, registered social landlords or the private sector. These organisations were to provide a range of appropriate accommodation as well as the necessary support package (orientation, guidance on living skills, and activities to prevent asylum seekers becoming isolated or bored, for instance). False start – interim plans Initially the government aimed to introduce this wholly new system in April 2000. However, it was unable to do so because NASS had failed to secure sufficient accommodation in the dispersal areas. The government then proposed transitional arrangements that would phase in the new policy. It was decided that, from April onwards, NASS would support all new port applicants in England and Wales, all those who applied for asylum in Wales and Scotland, and those persons resident in the Oakington fast-track detention centre in Cambridge. Those applicants who were already in the country were only to be phased into the system later in 2000; unaccompanied children were to

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Figure 5.2: Current consortia areas for dispersal of asylum seekers in the UK

continue to be supported under the provisions of the 1989 Children Act. Furthermore, those who had applied for asylum prior to April 2000 were not to be dispersed but allowed to remain in London and the South East. Critics argued that these transitional arrangements were unduly complex and would only lead to confusion. They pointed to the facts: • NASS, local authorities and the London Asylum Seekers Consortium would be competing with one another to secure accommodation within the same markets (LGA, 2000a). • Many local authorities had already started to wind down their asylum seeker support teams in anticipation of them being replaced by consortium provision. • The complexity of the arrangements placed an enormous burden on those expected to operate it, and that this was likely to lead to errors. For example, according to the Audit Commission (2000c), NASS clients automatically received a letter entitling them to free NHS care; however, no one knew exactly how asylum seekers who were still supported by local authorities could apply for such help, and whether or not they would still be eligible if they failed so to do.

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Initial reactions to (and critiques of) the current programme The new provision generated a huge reaction in both the broadsheet and the mass media, as well as a sustained and very critical campaign against it by the Refugee Council, among others. Furthermore, it has also been critically reviewed by the government’s own watchdog, the National Audit Commission. The initial reaction to the publication of the Asylum and Immigration Bill among those working with (and for) refugees was far from supportive. In a report in The Times, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants described the bill as “a missed opportunity that continued the old heavy-handed controls” (The Times, 10 February 1999). And in a particularly trenchant article in The Guardian (5 August 1998) Nick Hardwick, Chief Executive of the Refugee Council, was stinging in his criticism of the proposed policies, describing them as “a stairway to hell”. He went on to describe how “under the new proposals, applicants will lose all remaining rights to benefits – and without money they could be forced to crime and prostitution”. He continued: The new government proposals run a great risk of replacing one shambles with another …. The government has chosen the most expensive and inefficient way. Our nightmare is of asylum seekers being scattered across the country, isolated on sink estates in mono-cultural areas, still waiting years for a decision on their case. On a day-to-day basis, chaotic food distribution systems would result in the most needy and vulnerable going without. If in future asylum seekers families are dumped in areas where there is no experience of their needs, the number of children out of school will grow. Local community relations would suffer, particularly if the advance billing casts all asylum seekers as bogus scroungers. Of course many, if not a majority, will drift back to London. Without any entitlement to state support, they will be dependent on their families and communities – already desperately poor – for help, or face the risks and exploitation of illegal working. (Nick Hardwick in The Guardian, 5 August 1998)

Not surprisingly, the Refugee Council lobbied against many features of the bill, and established a campaign to ensure changes to it, with regular briefings and calls to action for the campaign’s supporters. In October 1999, for example, the council asked supporters to contact their respective MPs urging them to support an amendment to the bill. This amendment argued that if the Home Office was unable to meet its self-imposed target of giving asylum seekers a decision on their claim within six months, then asylum seekers should not be forced to live solely on vouchers, since these had always been envisaged as suitable only for short-term support. In November 1999, the Refugee Council met with the government to express grave concerns about dispersal under the interim arrangements. It raised three issues in particular:

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1. Is it advisable to disperse people simply to those localities where housing is available, without a more thorough analysis of the suitability of the locale as a reception zone? 2. Are proposed arrangements for single asylum seekers unduly harsh? 3. Has the government instituted appropriate arrangements for the management of dispersal? And in December 1999, while reporting the passing of the act, the Refugee Council noted the improvements to provision that had been made as a result of its lobbying campaign. Included among these were an increase in the cash amount of the support package to £10 and entitlement of children of asylum seekers to 100% of income support. The Refugee Council concluded that “were it not for the work of the supporters of the Refugee Council, the lives of asylum seekers and their children would have been made a great deal more painful” (Refugee Council, 2000a, p 11). National Audit Commission report The National Audit Commission published an evaluation, entitled Another country, of the first few months of the new dispersal and support regime in July 2000 (Audit Commission, 2000c). It was based on considerable fieldwork as well as desk research, with the commission’s staff visiting 15 sites, made up of 10 local authorities and five health authorities, all of which had had considerable previous experience of providing services to asylum seekers. It could be argued, however, that there was a flaw in the commission’s research strategy: it chose not to visit organisations new to the field of asylum support to gauge their preparedness and awareness of key issues. The National Audit Commission began by questioning the likely deterrent effect of the new support arrangements and dispersal. It drew a comparison with the 1996 Act, which had only a transient impact on the number of asylum seekers coming to the UK. It also pointed to the fact that 60% of asylum seekers were still choosing to make their claim ‘in-country’, even though this meant that they would not be offered any assistance. The inference here was that, seeing as welfare benefits were the main factor attracting asylum seekers to the UK, then many would switch to making port-of-entry claims immediately after the withdrawal of benefits from in-country applicants. Subsequent research on why asylum seekers opt to seek refuge in the UK rather than other countries has supported the conclusion that welfare regimes have only a limited deterrent value (Robinson and Segrott, 2002). This research also found that few asylum seekers had much prior knowledge of the benefits they would be given in the UK, and even fewer knew whether these were greater than, or less than, those on offer in alternative countries. Most of them simply expected that they would be left to fend for themselves, having to earn their own living and find their own accommodation. None of those interviewed in late 2000 and early 2001 was aware that the UK operated a dispersal policy.

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The commission then summarised what it considered the main challenges posed by dispersal and the possible impacts of failure: For local agencies with little knowledge of the cultural needs of asylum seekers, or the problems that new arrivals often face in using services, dispersal will represent an immense challenge. Local government and its partners need to learn fast and plan well if they are to meet the needs of this vulnerable group. Failure to do so could escalate community tensions and incur substantial long-term costs. An inadequate response will also cause severe distress to asylum seekers and constrain the long-term opportunities of those allowed to stay in this country. Without effective support, asylum seekers could easily become locked in a cycle of exclusion and dependency in their new community. Alternatively, they could simply ‘vote with their feet’ and return to London, again putting pressure on health and education services in the capital. (Audit Commission, 2000c, p 4)

The commission then sought to identify those factors it regarded as critical in determining the success of the UK dispersal policy. These were collected under three headings: • the preparations that regional consortia make prior to dispersal; • the provision of local support services to those who are dispersed; • the national framework within which dispersal was functioning.

The preparations made by regional consortia The commission identified six main issues that the consortia needed to address in order to put in place conditions conducive to dispersal. 1.The need to establish joint working relationships. The National Audit Commission argued that dispersal would only be effective if the roles and responsibilities of every tier of organisation were clarified, and if there was clear communication and cooperation between all types and levels of organisations. It suggested that consortia might need to replace their highly individualistic structures with a standard organisational structure made up of two tiers, the first of which would coordinate strategic activities region-wide, and the second of which would manage the day-to-day implementation of dispersal. It argued that, without such standardisation, there remained the potential for variations in practice that might cause tensions between asylum seekers who have been treated differently as well as with local people, who might perceive some asylum seekers to be in receipt of more than they themselves received. It also suggested that inter-organisation thematic working groups were an effective means of ensuring joint working and sharing of information. To demonstrate the difficulties that were already arising from communications

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problems, the Audit Commission provided several examples. It noted how, in one case, the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) of the Home Office had failed to notify a local authority of a change in the legal status of an asylum seeker who had, as a consequence, lost his entitlement to housing benefit. Not knowing this, the local authority had continued to provide accommodation, for which it would never be able to recoup the costs. In another case, one local authority was housing dispersed asylum seekers under social services legislation that enabled it to provide not just accommodation, but also furniture and household equipment, while another authority was working within homelessness legislation that allowed only the provision of accommodation. 2.Developing a strategic approach based on robust evidence. The commission suggested that successful dispersal would be facilitated by consortia acting strategically and basing their long-term policy upon a sound evidence base. More particularly, consortia would only ever be able to respond to the needs of dispersed asylum seekers by acquiring a detailed and sensitive knowledge of the characteristics of the asylum seeker population in their region and then undertaking formal needs analyses. Possible methods of acquiring such infor mation locally included focus groups, conferences and the encouragement of peer research projects, or being allowed access to NASS and IND databases. 3.Involving local politicians. The success of dispersal depends on defusing local tensions. Central to this is the early, and formal, involvement of local and community politicians. These actors could advise on where asylum seekers should (and should not) be dispersed to; they could also help influence local attitudes towards the arrival of asylum seekers. They could even arrange welcome parties for new arrivals. Again, the report provided examples. In one case, a local opinion former responded to the tension caused by asylum seekers’ lack of understanding of the UK’s refuse disposal system. Prompt and practical intervention (the organisation of a public meeting to air different views and the hiring of a community skip) had not only resolved the community issue through local action but had also encouraged local people and asylum seekers to work together to a common goal. 4.Proactive management of community relations. The commission recommended strongly that consortia should make positive interventions to improve local community relations. The Kosovan programme had already shown that sympathetic coverage of the plight of this group had improved their reception and eased their resettlement (see Gibney, 1999). The commission made a series of recommendations on this point. It suggested that the media in each locality to which asylum seekers were to be dispersed should be involved at a very early stage. Consortia should impress upon the media that its reporting should be responsible and sensitive. Consortia should also ensure that its press relations were handled centrally so that one single message was being broadcast, rather than a series of potentially contradictory statements, each emanating from a different constituent organisation. The emotive power of

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language was also fully recognised: the commission recommended that such terms or analogies be avoided since these simply reinforce pre-existing hostility. The press should also be fully briefed in advance of any sensitive decisions so that it is in a position accurately to report developments rather than having to rely on hearsay or rumour. And the media should be used proactively to promote positive stories about asylum seekers and to dispel local myths. The commission reported good practice, exemplifying this with a case study of the Yorkshire and Humberside Consortium. This was thought to have established both clear overall objectives for its media interventions and a series of key messages that it had sought to disseminate. It had centralised press relations, and had encouraged positive reporting. What is more, the consortium had regularly briefed the local press on developments. The National Audit Commission also recommended that consortia should communicate directly with local communities to explain their policies and also to inform communities of any initiatives that might effect them. Its fieldwork found that 80% of local authorities failed to notify local residents that asylum seekers were about to be resettled in their neighbourhood. The police were also thought to be an important element in a positive community relations strategy. Police officers need to be made aware, said the commission, of the circumstances of asylum seekers and also be trained to be culturally sensitive. Once fully trained, they are then able to mediate more effectively in local disputes and help educate local people. The commission therefore commented favourably on the decision of the Association of Chief Police Officers to produce a good practice guide on how to police asylum seeker communities. 5.Overcoming barriers to service delivery. Three key issues were identified here. First, asylum seekers should be well informed of their rights and entitlements and also have the practical knowledge of how to access these. The National Association of Citizen’s Advice Bureaux, for example, recommended that all asylum seekers should be provided with a summary statement covering these issues, both on arrival and whenever their immigration status subsequently changed. Second, consortia staff should be well trained and briefed. And third, appropriate translation and interpreting services ought to be put in place in every locality to which asylum seekers were dispersed. The final issue was thought to be particularly important, given that language is one of the main barriers to accessing information and services. 6.Promoting refugee community development and involvement. The National Audit Commission argued that it was important to involve refugee communities directly in their own resettlement, since this not only built their confidence and self-esteem but also provided opportunities for the free flow of information and for capacity building. Consortia should therefore consult with, create and support community organisations. For example, earlier research in Wales had shown that few local authorities there consulted with asylum seekers and refugee communities, and even where consultation did take place it was often on an irregular and informal

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basis (Robinson, 1999). A survey of 225 statutory and voluntary agencies found that over half of all bodies sought no consultation whatsoever, and only two organisations arranged regular formal consultation. Only 4% of respondents participated in regular discussions with the local refugee council. Nor had service providers sensitised themselves to the needs of refugees and asylum seekers in other ways: only two organisations had deliberately sought to employ refugees (2.7% of usable replies), and only four had appointed targeted staff (7%), although none of these had then received specialist training. The commission was concerned not only about the unresponsive nature of existing mainstream organisations, but also about the uneven geographical spread of specialist refugee community organisations (RCOs). It noted that, at that time, 88% of all RCOs recognised by the Refugee Council were located in London and that only 11 local authorities outside the capital were funding RCOs. The consequence of this was that asylum seekers who were being dispersed would have had no access to specialist support or advocacy, and instead would have had to rely on their own resources or upon mainstream organisations that might not be attuned to their needs and circumstances. The National Audit Commission concluded this section of its report thus: To date, the needs of asylum seekers and refugees have not been addressed in a systematic way. Operational pressures, combined with scant information and inadequate joint working, have too often impeded a strategic approach. Despite some examples of innovative good practice, many barriers to services and inequities in service provision exist. (Audit Commission, 2000c, p 44)

Providing local support services Having identified the prerequisites for dispersal, the National Audit Commission then looked at some of the issues surrounding the provision of services for those who had been dispersed. It feared that “local agencies may face a number of difficulties in providing services to asylum seekers and refugees. These are likely to be more acute in areas with little experience of this client group” (Audit Commission, 2000c, p 80). It considered seven service-related issues to be critical to the success of dispersal. 1.Ensuring that asylum seekers are dispersed to appropriate locations. The commission recommended that the government be more rigorous in its selection of dispersal areas. It argued that the key characteristic of such areas should be the current or potential capacity both to support multiculturalism and to ensure the full participation of asylum seekers in all aspects of society (that is, integration). The individual elements that define an ideal dispersal area are reproduced in Table 5.1.

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Table 5.1: Factors to consider when assessing whether areas are suitable for asylum seekers Consider

Ask

Ethnic composition

•

Does the area have a multicultural population?

•

Does the area already include people of the same nationality as the asylum seekers? Is there likely to be conflict between different groups of asylum seekers from the same country? Does the area have a history of racial tension? Is the placement of asylum seekers and refugees likely to lead to tension? Are there established refugee community groups in the area? Is there support available to develop new community networks? Are there school places available for asylum-seeking children? Is language support available in these schools? Are there adequate translation and interpretation facilities in the local area? Is the area well served by immigration lawyers? Is the area likely to offer asylum seekers and refugees employment opportunities in the longer term? Are there places of worship to meet the religious needs of asylum seekers? Will asylum seekers be within walking distance of other services, such as local colleges, health services and outlets accepting vouchers? Is the area well serviced by public transport? Do local services such as GPs have the capacity to meet the needs of both asylum seekers and the indigenous community?

Community relations

• • •

Community networks

• •

School places

• •

Translation and interpretation services Legal support

•

Employment opportunities

•

Places of worship

•

Other services

•

•

• •

Source: Audit Commission (2000c)

The commission also pointed out an inherent tension in the definition of dispersal areas. While areas that are already multicultural might be more accepting of asylum seekers, they are also likely to already have an aboveaverage percentage of deprived households. Sending asylum seekers there will exacerbate deprivation. Conversely, placing deprived asylum seekers in localities where the material quality of life is better might simply ensure their isolation from ethnic support networks.

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2.Ensuring that the local housing stock is appropriate. The commission recommended that areas selected for resettlement should have a range of housing types, sizes and tenures so that all asylum seeker households can receive accommodation appropriate to their individual needs. Equally, they should have sufficient and appropriate move-on accommodation for those asylum seekers who are later given refugee status. The commission concurred with an earlier study by Zetter and Pearl (1999), which argued that social housing providers need to do more than simply provide shelter; rather, they should also be encouraged to offer a support package to their asylum-seeker tenants. This package would consist of initial orientation, guidance on basic living skills, and activities to prevent them from becoming bored or institutionalised. 3.Ensuring that legal support is available locally. The local availability of legal support has become one of the most contentious elements of the current dispersal policy in the UK. The issue is that asylum seekers are being dispersed to parts of the UK where there is little established expertise in immigration law. In addition, since asylum seekers are supported largely on vouchers, and therefore have little cash, they find it very difficult to travel to areas where such expertise does exist. Although some £23 million of additional funding was made available by the Lord Chancellor to improve legal support in the dispersal areas, it takes considerable time for lawyers to develop such expertise and to offer it as a service. In the meantime, the National Audit Commission commented that only 200 contracted immigration law firms in England and Wales are located outside London, and few of these are proficient in asylum law. 4.Ensuring that general and specialist healthcare is accessible. Asylum seekers and refugees have the same entitlement to NHS services as the indigenous population. However, this does not necessarily mean that service access and delivery are comparable. The commission was critical of the fact that immigration officers at the ports of entry referred very few asylum applicants to the Port Health Control Units for an initial health assessment, and that in-country applicants were totally exempt from such assessments. As a result, only 25% of all applicants underwent an initial health assessment. This failure to collect aggregate and individual data on health denies the possibility of gearing provision to the specific and identified needs of asylum seekers. In addition, once asylum seekers are resettled, many are denied access to primary healthcare because GPs will not register them as patients. There are two main reasons for this. First, GPs receive only the standard capitation fee for asylum seekers even though individual consultations with asylum seekers generally last three to four times longer than consultations with other patients. And second, these consultations may have to be undertaken through a paid interpreter. Finally, the commission noted that although mental health is known to be a particular issue for some asylum seekers, few specialist services in this field are available outside of London.

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5.Ensuring that local education services are appropriate. Although local education authorities (LEAs) have a legal duty to provide education to all five- to 16year-olds within their catchment areas, the Refugee Council estimated that some 2,000 children of asylum seekers went without school places in 1999. This represented some 3% of all such children in the UK. Even where children did gain access to a school, few benefited from specialist support. This problem was particularly acute in areas that had no previous experience of refugee or ethnic minority settlement. In these localities, LEAs would have to take a series of initiatives before asylum seekers could be received. They would need to raise local awareness of special needs, provide English language support, help victims of trauma, and provide extra help for those who have experienced an interrupted education. As with GPs, though, the guaranteed income of LEAs would not immediately be increased to reflect this extra expenditure, since the Standard Spending Assessment is always calculated on the basis of lagged data. In the short term, then, LEAs will have to fund initiatives from their own resources, approach consortia for assistance, or apply for some of the extra £1 million earmarked by the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) for asylum-seeker pupils in areas of dispersal. However, it is unlikely that these sources will cover all the costs eventually incurred, and it is difficult for many authorities to apply for such external funding when they fail to collect basic data on the asylumseeker population in their care. 6.Ensuring that English language support is adequate. The commission also noted that there was a great need for language classes, either to teach English to beginners, or to improve the standards of the remainder. Such classes would have to be provided free of charge or at low cost and would therefore need to be subsidised by local authorities. 7.Ensuring that employment training is available. After six months in the UK, most asylum seekers can apply to the Home Office to take up paid employment. Few are denied. Therefore, jobseeking, and its associated training needs, is important for most asylum seekers and refugees. It is also important for Britain, since there is the potential for asylum seekers and refugees to fill some of the labour market shortages that have been so well publicised in recent times2. Local authorities to which asylum seekers have been dispersed will therefore need to provide specialist services to facilitate their re-entry to the labour market. Staff will need to be briefed on the special needs of asylum seekers and the particular opportunities available to them. Information about jobseeking and the UK labour market ought to be provided and disseminated, as would vocational training; issues of re-accreditation need to be resolved; and local employers will have to be re-educated about the potential of asylum seekers and their legal status. Mentoring schemes and work placements might also be introduced. Moreover, funding for such initiatives will need to be sought imaginatively.

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Strengthening the national framework The final section of Another country (Audit Commission, 2000c) looked at the national framework within which dispersal policies operated. It suggested that there were three key issues at this level that would help determine the success of the policy. 1.The asylum determination procedure. Dispersal depends centrally on the Immigration and Nationality Directorate of the Home Office being able to deliver decisions on asylum claims within the six-month target period. The government itself acknowledged as much when it said “delivering faster decisions is crucial to the overall strategy” (Home Office, 1998, p 3). Without quick decisions, housing providers will be unable to manage their stock and ensure that sufficient housing is made available for new arrivals; nor will they be able to keep move-on accommodation vacant indefinitely pending decisions. Agencies will be unable to plan service provision, without knowing who will be resident in their catchment areas and for how long. 2.Funding. Asylum seekers have special needs; consequently, they can make high demands upon local services and budgets. Local authorities are naturally reluctant to commit themselves and their local charge payers to accepting such people if there is no reasonable prospect of additional funding from central government to meet extra costs. Under the old grant regime that ran from April 1999 to December 2000, local authorities were able to reclaim £140 per week from central government for each adult asylum seeker and £240 per week for each family. Even so, the LGA (2000a) calculated that many spent much more than this. For example, between April and December 1999 they spent £19 million more on asylum-seeker support than they would receive in grant income, and between December 1999 and March 2000 the deficit rose by a further £10 million. Ninety per cent of this shortfall was borne by London authorities. The new NASS scheme is designed to be more fully funded, but it will still not meet statutory education and healthcare costs, estimated to amount to £384 per annum for single adults and £4,416 per annum for families. Some of these costs will eventually be reflected in revised allocations of central government funding, but even these will not cover the full cost, nor will they produce income immediately. The report consequently recommended that central government departments be more generous with local providers of services. 3.Information sharing. The National Audit Commission suggested that, for dispersal to work seamlessly, agencies would have to share information and communicate effectively. It pointed out that central government had not been effective at informing local authorities about how many asylum seekers would be sent to them, or the socio-demographic characteristics of these people. Nor had the government kept local providers sufficiently informed about the possible abandonment of language-based clusters of asylum seekers.

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Conclusions and recommendations The National Audit Commission concluded its preliminary evaluation of the dispersal policy thus: Providing effective and appropriate services to asylum seekers and refugees represents a significant challenge for local agencies, particularly those with little history of providing support. The current arrangements offer no guarantee that the needs of asylum seekers will be met in a consistent way, due to shortcomings at both the local and national level. These weaknesses can be remedied where local agencies work together through the regional consortia to improve needs analysis, promote a more strategic approach to service delivery and give service users a stronger voice. Government needs to support these efforts by improving the national framework – speeding up the decision making process on applications and appeals, coordinating the policy framework across different departments and ensuring that the funding mechanisms cover essential local costs and secure value for money. (Audit Commission, 2000c, p 92)

Continuing commentary on dispersal The Refugee Council The Refugee Council has continued to lobby the government for changes to policy. Some of these relate to changes in the value and form of financial support, but others are specifically concerned with dispersal. 1. The Refugee Council continues to argue vociferously that dispersal denies some asylum seekers access to legal advice because of the shortage of trained immigration lawyers outside of London. It notes, for instance, how asylum seekers dispersed to Bradford had been unable to get advice because all three law practices were declining new cases. 2. The Refugee Council has pressed for greater funding for the regions so that they can build up essential education, health and other basic services, which the council still feels to be inadequately developed. It noted how a GP practice in Leicester was refusing to register any more asylum seekers, since it was already seeing more than 35 per day, on top of its usual workload. And it also drew attention to the community organisations based in London that were being asked to help in the regions because of a lack of local provision there. 3. The council has drawn attention to the gradual erosion of the policy of grouping asylum seekers by nationality (the policy of ‘language clusters’). Originally, each dispersal cluster was to have accommodated asylum seekers from only a limited range of nationalities so that each group would have the

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critical mass in a locality to create a community, and each community would also be sufficiently large to merit the provision of specialist services. The Manchester regional coordinator, for example, had expected only two nationalities per authority; in fact, the first 160 asylum seekers to arrive comprised 17 different nationalities. Liverpool received 14 different nationalities among its first 61 arrivals (Refugee Council, 2000c). 4. The Refugee Council feels that the government has abandoned its stated policy of rigorously vetting dispersal locations. Instead, it claims that the distribution of asylum seekers is simply being driven by the cost of accommodation, with larger numbers being sent to cheaper areas. The South West consortium disbanded itself because so few asylum seekers were being sent there. According to its chairman: It’s clear that the Home Office wants to direct asylum seekers to the cheapest accommodation. For cost, it’s cheaper to house those that are dispersed in the North West than it is in the South West, and its cheaper to house them in Plymouth than Exeter. (Refugee Council, 2000d, p 5)

5. The Refugee Council, among others, has claimed that, in its haste to disperse, the government is using inappropriate and inadequate housing. Clearly, some landlords are trying to exploit the government’s predicament. The council cited the case of a landlord who tried to rent to NASS a collection of caravans parked in a field. Another failed to change the electricity supply from coin-operated meters, which were unusable by asylum seekers who had very limited access to cash. And a third was even charging his tenants for individual glasses of water. More generally, however, Shelter, the charity for homeless people, completed a survey between January and March 2000 of some 154 privately rented dwellings occupied by asylum seekers (Garvie, 2001). The survey concluded that 17% of the dwellings were unfit for human habitation; 28% were accommodating more occupants than the number of bed spaces they contained; 10% had inadequate facilities; and many asylum seekers were being exposed to unacceptable fire risks. Shelter made five key recommendations, two of which are given here: • There should be an urgent and thorough review of the housing and wider support being provided by the NASS system, particularly in relation to the use of homes subcontracted from private landlords. • Realistic and effective mechanisms should urgently be put in place to ensure that NASS informs, consults and works with local authorities and other relevant agencies operating in the areas where asylum seekers are being housed. (Garvie, 2001, p 9) 6. The Refugee Council has campaigned against the administrative inflexibility of dispersal and how this can have severe consequences for individual asylum seekers. One case it cited demonstrates this clearly. In May 2000, a 25-yearold Congolese woman who was five months’ pregnant was dispersed to Liverpool. She was placed in a single room where she had to share a double

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bed with another woman she had never met. After she gave birth, Refugee Action arranged for her to move into more suitable accommodation with her baby, but it took four weeks for her vouchers to arrive at the new address. In the meantime, she was forced to use old newspapers to clean her newborn baby, as she had no money to buy nappies. Days after they discovered this disgraceful situation, Refugee Action closed its Liverpool office, blaming Home Office inefficiencies and accusing the government of failing to meet the basic needs of asylum seekers. (Refugee Council, 2000d, p 5)

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust Following public criticism of the type voiced by the Refugee Council, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust commissioned a report in November 2000 into the appropriateness, quality and quantity of services that were being provided for asylum seekers in West Yorkshire, one of the main dispersal areas. The published report was entitled Dispersed: A study of services for asylum seekers in West Yorkshire, December 1999-March 2001 (Wilson, 2001). Wilson, who undertook this research, interviewed 65 local residents and service providers in the public and private sectors, as well as 27 asylum seekers. She began by describing how the dispersal system operated, but noted that this had already begun to change in West Yorkshire by January 2001. In the early days of dispersal, NASS had made most of the decisions concerning the number of asylum seekers that would be dispersed to any given locality and when they would be sent; by early 2001, however, the West Yorkshire consortium had taken the lead. It had developed its own database, was working out what accommodation was available, and was telling NASS how many asylum seekers to send, and when. The consortium was even specifying what languages it preferred asylum seekers to speak. Such practice reflected the National Audit Commission’s recommendations that the relationship between NASS and consortia should be more equal, and that more localised decision making should be incorporated in the programme. However, the West Yorkshire consortium had gone further than this: it had also initiated the establishment of its own local reception centre to which all (non-private sector) newly dispersed asylum seekers were sent. This centre not only provided health-screening services, but also put asylum seekers in touch with local solicitors, local community organisations and local language classes. The centre could even house asylum seekers temporarily while their accommodation was being prepared. Wilson went on to note that, in addition to these important advances, local organisations were gradually gaining experience and expertise and that service provision was improving as a result. She described the consortium’s development of a media strategy and how it was consulting widely with stakeholders, many of whom had responded positively. There was no shortage of housing for asylum seekers and some of this was appropriate and located in appropriate areas. All housing providers were now consulting the police about the extent

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of racial harassment in neighbourhoods before housing asylum seekers there, and some private accommodation providers were doing more for their tenants than was required in their contracts. The One Stop Shop, which aimed to provide in one location all the support that asylum seekers would need, was also working effectively. There was also good practice in the healthcare sector: each asylum seeker was now being screened so that individual health needs could be identified, an effective interpreting service had been put in place, and there was joint working between different service providers. In education, each district had appointed an officer to facilitate access to schools, colleges and training courses, and asylum seekers were being enrolled by each of these types of organisations. This had been helped by the DfEE grant of £500 per dispersed asylum-seeker child and the acquisition of Ethnic Minority and Traveller Achievement Grant aid. In short, Wilson’s report painted a picture of considerable progress in West Yorkshire, with the dispersal system gradually bedding in. However, Wilson also enumerated some of the failings of the dispersal programme: • NASS was not observing the principle of creating language clusters, and the arrival of asylum seekers speaking very many different languages in West Yorkshire was creating problems for service providers; • the practice of holding asylum seekers in the South East of the country for long periods before dispersal made dispersal unnecessarily disruptive, especially with regard to legal advice and the schooling of children; • levels of support were different between those in private accommodation and those in consortium accommodation; • there was considerable duplication of effort: for example, several different organisations were all found to be paying for the same letter to be translated; • some asylum seekers in private accommodation were receiving little or no orientation on arrival in West Yorkshire; • NASS was not warning local service providers of the special needs of some asylum seekers; • NASS was failing to provide service providers with sufficient information about where asylum seekers were being housed and when they were arriving. Wilson concluded that, although there were clear signs that the system of dispersal was improving over time in West Yorkshire, further improvements could be made, both in this locality and nationally: • the programme needs to be better resourced; • contracts must be revised to ensure that all asylum seekers enjoy the same entitlements; • more information needs to be collected and then shared more widely and more freely;

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• local knowledge needs to be incorporated to a greater extent in decision making (for example, about where to house asylum seekers); • other regions should adopt the idea of reception centres. More specifically,Wilson wanted to see greater spending on interpreting services, English-language classes, mental health services and refugee community organisations, as well as an increase in the capitation fee for GPs. And she recommended more rigorous vetting of accommodation, a more transparent transfer system, and greater consultation with local communities and refugee communities.

Nottingham Asylum Seekers Later in 2001, Nottingham Asylum Seekers (NOTTAS) commissioned a local study that was published under the title Another country, another city (Stansfield, 2001) and looked at the experience of dispersed asylum seekers in Nottingham. This research highlighted many of the same criticisms made by Wilson in West Yorkshire. In particular, there was a very strong feeling that insufficient information was being collected by NASS and that, along with private accommodation providers, NASS was failing to share the information that did exist. Inadequate information is a problem in the City asylum support system. Without a good information system, good joined-up working and planning is not possible. While the City Council is provided with some information by NASS, this is often too vague to be useful. So for example, while the City knows where asylum seekers live, the Council has to make assumptions about family structure. (Stansfield, 2001, p 44)

Stansfield, who undertook this research, noted that, under the previous interim arrangements, the London consortium had completed a needs assessment for each dispersed asylum seeker and that these had been forwarded to the receiving authority well in advance of the individual concerned. In contrast, NASS did not complete such an assessment and no notification was given to local authorities that a new asylum seeker might have tuberculosis. Stansfield also described NASS’s failure to consult locally and its consequent inability to incorporate local knowledge in its central decision making. As a consequence, asylum seekers had been allocated accommodation in Nottingham without the knowledge of the City and some of this accommodation breached NASS’s own guidelines, for example in relation to distance from post offices or the composition of the local population. He consequently recommended strongly that there needed to be more consultation and that NASS decision making should be localised where possible. The NOTTAS report also drew attention to problems with dispersal that had not been apparent in West Yorkshire. Stansfield found that the One Stop

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Shop was overwhelmed to the point that asylum seekers were waiting hours for an appointment. Often their queries related to the non-appearance of their vouchers, an issue that should have been dealt with by NASS centrally. He also found local housing providers to be so focused on the need to respond to dayto-day pressures that they were unable to undertake more strategic work, such as consulting with local refugee community organisations. He also described how some “private contractors have become as big as registered social landlords (RSLs) but lack the skills, knowledge and experience of staff in RSLs” (Stansfield, 2001, p 34). Finally, Stansfield reported the frustration experienced by the service providers that were short of translators, interpreters and community workers – they could not legally employ asylum seekers for these jobs since the Home Office was refusing to give them permission to work.

The Home Office internal review of 2001 Valuable though it was, the National Audit Commission report was premature. It reviewed only the first few months of the new arrangements, when the Home Office was attempting to create an entirely new welfare system for asylum seekers, a new organisation to deliver this (NASS), and a new policy of no-choice dispersal across the country. Inevitably, the enormity of this project would create teething problems. The Home Office itself recognised the need to review its policies and practices in this area once they had been in operation long enough to draw sound conclusions. It began this process in spring 2001, when the Immigration Research and Statistics Service (IRSS) of the Home Office commissioned ‘Foundation Research Projects’ from six independent academics, each of whom was asked to collate evidence on the functioning of a different facet of policy. One first piece of work undertaken was to provide the context for the five others by reviewing the research literature on past and present dispersal programmes and identifying those policies that had worked in the past and those that had not (Robinson, 2001). The other five researchers then focused on separate facets of contemporary policy: • healthcare (Johnson, 2001a) and legal services (Harvey, 2001) in dispersal areas; • provision of English language tuition (Griffiths, 2001); • ‘host’ community groups (Bakewell, 2001) and refugee community organisations in dispersal areas (Fletcher, 2001). After an IRSS policy workshop to discuss the findings of this research in July 2001, Johnson then collated a synthesis report to provide the IRSS with an independent external commentary on the implementation of dispersal (Johnson, 2001b). Johnson’s synthesis identified the key findings of other researchers. All in all, the policy needed:

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• a more proactive approach to promote positive attitudes towards asylum seekers in dispersal areas; • better methods of sharing information between service providers; • stronger direction of multiagency fora to ensure the more effective diffusion of good practice so that organisations learn faster and have to rely less upon the goodwill and knowledge of certain key individuals; • centralised provision of core translated literature, such as ‘welcome packs’, to avoid the duplication of effort; • further development of the translating and interpreting services available in the regions; • mapping of local resources to avoid overlap and gaps; • clarification of local confusion about the difference between refugees and asylum seekers and their differing entitlements; • extra resources to reduce the unacceptable pressure under which grassroots workers were having to do their jobs; • extra resources for NASS to enable it to meet its own targets and give greater prior warning to service providers about impending arrivals; • more resources for the One Stop Shops that are struggling to meet existing demand for support and are unable to provide outreach services to those dispersed to more remote areas. Following these foundation projects, the Home Office then began its own internal review of the dispersal programme (this was completed by the Casework Directorate rather than the IRSS). Although the outcomes of this review were never made public, it is likely to have produced both operational changes in how dispersal was managed and strategic changes in the dispersal programme. Our sources for this information are an internal paper of October 2001 and the White Paper, entitled Secure borders, safe haven, published in February 2002 (Home Office, 2002). The White Paper is significant since it recommended a new ‘joined-up’ system for the reception, accommodation and integration of asylum seekers and refugees, and announced that an alternative to dispersal would be tried out. The paper and subsequent act have introduced a range of new centres. • Induction Centres are designed to receive, temporarily hold, and screen asylum seekers. Here, they will have their rights explained to them, and information and their details collected from them. The centres are to be located in the main ‘ports’ of entry, and are to contain between 200 and 400 principal applicants each plus their dependants. Asylum seekers will remain in these centres for between one and seven days. They will then either be dispersed or sent to the new experimental Accommodation Centres. • Accommodation Centres will house asylum seekers from application to final decision and will offer full-board accommodation, translating and interpreting services, legal advice, training opportunities and health services. Asylum seekers will be free to leave the centres (for example, to work daily on local

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volunteering projects) provided they report regularly, and they will be allowed to have guests. During their stay they will be given a small cash allowance. However, those who refuse this accommodation will receive no further assistance. Each Accommodation Centre will cater for a different mix of nationalities so that viable communities can develop within them. Each centre will accommodate 3,000 persons. The rationale for such centres was described thus: • closer contact between asylum seekers and the relevant authorities; • reduced decision times by tighter management of the interview and decision-making process; • fewer opportunities for illegal working during the application process; • minimal opportunities for financial or housing fraud; • reduction in community tensions; • facilitation of integration for those granted a status in the UK and voluntary return packages for those who are refused. (Home Office, 2002, p 57) However, even after the 2002 Act, dispersal will remain the norm for most asylum seekers: The Government will maintain the principle of dispersal away from London and the South East but develop better mechanism [sic] for consultation with, and the involvement of, local authorities and others. Taking account of the practical and financial impact on local services, we will revert to a policy of dispersal based on language cluster areas. (Home Office, 2002, p 58)

Consequently, while the concept of Accommodation Centres is being considered, the IRSS has begun the process of reviewing how dispersal can be made to operate more effectively and efficiently. It began by commissioning research that could act as an evidence base for any changes that might be proposed. This research consisted of two separate elements. The first evaluated the expectations and experiences of dispersal from the point of view of those dispersed, those providing services, and ‘local’ people living within the cluster areas to which asylum seekers were being dispersed. This research was completed by a team from Oxford Brookes University, and was headed by Roger Zetter. The second commissioned research assessed the extent to which dispersal was being undermined by the secondary migration of asylum seekers back to the South East and major cities of England. This was completed by Robinson while at the University of Wales, Swansea. Zetter’s report, entitled Dispersal: Facilitating effectiveness and efficiency (Zetter et al, forthcoming), was based on interviews with a wide range of stakeholders at national and local level. His team interviewed over 100 key informants in the main central government departments, regional consortia, local and statutory authorities, the voluntary sector and local communities, in addition to 42 asylum seekers dispersed throughout the West Midlands and the North West. Zetter

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concluded that where dispersal was fully implemented, it worked well and that there was clear evidence of excellent practice. In addition, regional consortia had proved to be effective vehicles for implementing policy. However, because of the pressures under which the system was operating, good practice was insufficiently widespread. Performance was inconsistent between consortia as well as between private sector accommodation providers, and the provision of key services for asylum seekers varied widely. There were also major shortcomings in information coordination and sharing. Zetter felt the dispersal system was overly centralised and overly bureaucratic, and lacked the coordination and sense of partnership that would produce joined-up delivery. He claimed that systemic weaknesses in the programme were impacting heavily upon underresourced voluntary sector organisations and on overstretched One Stop Shops. On the basis of this analysis, Zetter made 39 recommendations. Central to these were: • the regionalisation of NASS; • greater central coordination of the programme; • new in-region reception facilities to better orientate and brief new asylumseeker arrivals; • reversion to the principle that each cluster area should only receive a specified range of language groups; • greater funding of dispersed asylum seekers through targeted and up-front payments rather than later modifications to the Standard Spending Assessment (the method by which central government calculates how much each local authority should be given in funding); • formal recognition that consortia are partners in the dispersal process, and not simply contractors; • more comprehensive local dispersal plans involving all stakeholders; • substantial upgrading of language and legal support in the regions; • the development of proactive local media strategies; • a reconsideration of which type of organisation is best suited to provide the One Stop Shop service; • more rigorous checking of the accommodation procured by NASS and consortia; • greater consultation with, and involvement of, asylum seekers in the regional consortia; • increased funding for the development of Refugee Community Organisations in dispersal cluster areas. Robinson’s research on the effectiveness of dispersal focused on the extent to which those dispersed later migrated back to London, other major cities and the South East (Robinson, forthcoming). This study was both quantitative and qualitative in nature. The Home Office’s ASYS database was used to track the movements of some 55,930 asylum seekers and their dependants within

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the UK during the period in which they were awaiting a decision on their claim for asylum. This quantified the scale and direction of secondary migration. And a sample survey of 20 asylum seekers shed light on the causes of initial secondary migration and their future plans. Robinson found that secondary migration rates were averaging 18-20% for the cohorts that had been waiting 18 months for an asylum decision, and that the majority of secondary migration was directed towards London, Birmingham and Manchester. The reasons that most secondary migrants gave for seeking to leave the location to which they had been sent by NASS included: • racist victimisation; • a sense of being isolated from fellow countrymen; • the absence of key infrastructure (especially mosques, churches and experienced legal advisers); • a feeling that they were exposed and vulnerable because of their visible ‘differentness’. Although secondary migrants did not seem to plan their mobility (but instead relied upon snippets of advice and gossip), they were attracted to cities where there were people from their own country and culture and where they could blend in and feel safe. Robinson concluded that people could be better anchored in dispersal clusters by asylum decisions being made more quickly and by implementing a number of improvements to dispersal: • making sufficient resources available to NASS to match asylum seekers more accurately with appropriate dispersal locations; • collecting and disseminating more and better information about each asylum seeker to allow more accurate matching of people to dispersal locations; • providing more and better information about dispersal locations to asylum seekers before they are sent there; • selecting dispersal locations with greater rigour and on the basis of more detailed local knowledge. Robinson also argued that greater transparency was urgently needed in how decisions were made about whether to move asylum seekers who were unhappy with their accommodation or were suffering from racist victimisation. The respondents to the research clearly felt that a formal system existed to do this, but that it was operating ineffectively and inconsistently. In reality, no such formal mechanism actually existed. The argument that dispersal was putting some asylum seekers at risk, and that racist victimisation in dispersal areas was prompting secondary migration, has received considerable support. The Monitoring Group, an organisation that seeks to record racially motivated incidents, found that 28% of the 3,710 callers to the organisation in the year April 2001-April 2002 were asylum seekers claiming to have been attacked. Between April and August 2002, the

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proportion rose to 38%. Furthermore, these figures are thought to be a gross underestimate; a spokesman for the organisation said,“I suspect that the numbers that we have recorded are the very small tip of the iceberg” (BBC, 2002). Burrell (2002) has noted that official Home Office figures indicate that 2,000 racial attacks were inflicted upon dispersed asylum seekers between April 2000 and September 2002. He went on to note that 100 of these attacks had taken place in Sunderland, and that NASS therefore had to suspend dispersal to that city, particularly in the light of the fatal stabbing there in August 2002 of an Iranian, Peyman Bahmani. Unfortunately, Sunderland was not alone in this. Sustained violence against asylum seekers was recorded in Hull in August 2000, leading to seven Afghans being moved from Hull to Sheffield after one was stabbed and another lost an eye (BBC, 2000). A Kurdish asylum seeker living in the city had his throat cut in the same month by a gang of youths hurling racial abuse (Burrell, 2001). The Sighthill area of Glasgow also became notorious for the harassment of dispersed asylum seekers, culminating in the murder there in 2001 of Firsat Dag. Seventy attacks against asylum seekers had been recorded there in the previous 14 months. In response, dispersal to the city was halted in autumn 2001, but this did not stop 17 asylum seekers fleeing the city during one week in August, claiming they would not be forced to return. And finally the BBC (2001) reported that there were 600 asylum seekers resident in Birmingham in November 2001 who had moved there to avoid harassment in Scotland and the North of England.

Conclusion For dispersal to be used as a policy instrument, its implementation needs to be rooted in thorough research. Too many of the initiatives described in this chapter have been conviction-based – they have not been well enough researched or considered. This is particularly the case in relation to the choice of localities to which refugees and asylum seekers have been dispersed. Although successive administrations have declared wish lists of the ideal dispersal zone, they have allowed the pressures of everyday implementation to override these. Instead, dispersal has become a scramble to locate vacant, and reasonably priced, accommodation. For example, there is no evidence whatsoever that the government has ever undertaken any thorough analyses of either the housing markets or the labour markets in potential dispersal zones. This is even more glaring an oversight when one considers that almost all the data it would need is available from published statistics and is accessible through standard Geographical Information System packages. Information is another critical element in policy for mulation and implementation in this field (Robinson, 1998). Those receiving asylum seekers and those servicing their needs need to know the number of asylum seekers to be assigned to them, their nationalities and languages spoken, and how long they will be assigned to them. Furthermore, they need to know this some time

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in advance of the asylum seekers’ arrival. They also need to know what the perceived and real needs of these people are, and to have this information supplied regularly and with a high degree of accuracy. The current failure to provide the majority of asylum seekers with health screening is a case in point here, since it denies the medical profession vital information that could be used to plan appropriate responses. Furthermore, information needs not only to be collected from asylum seekers but also given to them, so that they fully understand their rights and entitlements and how to access them, and are in a position to make informed choices. Too often asylum seekers have been dispersed to towns and cities they know very little about. Their expectations are founded not on facts but gossip and rumour. Information is of little value, however, if it is not communicated freely. For dispersal policies to be effective, they need to be based upon shared access to data that are made available through well-defined and effective lateral and vertical channels of communication. Common access to online databases would allow sharing of information, and inter-agency working parties and fora would facilitate the sharing of experiences. Dispersal policies also require adequate and timely resourcing. Potential dispersal zones are much more likely to receive asylum seekers voluntarily once they know the extra cost will be met in full when services are actually delivered. The current UK system, in which Standard Spending Assessments are adjusted years after the arrival of asylum seekers, is neither adequate nor attractive; nor are policies that explicitly fail to cover all the costs that service providers will be expected to incur. The crux of this is that governments must recognise that dispersal is an inherently more expensive process than clustering, since the same services will need to be provided in a large number of different locations rather than in a small number. Finally, short-term dispersal needs to be seen as part of a longer-term process. Many of those asylum seekers granted status will remain in the towns and cities to which they are dispersed, as will many of those whose claims are unsuccessful but who are not subsequently removed from the country. Therefore, dispersal is not just a temporary solution to the short-term problem of where to accommodate asylum seekers while they await the outcome of their asylum claim, but the beginning of their long-term integration. Dispersal zones should not simply be areas where housing is cheaply and readily available and within which asylum seekers can be ‘held’ for six months, Rather, they ought to be locations suited to the long-term generation of viable and integrated ‘refugee’ communities. The volume and type of local employment opportunities needs to be taken into account when defining dispersal areas, as do the prevalence of racist harassment, the activities of the right wing, local attitudes to multiculturalism and the prior existence of co-ethnic communities.

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Notes 1

Initially, only about £10 of this support was paid in cash, with the remainder being offered in the form of vouchers which could be exchanged for prescribed items at named shops. Subsequently, and following heavy criticism of the voucher scheme, the Home Office withdrew this by the end of 2002 (Home Office, 2002). Advice and assistance in the cluster areas would be provided through One Stop Shops created by local refugee councils.

2

A recent report found that, out of a total of 236 qualified and skilled refugees and asylum seekers in London, some 42% of the former and 68% of the latter were unemployed (Peabody Trust, 1999).

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SIX

What works? Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of dispersal Vaughan Robinson

The need for evidence There is no doubt that over the past five years there has been a significant shift towards evidence-based policy. The government has been forced to abandon its conviction-based policies in favour of this sound base for new initiatives. Why? The reasons are many: increased scepticism among a more educated and questioning electorate; the greater availability of relevant social science knowledge; more frequent and intense lobbying by interest groups; rising pressure for public accountability (Davies et al, 2000). In the UK, the government has been particularly keen on this trend. The Social Exclusion Unit, the Performance and Innovation Unit and the Centre for Management and Policy Studies have all been established to ensure that policy making is modernised and based upon the rational principles espoused in the seminal document, Professional policy making for the twenty-first century (Cabinet Office, 1999). That document introduced a modern vocabulary to public policy making. Future policies were to be ‘strategic’,‘outcome-focused’,‘joined up’,‘inclusive’,‘robust’,‘flexible’ and ‘innovative’. Beyond this, it should also ‘learn from experience’ and be rooted in ‘evidence’. However, this new departure has not been without teething problems. For example, what constitutes ‘evidence’? What relative weight should be accorded to each types of evidence? And is the decision-making process really as rational as this school of thinking assumes (Nutley and Webb, 2000)? And yet there is much agreement that policy making should focus on ‘what works’. David Blunkett, then Minister for Education and Employment, declared: Social science should be at the heart of policy making. We need a revolution in relations between government and the social research community – we need social scientists to help to determine what works and why, and what types of policy initiatives are likely to be most effective. (Blunkett, 2000)

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This chapter draws upon the evidence base presented in Chapters Three, Four and Five of this volume. It distills the principles that are critical to the success of dispersal policies and the elements that are critical to their successful implementation. (This discussion assumes that dispersal policies are desirable and justified, points that will be considered further in Chapter Seven.)

The continuing demand for dispersal Several reasons can be proposed for the deployment of dispersal programmes in the three countries (the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK) considered in this report. For example: • policy makers are facing unmanageable levels of asylum-seeker immigration; • the volume of arrivals can no longer be accommodated by reception or detention centres within which asylum seekers can be carefully controlled; • dispersal acts as a deterrent to potential asylum seekers; • it is only fair that a national problem should be borne by the whole of the country rather than by parts of it; • the burden of asylum-seeker numbers in certain parts of the country is overwhelming local services, and, as a consequence, is causing local resentment and possibly racism; • it is politically unacceptable to have such concentrations of asylum seekers because they are perceived by local people as threatening. These perceptions are unlikely to change quickly, and public opinion cannot be altered significantly in the short term, given the way in which asylum seeking and asylum seekers are being represented in the popular print media. For these reasons, it seems likely that policies to disperse asylum seekers will continue to be proposed and implemented in Europe for some years to come. Therefore, it is imperative on one level that these policies are implemented as efficiently and effectively as possible while, on another level, efforts are made to change the factors that make them necessary.

Desiderata for successful dispersal Chapters Three, Four and Five of this volume suggest a number of desiderata for successful dispersal. These can be grouped under two separate headings: those factors that create the right prerequisites for successful dispersal, and those concerned with the successful implementation of dispersal.

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Prerequisites Positive media interventions Given the national and local media’s history of stereotyping asylum seekers and linking their arrival in particular localities to specific problems, it is vital that, in future, it is encouraged to take a different stance and report the issues more accurately, perhaps even more positively. Central to this positive reporting is the continual briefing of the media. It is then in a position to report developments accurately once news breaks, thereby forestalling the rumour, suspicion, fear and gossip that feeds xenophobia. In addition to providing information to the media, it is also desirable that positive images of asylum seekers are disseminated wherever possible. These images would focus on the reasons why people had to flee their countries of origin, the similarities that exist between asylum seekers and people in the country of reception, successful stories of integration, and examples of refugees who have later made some noteworthy contribution to the receiving society. Such images would begin to challenge past representations of asylum seekers as people who did not really have to leave their country of origin, but rather sought economic benefit by migrating to Western Europe to take advantage of generous welfare benefits. The media campaign surrounding the arrival of Kosovan refugees in the UK represents an archetype for such interventions, and one that produced very positive results. However, the responsibility for stereotyping asylum seekers and fanning xenophobia lies not only with the media. Politicians, too, have very public voices that help set the tone of national debate and legitimise certain ways of thinking and certain attitudes. While national debates continue to be concerned with ‘deterrence’, the ‘numbers game’,‘illegals’ and ‘bogus’ asylum seekers, asylum seekers and refugees will continue to be perceived as problems, to be avoided by localities considering hosting quotas of dispersees. NIMBYism will remain rife. Politicians therefore need to give a positive lead on these matters and change the tone and substance of public debate. Governments might also consider the use of centrally managed and funded public education campaigns, specifically designed to challenge public attitudes towards asylum seekers. The UNHCR already has considerable experience of such campaigns in Western Europe, and can demonstrate that they have been effective in changing public attitudes (albeit to a degree limited by the size of the budget at their disposal). Adequate and timely resourcing One of the most common objections of local populations and politicians to the reception of dispersed asylum seekers is that the ‘costs’ associated with their arrival are unlikely to be fully refunded by central government. This objection is relatively easy to rectify. The perceived financial ‘burden’ should be very

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visibly matched by additional income. Indeed, one might argue that one way of overcoming NIMBYism would be to overfund those localities that accept dispersed asylum seekers, so that they are seen to profit from their hospitality. This, however, underscores the point that dispersal, if it is to be desired, has to be viewed as a high-cost option in which extra resources are expended to achieve desired aims, rather than simply as a way of saving money. The current UK system, in which Standard Spending Assessments are adjusted years after the arrival of asylum seekers, is neither adequate or attractive; nor are policies that explicitly fail to cover all costs that service providers will be expected to incur. The Swedish example, where municipalities were given a lump sum for agreeing to take asylum seekers and then additional simple per capita payments, seems to be the most straightforward alternative. Collection and dissemination of information I have argued before that information is central to the process of resettling refugees and asylum seekers, and have described the information inputs that are needed for policy formulation (Robinson, 1998). Information has the same centrality for dispersal policies. First, information needs to be collected from asylum seekers as soon as they arrive so that their needs are known and their characteristics recorded. This information should then be used as the basis for dispersal decisions before being disseminated to organisations in the reception zone to which an asylum seeker is to be sent. There, service providers can use the information to monitor the provision of appropriate services. Currently, this is not always the case, with the failure to provide health screening for most asylum seekers arriving in the UK, denying the medical profession vital information that could be used effectively to plan appropriate responses. Second, information needs to be collated about the potential reception zones and then used to judge their suitability. Only then will we be sure that asylum seekers are being sent to the areas where their reception and integration stands the greatest chance of success, rather than simply those areas that have inadequate (and, therefore, vacant) housing. And third, information needs not only to be collected and analysed, but also disseminated. Chapter Five of this volume illustrated how information needs to be shared between central government and local stakeholders, and between local agencies. For dispersal policies to be successful, they need to be based upon shared access to data, which is made available through well-defined and effective lateral and vertical channels of communication. Inter-agency working parties, fora, and online shared databases would seem to be the minima here (although central government would have to resolve data protection issues relating to online databases). Chapter Five also provided examples of the problems that arise when information does not flow freely through such channels. Furthermore, information also needs to be disseminated to asylum seekers, so that they fully understand their entitlements and rights and how to access

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them. A case in point is the common perception among dispersed asylum seekers in the UK that transfers between regions are possible when in reality no formal mechanism exists (Robinson, forthcoming). Those being dispersed also need to be accurately informed about the destination to which they are being sent, its characteristics and what opportunities it presents. This seems to have been a consistent weakness in UK dispersal programmes with regard to Vietnamese and Bosnian programmes right up to the present day (Robinson, 1993a; Robinson and Coleman, 2000). Briefings still vary according to which organisation provides them and what pressure they are under at the time. In many cases, asylum seekers deny ever having received any information on the places to which they were being dispersed. Regional orientation videos would be very cheap to produce and could be overdubbed in different languages1. Selecting appropriate dispersal zones The selection of dispersal zones and cities is an example of current dispersal policies not being evidence-based when they could and should have been. It is not that the evidence is not there: a vast array of quantitative data exists with regard to social demography, labour markets, services, political complexion and housing stock of potential dispersal areas. Instead, successive administrations have declared vague wish lists of the ideal dispersal zone and have then largely ignored these in the scramble to locate vacant housing. For example, there is no evidence whatsoever that the UK government has ever undertaken any thorough analyses of either the housing markets or the labour markets of areas to which refugees or asylum seekers have been sent. Equally, discussions with NASS staff in the UK indicate that the extent of racial harassment and rightwing political activity in potential dispersal zones is not factored into decisions about cluster areas or asylum-seeker allocations. All of the data needed to include these elements in decision making are available from published statistics. For example, the annual housing returns for each local authority prepared by the Chartered Institute of Public Financiers and Accountants allows for a complete overview of the housing stock of every authority in the UK. Such statistics could be brought together through a standard Geographical Information System package, which allows the easy online overlaying and manipulation of a wide range of data. The results could then be fed into both strategic decision making (which localities should be defined as future cluster areas?) and tactical decision making (which local authorities have appropriate housing to meet the needs of a particular group of new arrivals, for example, nationalities with large families?). Improved decision making All programmes for successful dispersal of asylum seekers depend upon the national immigration service making a speedy determination on individual asylum claims. When this does not occur, the system ‘clogs up’. The most

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appropriate housing is always fully occupied; asylum seekers are consequently dispersed to progressively less appropriate localities and accommodation simply because of the pressure of numbers. Equally, asylum seekers need to be dispersed quickly from their initial ports of entry to prevent them from developing roots and connections with these areas. Chapter Four illustrated the Swedish example of how much disruption is caused when people are dispersed having lived in reception centres for 12 months or more. Empowerment Critics of dispersal in the UK, Netherlands and Sweden all claim that the policy disempowers the asylum seeker and removes a basic human right. Despite obvious practical difficulties, there is a strong ethical argument that all dispersal policies should incorporate within them some element of informed choice, and there are powerful and practical reasons for allowing asylum seekers some control over their own destiny. Denying all choice and forcing people to live in localities that they feel are inappropriate has generated large-scale secondary migration in the past, and (to a slightly lesser degree) is also a feature of the current UK dispersal programme. Such uncontrolled secondary migration prevents the government from exercising any control over subsequent patterns of settlement and hinders removal policies. It also means that service provision is made on the basis of uncertain numbers, leaving some stakeholders providing (and being funded for) services for asylum seekers who are no longer resident locally and others providing services to asylum seekers but not receiving the official resources.

Implementation of dispersal Taking the long view Although dispersal policies are often perceived as ways of temporarily accommodating asylum seekers while they await decisions on their asylum claims, policy makers need to take a longer-term view. Many asylum seekers become refugees or are given leave to remain, and the locality to which they have been dispersed therefore becomes the locality within which they are expected to integrate. However, an area that is suitable for temporarily receiving asylum seekers is not necessarily an ideal location for their long-term integration. The prime requirement for a reception zone is the availability of vacant, cheap and appropriate accommodation; the main requirements for long-term integration, on the other hand, are the availability of employment opportunities and social support mechanisms. Policy makers need to plan with both sets of requirements in mind. Otherwise, dispersal will simply be cancelled out by subsequent secondary migration. In addition, research in countries with much immigration, such as Australia, demonstrates that the siting of initial holding centres can often be critical to the later settlement patterns of a minority.

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Many new arrivals in Australia simply wished to remain near to where they were first accommodated, since that is where they became familiar with life in the new country. The same has also been the case in the UK during the cur rent dispersal prog ramme. Asylum seekers held in emergency accommodation in London in the early phases of the dispersal programme proved very resistant to policies to disperse them elsewhere. Preventing isolation If asylum seekers have to be distributed widely in order to appease xenophobics and racists, then they should not have to bear the cost of these prejudices themselves. Crucially, they should not have to suffer the practical and emotional costs of isolation. To be humane, dispersal needs to be managed so that linguistic or national clusters are created within which some sense of community and continuity can develop, even if there is constant movement of individual asylum seekers through these clusters. These proto-communities need to be adequately resourced so that they can build their own capacity to assist, advise and act as advocates. And they need to be linked to the indigenous community so that experiences and knowledge can flow freely, to the benefit of understanding and community cohesion (Cantle, 2001). Again, countries with great experience of immigration such as Canada and Australia have programmes where refugee resettlement takes place in partnership with local groups (such as faith groups) or is even sponsored by them so that isolation is forestalled and the public is educated through direct experience. However, even where such attempts have been made to create small local communities of asylum seekers drawn from particular nationalities or religions, there remains a need to ensure that these satellites do not become isolated from their wider ethnic group. New technology such as satellite TV, e-mail and the Internet are very promising in this regard, allowing community without propinquity. Teaching the use of such tools represents good vocational training. A clear example of what can be achieved in this context is provided by how diasporic groups have used these instruments to maintain single communities spread across the globe (Cohen, 1997). Finally, even with the formation of community clusters there will still be the potential for isolation, particularly from specialist services. In Britain, one of the main criticisms of the current dispersal policy is that asylum seekers sent to the regions do not yet have access to specialist immigration lawyers, who are still predominantly located in London. Furthermore, they do not receive any travel assistance or resources in order to avail themselves of these services. Whether an asylum seeker gains refugee status therefore depends more upon the geographical lottery of which region they are dispersed to, rather than the strength of their claim.

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Community involvement If dispersal is deemed essential, it would seem sensible to engage ethnic communities in this process to help ensure some shared ownership of the process. There is little evidence to date that the UK government, for instance, has consulted with ethnic communities about what might be appropriate locations for dispersed ethnic clusters and what might be optimal sizes to support necessary ethnic services, other than indirectly through their contact with refugee councils and consortia. Nor has any ‘host’ community been very involved in the process of dispersal – at least in the UK. Local support groups proved invaluable in receiving and resettling refugees during the Vietnamese programme, and while the climate of opinion towards asylum seekers has undoubtedly changed since then, it would still be advantageous to try to engage local people. Not only would individual or group ‘buddying’ arrangements of the type used in Australia under the Community Refugee Settlement Scheme offer practical support to asylum seekers (Robinson, 1993b), they could also be a catalyst to changing the negative public attitudes discussed earlier. The British Home Office has now recognised the need to engage local communities in dispersal and has commissioned research on how this might best be facilitated. It is hoped that this will inform future policy. Improved matching of asylum seekers to appropriate dispersal locations The sheer volume of people presently seeking asylum in many European countries has put settlement mechanisms (including dispersal programmes) under such pressure that their prime objective becomes simply moving people into accommodation as fast as possible and in as large a number as possible. People have to be moved from emergency accommodation or reception centres so quickly that the aim of matching people’s needs to locations and properties has to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency. This can lead to unnecessary suffering for asylum seekers and unnecessary long-term costs for the government. Asylum seekers who have had negative experiences of dispersal may integrate less readily if they are given refugee status because of psycho-social problems. They may exhibit long-term illnesses that later prevent them from working and that require intensive and expensive healthcare. For example, one of the respondents to a Home Office study of secondary migration of dispersed asylum seekers (Robinson, forthcoming) was an educated and highly sensitive middleaged professional man. This man had experienced torture and was a very active member of a minority religion which had two main churches in the UK. Presumably in haste, NASS dispersed him to a town in the UK that was 150 miles from the nearest church, and put him in a house with shared facilities with a group of uneducated teenagers of the same nationality. His life was made miserable: the teenagers played loud music throughout the night, denied him access to the kitchen, stole from him, refused to keep communal facilities clean and regularly held open parties in the house that attracted local drug

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dealers and prostitutes who then used the premises to ply their trade. The neighbourhood to which he had been dispersed had a history of racist victimisation and the man soon experienced this, through a violent and unprovoked attack that left him hospitalised and traumatised. Since his church was so far away and had been the focus of his social life, he had no one to turn to for support. He became increasingly withdrawn and suicidal. He subsequently engaged in secondary migration to be near his friends and church, but was still dependent upon medication, and distrustful of others. He continued to see a psychiatrist 18 months after arriving in the new town, and also regularly visited the local refugee council to tell them of his past experiences. He was not able to work, which, given that he had been a hospital consultant before fleeing his home country, was a loss to Britain. If the number of asylum seekers being dispersed could be reduced and bodies overseeing dispersal were to have more resources and more information, then asylum seekers could be better matched to dispersal locations and would be more likely to remain there. In this context, it is encouraging to see that one of the main purposes of the new Induction Centres announced in the Home Office’s White Paper (2002) is to collect such data, although these will only be of value if they can be speedily passed to NASS for action. Ensuring a steady flow of appropriate accommodation One of the keys to successful dispersal is a stock of accommodation that is more than sufficient for the immediate needs of dispersal. Without it, asylum seekers are held in emergency accommodation for too long, or are allocated inappropriate accommodation that either creates local tension if it is thought to be too good or secondary migration if it is thought to be too poor. Although there is currently a surplus of accommodation available for use in the UK, this has not always been the case with British dispersal programmes in the past, and may not remain so in the future. Even so, NASS staff explain that it is already becoming increasingly difficult to designate a town or city as a cluster area, because municipalities are now much more likely to challenge this decision via their MPs and the Home Secretary. If the scale of opposition continues to grow, the British central government may have to reconsider the voluntary nature of local authority participation in dispersal. Instead, it might use legal powers to impose cluster status (as the Dutch government has done) or extract voluntary commitments from most authorities as part of a formal national ‘burden-sharing plan’ (of the type used in Sweden). Note 1

Ten years ago, I published an article suggesting the production of such videos with regard to the UK’s programme for Vietnamese refugees (Robinson, 1993b). The videos have yet to be produced.

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SEVEN

Redefining the ‘problem’ and challenging the assumptions Vaughan Robinson

Introduction Dispersal policies have been introduced in Western Europe because, when asylum seekers and refugees have been allowed to choose where they wish to settle within national space, they have invariably picked a small number of cities or even neighbourhoods. In other words, they have chosen to cluster in ethnic areas. Chapter Two described how ‘the facts’ of refugee and asylum seeker clustering have been presented by government and the media; how clustering has been framed as a ‘problem’ to be solved; how the removal of a basic human right from asylum seekers made dispersal policies possible; and how dispersal programmes have been introduced as the solution to the ‘problem’ of clustering. This chapter addresses the same ‘facts’, but from a different perspective. First, it considers whether clustering of asylum seekers and refugees is an aberration that is problematic and therefore needs to be corrected. Second, it outlines the justifications that have been provided for dismantling clusters and critiques them. Third, it argues that if the reasons publicly expressed by the government for dispersal cannot really support such policies, then policy must be meeting some other need. Fourth, it suggests that dispersal is a response to a ‘moral panic’ within the indigenous population about the extent to which it feels it is losing its ability to maintain the purity of space. Fifth, the chapter then argues that if dispersal is actually a response to a different problem than the one publicly framed by the media and policy makers, we might reasonably search for alternative solutions to this new problem. At the end of the chapter, some alternative solutions to the reconceptualised ‘problem’ are discussed, which might make dispersal policies unnecessary.

Is the clustering of refugees and asylum seekers really a ‘problem’? Academic research and ‘real world’ observation tells us that there is a natural tendency for people to want to live in environments that reinforce – rather

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than challenge – their beliefs and identities. This is particularly true of those under threat from rapid change; they will naturally cleave to the security of the known and the comforting. For migrant groups, recently arrived in a new society, this basic human need is best met by living among co-ethnics. Studies in most western countries have demonstrated how migrants initially develop ethnic areas near to their main ‘ports’ of entry, the location of which is often determined by the availability of specific employment opportunities. These ethnic areas are then strengthened by the subsequent arrival of dependants and more primary migrants. Once these migrant populations exceed a critical mass and begin to consider themselves settlers rather than transients, then they stimulate the development of a wide range of cultural, religious, social and commercial institutions until the ethnic quarter is ‘institutionally complete’ (Breton, 1964). Migrants and their families can live, work and maintain their old ways in a micro-community insulated from what might be an unwelcoming or hostile new society. Once a dense network of such institutions exists, it not only services the needs of the community but also becomes a powerful magnet that attracts new immigrants who have just arrived from the source country. Over the long term, these migrant clusters can develop into one of three things: • Colonies. This is the term used by Boal (1978) to describe clusters that are temporary and that result from the need that most migrant groups have for adjustment to life in a new society. After that process of adjustment is complete, then the need for clustering also disappears. • Enclaves. These represent long-lasting clusters, where a minority is positively seeking to maintain a separate identity and culture, and wishes to transmit these to subsequent generations born in the country. • Ghettoes. This is a label given to long-lasting clusters that are motivated more by the majority population’s desire to exclude a minority than by the latter’s desire to maintain a separate identity. A wide variety of international studies has shown that migrant groups cluster in both the short or long term and that this clustering impacts upon localities – visually, culturally and socially. Wirth’s (1928) classic study of the Jewish ghetto showed that this particular religious group had clustered together in recognisable ethnic quarters in European cities since the Middle Ages and how for much of this period such clustering was out of choice and for very understandable practical, emotional and cultural reasons. Van Kempen and Van Weesep (1997), for example, have quantified the degree of segregation of minority groups in the Netherlands and within its major cities. They calculated Segregation Indices of up to 60 for Turks and 53 for Moroccans. In an earlier paper, I demonstrated how the desire to live with co-ethnics had led to the clustering of Britain’s Asian population (that is, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi), not only regionally but also within major cities (Robinson, 1996b). I had discovered a little earlier that the same forces were at work within that population, producing finely differentiated clustering invisible to the external

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gaze, such that Indian Hindus originating from the State of Gujurat were spatially separate within British cities from Indian Muslims from the Punjab (Robinson, 1986). And Musterd et al (1997) have provided a review of levels and patterns of ethnic clustering in cities across Western Europe. The clustering of minorities in residential space is therefore a ‘natural’ process arising from man’s desire for a sense of belonging, security and companionship. It is also a process that has considerable benefits for minorities. These are summarised in Box 7.1 overleaf. While Box 7.1 demonstrates that voluntary clustering can be a very beneficial phenomenon as well as one that produces significant benefits, it is also the case that clustering can be a malign phenomenon. It can impose costs on minorities, as well as isolate a minority from contact with mainstream society. While this might be the very purpose of clustering for some members of the minority, for others it denies opportunity; consequently, they are further marginalised. Depending on the location of clusters, adults and children might be denied access to infrastructure, services and opportunities. Massey and Denton (1993), for example, note that geographical clustering of black people in US cities has been responsible for the creation of a marginalised, disenfranchised and disadvantaged underclass. Not surprisingly, then, clustering is a problem for some minorities, and for some people within minorities. This is particularly the case where clustering is imposed from without or is a fearful response to threats, be they perceived or real. For example, minorities may choose to cluster in order to avoid the harsh realities of racism, harassment and discrimination. Living within an ethnic quarter where most of the social interaction will be with co-ethnics and where protected jobs, accommodation and services may be available minimises exposure to racism. Alternatively, minorities may not choose to cluster at all. Rather, their clustering may result from the direct or institutional racism of housing providers and housing gatekeepers who choose to maintain mono-ethnic neighbourhoods, thereby reflecting societal disapproval of mixed-race neighbourhoods. For example, Massey and Denton’s classic study, American Apartheid (1993), showed how white people in the US consciously created a series of mechanisms in the first half of the 20th century that were designed to exclude black people from certain neighbourhoods and channel them into others. These mechanisms ranged from violent attacks on individual black families to Improvement Associations, and the infamous restrictive covenants that they imposed. Furthermore, clustering may be reinforced or even caused by the actions of members of the indigenous population who choose not to share residential space, but instead withdraw from neighbourhoods once their community is penetrated by newcomers. An earlier study of my own, which focused on racial tipping points in the British city of Blackburn, showed clearly how the willingness of white people to buy property in an inner-city neighbourhood diminished sharply once black and Asian people formed more than 20% of all its residents (Robinson, 1986). ‘White flight’, therefore, might be an important contributory cause of ethnic clustering.

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Box 7.1: The benefits of clustering Clustering: • offers minorities a temporary haven from which they can adjust to life in a new society; • offers a value-reinforcing environment (rather than one that continually challenges values); • allows a minority to recreate diasporic satellites of the region of origin, thereby maintaining religious, cultural and social practices (Cohen, 1997); • provides a welcoming reception zone for new arrivals; • may provide a protected stock of residential accommodation, free from any discrimination or exclusion that might be present in the wider society; • facilitates the establishment of a critical mass that allows minorities to establish their own institutions and support services, which in turn allow a group to become encapsulated, if it so wishes; • creates a concentrated and captive market for ethnic goods, products and services, thereby both providing the incentive for businesses to develop to service these needs and also ensuring that sufficient demand exists to make such businesses and products viable; • heightens the perception of security, with minorities feeling they are less vulnerable to racist attacks and harassment than if they were geographically scattered; • may actually increase the security of minorities, since they are less exposed to such racism and better able to respond to it; • provides minorities with a secure base from which they can either challenge or compete with the wider society. Such incursions may be economic (for example entrepreneurs moving on from serving an ethnic clientele to a more diverse customer base outside the cluster), political (with geographical clustering giving ethnic votes greater relative importance), or, in extreme circumstances, militaristic (funded and launched from secure territory); • provides the main means by which culture and identity can be inculcated in subsequent generations. Not only does clustering ensure a high degree of social control over potentially wayward community members (often facilitated by gossip), it also ensures that the social networks within which people participate are value reinforcing; that single people are more likely to marry within the community; and that the critical mass will exist to stimulate the development of institutions capable of transmitting and maintaining culture, religion and identity; • provides a critical mass that prompts service providers to recognise specialised needs and instigate appropriate responses.

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Having acknowledged that some clustering is not voluntary and that clustering can impose costs on minorities that adopt this strategy, we are nevertheless left with many minorities that choose to cluster in ethnic quarters and consequently derive considerable benefit. Indeed, one might even draw attention to the way in which British overseas settlers have often chosen to settle in ethnic clusters, and even made ethnic clustering a central plank of their policies of colonial administration. These settlers insisted that different racial groups were confined to particular urban areas in cities as diverse as Singapore and Delhi. Contemporary western governments do not see the development of gated middle-class communities – estates of social housing or exclusive commuter villages – as being especially problematic or necessitating policy intervention, either. Why, then, is the clustering of asylum seekers and refugees framed as a ‘problem’, and one that requires urgent and wide-ranging intervention? And how do governments justify the need for intervention in a process that is both natural, produces benefits for some participants and is practised by many other members of society?

Refugee and asylum seeker clusters: common-sense justifications for doing away with them Governments rarely articulate explicitly why clustering is ‘undesirable’. Are we encouraged, then, to infer taken-for-granted justifications for dispersal policies? These implicit rationales tend to fall into two domains: equity and community relations. Equity is the principal that is most often espoused by those arguing the need for dispersal. They argue that it is unfair that any one locality or indigenous group should have to bear the social and financial ‘costs’ of having a clustered minority in their particular locality. It is argued that minorities are, by definition, a financial burden since they require specialist services, facilities and support mechanisms, such as language classes, over and above mainstream provision. Each of these extra services adds additional costs. In many cases, this thesis is further developed by pointing to the socio-demographics of the minorities concerned and arguing that their characteristics also make them more likely to be intensive users of existing facilities, services and benefits (and especially welfare benefits and healthcare services). Intensive use of these facilities, it is assumed, will lead to greater costs being incurred, either directly or perhaps indirectly through the deterioration of the quality of service to other users. Having propounded these two basic premises – minorities will need special services and will use other services more intensively – the argument continues. This represents a ‘burden’, and this burden should be distributed equitably between all localities and their resident taxpayers. Expecting only some localities to bear the ‘costs’ simply because they have, by accident, become or been designated ‘ports’ of entry is unfair and inequitable. In other words, if society has made the democratic decision to admit immigrants, then the whole of society should bear the costs.

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The alternative argument that is used to support dispersal is concerned with community relations. This argument revolves around social more than financial costs and assumes, again, that minorities impose extra burdens on local people. It also assumes that the presence of a non-conforming minority will make local people feel in some way threatened (even though they remain the majority) and that this will then fuel tension. This may manifest itself in competition over resources or in the minority being harassed, attacked or discriminated against. Either way, the argument is that the tolerance of the local population will be exhausted and it will vent its frustration. The argument also assumes that the threshold beyond which this will happen will differ for different minorities, depending upon how threatening they seem (or are assumed) to be. What might be an acceptable size of cluster for one minority will therefore be seen as a threatening size were it to be made up of another minority with different imagined or real characteristics. A further dimension to this argument is visibility. It is assumed that a minority that clusters together in numbers and also changes the landscape around it (for example, by constructing distinctive religious buildings or establishing ‘ethnic’ businesses) is likely to be more visible to the indigenous population than one that does not cluster. And when minorities are highly visible, it is often assumed that their numbers are greater than they actually are, and, therefore, that they are more threatening than they actually are. Thus, although numbers are important in themselves, they are amplified by concentration. The final dimension to the argument for community relations is that preventing clustering speeds assimilation and undermines prejudice through the debunking of stereotypes. It argues that denying minorities the right to cluster and create their own semi-autonomous communities is doing them a favour since it will encourage them to mix with the majority, participate in the majority’s activities, learn its ways and therefore become like the majority in time. The greater the degree of congruency that exists between minority and majority, the greater the likelihood of peaceful acceptance of the minority by the majority and the less likely it is that the majority will feel the need to harass or exclude the minority. Also, forcing minority and majority populations to share residential space encourages them to make contact with each other casually and regularly; this is thought to undermine stereotypes and labels and make people realise how much they share. In summary, the rationale for dispersal depends upon a philosophy that casts clustering as undesirable, characterises minorities as burdens, and assumes that it is in everybody’s interest for minorities to assimilate and mix. Dispersal, therefore, privileges the perspective of the majority population by proposing a solution that inconveniences them least: no single member of that group pays too much to support minorities, not one of them feels threatened, and no one finds themselves living in value-challenging environments as a consequence of immigration.

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Challenging the rationale for dispersal As we have seen already, one of the central notions used to justify dispersal is that minorities (including asylum seekers and refugees) are financial and welfare ‘burdens’. However, this is only true under certain circumstances. Clearly, in the case of children, the elderly, mothers, or the ill and infirm, there is the potential for the welfare costs associated with them to be outweighed by any immediate financial benefits that can be gained for society from their arrival. The same is also true in those cases where migrants are prevented from working, such as during their asylum determination procedure. However, given that research routinely demonstrates that asylum seekers are often young single men or skilled and qualified people persecuted for their convictions, and that children will grow up to become active workers, then there is the potential for asylum seekers to become economic assets. Indeed, one could argue that offering asylum to those with strong cases and who also have qualifications and labour market skills serves not only a moral purpose but also makes economic good sense since another country has borne the costs of training that individual. One study quoted by the Institute of Race Relations (2000), for example, calculated that the tax and social security contributions made by immigrants in Spain outweighed the amount the state spent on them by 187,000 million pesetas in 1998. Studies undertaken in Germany in the 1990s showed that recently arrived immigrant workers paid DM32 billion in taxes and social insurance contributions but drew out DM18 billion in benefits (Gieseck et al, 1994). Furthermore, they also paid 7.8% of all contributions into the state pension fund but drew out only 1.9% of all pension payments (Ulrich, 1994). Clearly, then, permitting immigrants to enter a country does not necessarily lead to its society incurring additional financial costs or costs that outweigh newly received income. Moreover, such cost-benefit analysis ignores the other potential (but less tangible or immediate) benefits of allowing migrants and asylum seekers entry. It ignores the number of migrants and refugees who later go on to make political or cultural contributions to their new-found home. And it also ignores the economic value generated by refugees who later go on to create businesses that employ thousands and have €million turnovers, such as Marks & Spencer and Forte Hotels in the UK. What is more, it ignores the value of cultural diversity in itself, and how this can enrich a society by adding to its language, its cuisine, its art, music and literature, its sporting culture and even its modes of thinking and ways of behaving1. Another central tenet of the dispersion argument, as we have already discussed, is equity. On closer analysis dispersal, however, is equity for some, but not for others. Clearly, it is reasonable to defend the indigenous population’s right to live in a non-threatening environment and also to protect it from having to finance the ‘burdens’ imposed by local concentrations of refugees; however, apologists for dispersal are curiously silent about the rights of the asylum seeker. Asylum seekers have committed no crime but seek only the right to live their lives without fear of persecution. And yet, they are denied many of their other

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rights by dispersal, such as the right to settle where they wish within national space, and therefore the right to congregate with co-ethnics, access specialist services, create viable and self-supporting communities, maintain many aspects of their culture and ensure that their children are brought up in such a way that they value their cultural roots, as well as those of their newly adopted home. And they are denied these rights in order to appease a bigoted but vocal minority of the indigenous population. The third tenet is cost reduction. However, by focusing on localised costs incurred only by a small number of places, dispersal underplays other costs. Dispersal is intrinsically more expensive than clustering because economies of scale are lost: • services have to be provided in a larger number of localities but to individually smaller groups; • people have to be moved around the country; • administrative systems and staff have to be duplicated in every locality to which asylum seekers are sent; • travel costs ought to be provided to allow those dispersed to access central, specialised services from their dispersed addresses. Thus, while dispersal ensures that the financial costs are not borne solely by the taxpayers of a small number of localities, it also ensures that the overall bill is inflated. For example, when the UK government introduced dispersal in the financial year 1999/2000, it calculated that central government expenditure on asylum seekers would rise by 49% (or £307 million) in the following year, even though the number of asylum applications was forecast to rise by only 11% (or 6,000) (Home Office, undated). The fourth tenet is that spreading minorities in some way stimulates positive social interaction. While this may be true under certain circumstances, it is not always the case. In their seminal study of racial relations in Sparkbrook, a mixed neighbourhood in Birmingham, tellingly entitled Race, community and conflict, Rex and Moore (1967) demonstrated that proximity does not always produce community. Rather, in Sparkbrook it produced regular conflict and the creation of new stereotypes, rather than the dismantling of old ones. Similarly, the rapidly expanding literature on rural racism in Britain is eloquent testimony to the acute racism faced by ethnic minorities when they first move into rural areas that have little prior experience of interracial living (Robinson, 2003). Studies, such as that undertaken by Jay (1992), demonstrate how isolated and vulnerable visible minorities become when they are separated from communities of co-ethnics and the support networks that they would have provided. And it also exemplifies the strength and bitterness of racism among local people in the rural South West of England, some of whom even admitted to having moved there primarily to escape multiracial living. The final tenet of the dispersal philosophy is that minority ethnic populations desire assimilation and that this is actually in their best interests. Such a view

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has long been discredited in academic discourse, and even in political debate in some countries. In both arenas, it has come to be associated explicitly with racial supremacist thinking. Yet, while few in public life would risk voicing their support explicitly for assimilation (as opposed to integration or pluralism), many are prepared to condone assimilationist thinking via the vehicle of dispersal. The very fact that minority ethnic populations around the world usually choose to cluster into recognisable communities demonstrates the strong desire to maintain and perpetuate separate ethnic identities, lifestyles and institutions. In summary, then, it could be argued that dispersal policies rest upon a series of contestable assumptions and tenets. Perhaps before governments further refine dispersal policies and academics get sucked into monitoring and evaluating them, we need to make ourselves aware of the weaknesses of the basic premises that support the edifice of dispersal policies, and, equally important, to challenge them.

Dispersal, moral panics and the purity of space The publicly expressed justifications for dispersal cannot really support such policies. Surely, then, policy must be meeting some other need. This section wonders if Western Europe is currently in the grip of a moral panic about the extent to which it feels it is losing its ability to maintain the purity of space. Is this the real reason why it has proved necessary to disperse asylum seekers and refugees, while allowing other groups to benefit from the advantages of residential clustering? In his seminal book Folk devils and moral panics, Cohen argues that: Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. (Cohen, 1987, p 9)

He continues, saying that each moral panic follows an (amplifying) developmental cycle. The key element in this is the definition and stereotyping of ‘folk devils’ who can then, legitimately, be treated in a different way to the majority society. Moral panics begin with a warning period in which it becomes clear that ‘something is about to happen’. Something does then ‘happen’ (the event) and this has an impact. Part of the impact is that participants and control agents both use culturally sanctioned signs and symbols to justify their perceptions and actions. The majority might therefore attach labels to the deviants and then associate this label with implied characteristics and behaviours (that is,

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stereotyping). The deviants or the majority might defend a particular place because of its cultural significance, or the media will convert the deviants into ‘folk devils’ who threaten conventional culture, norms and values: The deviant is assigned to a role or social type, shared perspectives develop through which he and his behaviour are visualised and explained, motives are imputed, causal patterns are searched for and the behaviour is grouped with other behaviour thought to be of the same order. (Cohen 1987, p 74)

People then form an inventory, or picture, of what happened and of their own condition. There is then a reaction in which people try to make sense of the event and decide how they feel about the broader issues around it. They are ‘helped’ in this by the media, which reduces ambiguity by interpreting events and their causes and consequences, labelling participants, and negatively symbolising the problem. The media might act as “agents of moral indignation in their own right” (Cohen, 1987, p 16) or might be the mouthpiece for political interests. The media play on the normative concerns of the public and by thrusting certain moral directives into the universe of discourse, can create social problems suddenly and dramatically. (Cohen, 1987, p 17)

Moreover, the media’s definition and reporting of news “is a main source of information about the normative contours of a society. It informs us about right and wrong, about the boundaries beyond which one should not venture and about the shapes that the devil can assume” (Cohen, 1987, p 17). As people become sensitised, they are nudged towards group-formulated and groupsupported (rather than individualised) interpretations and prognoses. Official agents of social control can then intervene on the basis of this shared negative symbolisation, which puts the target group outside the normative order. The target group, in turn, is denied fair play and due process. Social control is legitimated further by the construction of a sense of crisis or impending catastrophe that overestimates the scale and consequences of the problem, and therefore demands immediate action. However, the strict imposition of social control can play a significant role in the amplification of the sequence, with the ‘folk devils’ being made more aware of their difference, and therefore gaining in solidarity and self-consciousness. Cohen believed that each moral panic eventually blows itself out. He cited six reasons, any one of which would deflate the panic: • • • •

the media and public lose interest after a while; other news becomes more newsworthy; the public perceive that ‘something is being done about it’; the deviants become less deviant and more conformist;

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• the styles of the deviant become commercialised and are weakened by their widespread diffusion and adoption; • social control does have an effect on curbing deviance. However, one moral panic will always replace another; in this process, one group of ‘folk devils’ is exchanged for another, although: sometimes the panic passes and is forgotten, except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself. (Cohen, 1987, p 9)

There is very good evidence for believing that the developed world is currently in the grip of a moral panic about international migration in general, and immigration in particular. In his appropriately titled book, The global migration crisis, Weiner states that: in virtually every world capital, the flow of people is regarded with alarm …. The major concerns are how to deal with large-scale refugee influx …; how to integrate millions of guestworkers and their locally born children; what to do about illegal immigration; and how to cope with the growth of antiforeign political parties …. In many countries, citizens have become fearful that they are now being invaded not by armies and tanks but by migrants who speak other languages, worship other gods, belong to other cultures, and, they fear, will take their jobs, occupy their land, live off the welfare system, and threaten their way of life, their environment, and even their polity. (Weiner, 1995, p 1)

Each one of these ingredients is present in contemporary Western Europe, which is undoubtedly caught in a moral panic over immigration. In many countries, such as the UK, a siege mentality has formed: it is as if we live in a beleaguered nation, under threat from countless potential immigrants and asylum seekers all keen to enter ‘our’ national space. The media and politicians exclaim that such is the size of this ‘tide’ that it will ‘overwhelm’ our immigration controls and we will be ‘swamped’ and our identity ‘diluted’. The so-called ‘folk devils’ seeking to outwit our immigration controls are ‘bogus’ and quite prepared to resort to illegal acts to gain entry. Many might even be criminals! And while they seek to make little contribution to British society, they are happy to enjoy our welfare benefits, and take our houses and jobs! Underlying this characterisation of current asylum seeking as a crisis deserving of a moral panic is the fear that we have lost control. The government has lost control of our national borders (a core constituent of national sovereignty); immigration and the fate of the nation is now in the hands of those who massed in the Red Cross Refugee Centre at Sangatte, France, or stowaway onboard ships heading for British ports. There is the fear that we have lost

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control of our cities and are no longer able to guarantee either their cultural homogeneity or the ability to live with people who reinforce, rather than challenge, our beliefs and way of life. And there is the fear that we are gradually losing control of our neighbourhoods and that the threat has even reached the front doors of our homes. We cannot even guarantee that the next-door neighbour we see over the garden fence speaks our language, practises the same religion or even lives their life by the same codes of conduct. Nor can we be sure that we or our children will not be attacked or harassed in our own local streets by those who have sneaked past the front-line immigration defences, with their foreign diseases and their criminal inclinations. As with other moral panics, much of the hysteria surrounding contemporary immigration has been fired and nurtured by the media, which attaches labels, assumes motives and implies characteristics. Its handling of the clustering of newly arrived asylum seekers in Dover was a case in point. It reported, amplified and contextualised local tensions in such a way that Dover became a national symbol, a site of struggle, and – yet again – a bulwark against invasion. The contemporary problems of one small town were inextricably linked to a series of subliminal historical associations. The White Cliffs, the Battle of Britain and Churchill’s speeches about ‘fighting them on the beaches’ were all evoked in such a way that Dover again came to be seen as a symbol of national resolve in the face of adversity. And yet, it is not just the media that bears the responsibility for creating local and national moral panics. Politicians and public opinion formers must also accept responsibility. What about: • the blatant scaremongering of the Conservatives in the 1960s (‘If you want a nigger neighbour vote Labour’)? • the high-profile campaigning of the National Front in the 1970s? • the hard-line rhetoric of the current Labour administration? • the sabre-rattling of local Conservatives in Dover? These have all legitimated the public’s belief that immigration is a threat that has gone ‘out of control’. Asylum seekers are the new ‘folk devils’. And because they are ‘folk devils’, they can be treated in ways that citizens and other residents would find unacceptable, and have rights removed from them as if they were all proven criminals. In many ways, the current moral panic is not just about loss of control and the fears that are associated with that, but about the purification of space. Sibley (1995) argues that all societies use power, and the social control that this enables, to exclude ‘outsiders’ from certain spaces that they do not want to see ‘polluted’ by the ‘discrepant’. Separation is a part of the process of purification – it is the means by which defilement or pollution is avoided …. Spatial separations symbolize a moral order. (Sibley, 1995, p 39)

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Sibley describes how societies purify space by identifying ‘residues’ – the ‘wrong things in the wrong place’ – and by eliminating them, or else moving them elsewhere. The nation state is one of the key actors in such spatial exclusion because it values conformity and social control. It needs “the myth of cultural homogeneity … to sustain [itself and] to ensure support for domestic and foreign policies which are conducted on behalf of the nation” (Sibley, 1995, p 110). In order to justify its actions, the state … represent[s] the claims of others for space … as a threat to core values. The outside [is characterised as being] populated by a different kind of people who threaten disorder, so it is important to keep them at a distance. (Sibley, 1995, p 46)

Also implicated in spatial exclusion is the media. Its exaggerations and stereotypes support these characterisations and fuel these fears. Individuals, too, are active in trying to cleanse (local) space because they prefer purity and order – “worry is reduced [and] life inside the home is better and less intruded upon” (Sibley, 1995, p 99). The net effect is that, particularly during moral panics, “spatial boundaries … become charged and energized [and] the defence of … spaces [becomes] a more urgent undertaking” (1995, p 46). Consequently, for the discrepant ‘others’ to be permitted access to space at all, they will be relegated to socially and spatially marginal places that are “distant from the locales of the dominant majority” (1995, p 49). Valued space remains unpolluted by non-conforming or deviant groups, and the spatial pecking order continues to mirror the social pecking order. In summary, then, by bringing the work of Cohen and Sibley to bear on contemporary asylum seeking, we see that the moral panic surrounding this phenomenon is not really about asylum seekers per se. Rather, it is more concerned with a belief that the state has lost control of immigration and, as a result, can no longer guarantee and protect the purity of national or local space. In other words, the moral panic of asylum seeking is actually about British and European insecurity about their identity and their ability to create societies and places that will reinforce, rather than challenge, existing values, beliefs and ways of life.

Reconceptualised problem, reconceptualised solutions The prognosis, then, is this: dispersal is less about the prohibitive expense of clustering or putting too much strain upon local services than it is about soothing the fears of white voters who want to feel that immigration, and who is allowed to live in ‘their’ cities, is under control. If this prognosis is correct, then we might reasonably seek out alternative solutions. How might we make the clustering of refugees and asylum seekers seem less threatening? And how

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might we soothe the insecurities of the indigenous population that have led to its demand for dispersal policies? There are measures that would reduce the size of the asylum seeker population and relegitimise it. Would such measures help to diminish the perceived threat that has triggered the contemporary moral panic?

Relegitimising asylum seeking Governments currently claim that economic migrants are abusing the asylum route because they think they stand a better chance of getting into Western Europe by this means rather than by applying as labour migrants. Would-be economic migrants, therefore, become bogus asylum seekers, and the proportion of asylum seekers gaining refugee status plummets since few have any real claim. The public then takes the rejection rate at face value and stereotypes all asylum seekers as bogus, and perceives the asylum migration channel as illegitimate. In order to relegitimise asylum seeking, the roles of the different migration channels need to be more explicitly separated in the public’s mind. We need to emphasise and publicise the fact that legal labour migration is a necessary and desirable phenomenon that aids economic growth and allows our public services to function better. And we need to remind ourselves, the public, that there is nothing wrong with fleeing persecution; that it is to our credit as a nation that we offer the victims of such persecution a safe haven. In other words, we need to establish asylum seeking as a legitimate migration channel. In addition, a situation in which labour migrants, illegal immigrants and bogus asylum seekers all manage to find work in the UK should alert us to the fact that there are both sectoral and geographical shortages of labour in the UK. These shortages could easily and usefully be eased by selective loosening of legal labour migration. This would not only benefit the economy but also reduce the temptation for people who are denied entry through this migration channel to seek entry instead through the asylum channel, a course of action that has debased this channel’s legitimacy. There are already clear signs that the UK government, at least, has recognised part of this conundrum and is gradually easing legal labour migration, although it has yet to match this with public endorsement of the legitimacy of the asylum channel. In addition, part of the perceived threat posed to the indigenous population by asylum seekers relates to the ‘stock’ already in the country, rather than those arriving through this migration channel. The stock is, of course, affected by inputs (immigration); but it is also shaped by how long people stay in the destination country and how many subsequently leave. Public fears could be allayed by: • tighter management of the stock of asylum seekers by means of faster decision making (brought about by greater efficiency and much improved IT, rather than the removal of asylum seekers’ rights);

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• the greater voluntary return migration of asylum seekers awaiting the outcome of their claims to source countries where the threat of persecution has passed; • a more efficient removals system for those who are abusing the system; • a more concerted action against the facilitators who steer people into applying through the asylum channel. Again, there are clear signs that each of these elements has been recognised in the UK. Thus far, however, resources have been insufficient to have any significant impact on outcomes. In Britain, the wait for a decision on asylum claims in the UK is still more than 12 months. The publicly stated target is six months. And worse, the Immigration and Nationality Directorate of the Home Office (IND) is still struggling with ineffective IT systems and too few case workers. Less than 10,000 failed asylum seekers were removed from the UK last year, although the government set a target of 30,000 removals and gave negative asylum decisions to some 97,500 applicants and their dependants (Migrationwatch, 2002). Voluntary repatriation schemes in the UK that offer training, grants and cash payments to asylum seekers who are prepared to return to their homelands attracted less than 1,000 takers last year. Nevertheless, it is also clear that the UK government recognises some of these failings and is trying to act or assemble an evidence base for future policy initiatives. For example, it is in the process of changing the law to allow facilitators to be punished more effectively. The new law will raise the maximum prison sentence for people traffickers from 10 to 14 years. And it has recently commissioned research from a multi-national team led by Eurasylum on how to make UK removals policies fairer and more effective by identifying good practice elsewhere in Europe.

Changing the tone of the national debate While some governments have been anxious to stimulate a national debate about legal labour immigration in the full knowledge that their countries face a future labour shortage and an even earlier pension and welfare state funding gap, they have often failed to encourage any parallel debate about asylum seeking. As a result, the public remains remarkably ill informed about the reasons why many people are forced to leave behind their homes, livelihoods and loved ones, and the horrific experiences some have had in their countries of origin and en route to the UK. Instead, their opinions continue to be formed by the nature of public debate, led as it is by the agenda setting of politicians. Politicians shape the nature and content of national debate and legitimise stereotypes and attitudes. As long as they continue to frame the debate in terms of ‘deterrence’, numbers and ‘illegal immigration’, and try to distinguish between the undeserving ‘bogus’ asylum seekers and the deserving but far less numerous ‘real’ ones, asylum seeking will continue to be seen as a threatening and negative phenomenon.

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Managing the media Chapters Two and Five of this volume contain some examples of the way in which the British media has stereotyped and stigmatised asylum seekers to the point that their unfair treatment almost appears well deserved. And a recent round-up of media handling of the issue in Europe, undertaken by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR, 2000), demonstrates that the UK is far from unique. The IRR notes how the media and the state have cast dispersal as a policy of deterrence designed to curb the number of asylum seekers seeking entry to Europe. The language used in debating the policy is overwhelmed by terms of deterrence: ‘waves’ of ‘bogus’ asylum seekers (or ‘scroungers’) are ‘swamping’ our national culture. Clearly, then, challenging the media’s representation of ‘threatening’ asylum seekers is central to deciding once and for all whether dispersal policies are at all necessary. ‘Good practice’ implies responsible and non-xenophobic reporting of asylum matters as a basic and central principle. Gurbux Singh, the UK’s Commissioner for Racial Equality, has already challenged the media to act more responsibly towards minority ethnic populations and asylum seekers. In a speech to the National Union of Journalists in October 2000, he argued that “you, as journalists, have huge influence on the public. You have the power to change things, change attitudes, change perceptions. I am now asking you to use that power to change the Britain we live in” (Singh, 2000). He went on: Words have influence. Words have power. Words can do tremendous damage …. So the words you write, the tone in which you report a story, the headlines that appear, all influence public opinion. They all have an effect on public attitudes. They have an effect on the way people treat each other …. Media reporting of an issue can generate distrust and hostility between different racial groups. And if tensions like that are allowed to run out of control, innocent people suffer as a result. (Singh, 2000)

Talking about the way in which the two local papers in Dover had reported the clustering of asylum seekers in the town, he then said: If people in a position of influence … send out a message, even an implicit message, that it is OK, in this day and age to be racist, to discriminate against others, to victimize and bully them, to commit violence and other acts of grievous bodily harm, that gives a green light to some of the worst elements in our society. So we have a responsibility to lead public opinion, and the media play a crucial part in that process.

While appealing to the better nature (and commercial interests) of journalists represents one way of improving media reporting of the asylum issue, another is through direct intervention and positive media management. A good example of successful direct intervention is the joint campaign of the Welsh Refugee

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Council and the Media Studies Department of Cardiff University. This consortium employed a worker for six months to improve relations with the local media and to draft and circulate positive stories about asylum seekers, their arrival in Cardiff and their contribution to life in the city. An example of positive media management would be the Home Office’s Positive Images Group of the National Integration Forum. However, despite these examples, there are still clear signs that the need to shape media reporting has not been recognised at all levels: NASS staff, for example, admit that their relations with the media tend to be reactive rather than proactive. Information tends to be given out and comments made only when a local or national ‘crisis’ had arisen; the intention of the NASS is not yet to forestall such crises.

Promoting the positive value of asylum seekers Furthermore, few politicians and even fewer in the media talk about the potential of asylum seekers to the country and the locality in which they live. Given that refugees are known to be well educated, there is surely scope for recognising their value as well as their costs2. The public mindset that sees asylum seekers as burdens needs to be challenged through public education campaigns. These should be centrally managed and funded and would be specifically designed to change public attitudes towards asylum seekers. In this way, local communities and society at large could come to more fully appreciate their civic and moral duty to assist those who have fled from persecution (as they did in the Vietnamese programme), and also realise the many benefits that can arise from having refugees in their communities. A prime example of this is the social mobility that Ugandan Asians have won since arrival in the UK (Robinson, 1994) and their contribution to the revitalisation of local economies, such as Leicester, where Asians had already created 1,446 businesses by 1993, employing some 10,000-20,000 people (CAG, 1994).

Changing public perceptions through the educational system If we accept that ignorance is one of the main causes of fear of others, then education provides a potentially powerful tool for undermining negative attitudes towards asylum seekers. Since attitudes are often formed early in life, then the education system offers a means of shaping them for the better. Refugee Awareness Week in the UK, and the activities that are associated with it, provide an excellent example of what can be achieved, even informally. The schedule of events organised in Swansea for a recent Refugee Awareness Week allowed children and young adults to hear directly from asylum seekers, enjoy an entertaining play about the causes and experiences of forced migration, meet with asylum seeker children, enjoy art that portrayed the experiences of asylum seekers, participate in a debate about the positive benefits of immigration, hear the music of a culture that had been brought to the area by asylum seekers and

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learn how to do one of their dances, and play in a football match against an asylum-seeker team. While these activities were taking place, teachers were attending a series of lectures designed to challenge stereotypes; provide accurate information about asylum seeking, asylum seekers and Britain’s role as a place of sanctuary; and highlight the achievements of refugees who had come to the UK in the past.

Community involvement, active engagement and sponsorship policies One of the issues with which current policy has to contend is that asylum seekers are generally thought by the public and by other stakeholders to be someone else’s ‘problem’: • • • •

someone else admitted ‘them’; someone else agreed to have ‘them’ settle here; someone else should provide the services ‘they’ need; someone else should pay for these services.

In other words, there is very little public ownership of the national policy of giving asylum seekers sanctuary in the UK. It is something that is done ‘to us’ rather than ‘for us’. Granting asylum is ‘not in our name’. One way of encouraging public re-engagement with the asylum issue and the policies that go with it would be to rediscover refugee sponsorship schemes. These have worked successfully in Canada and in Australia in the past (Department of Immigration, Local Government and Ethnic Affairs, 1989) and were implemented in a different form through local volunteer groups during the Vietnamese programme in the UK. Perhaps there is scope for the rediscovery of such programmes, especially in light of the contemporary push for active citizenship.

Easing local pressures There are also measures that could be employed to ease local insecurities and fears. These might remove the need, therefore, to disperse asylum seekers from voluntary clusters. The use of directly funded and free-standing accommodation centres (note: not detention centres) with their own facilities would alleviate many of the pressures on local authorities near ports of entry. This would mean that the ‘burden’ of financing the settlement of asylum seekers would be borne by central government (and therefore the entire population) and not by the charge payers of specific localities. Such centres have been a successful part of Swedish and Dutch asylum policy for some time, and have also been used in the UK in the past to cope with the unexpected arrival of quota refugees after particular international crises. Indeed, such is their value that the UK has just committed itself to experimenting with such accommodation centres as an alternative to dispersal.

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Alternatively, if asylum seekers naturally choose to cluster in certain parts of the country and within certain cities, then some of the fears of local populations could be assuaged by speedily and deliberately reimbursing the relevant local authorities for servicing the needs of the new asylum-seeker populations. Indeed, one could even go further and argue that service providers in these areas should be deliberately over-funded so that the arrival of asylum seekers could be associated with improvements to services rather than their perceived deterioration. Moreover, if this over-funding of providers could be made public, then asylum seekers might not be seen as ‘burdens’ at all. Such ‘compensation’ for helping asylum seekers would need to be generous, promptly provided and clearly hypothecated to allay local political and public fears about the ‘drain’ of the local asylum-seeker burden.

Conclusion Dispersal is nothing more than the necessary response to appease a fearful white electorate and satisfy the local charge payers in those localities that naturally attract asylum seekers in the absence of planned dispersal. This chapter has discussed and aired alternative solutions to these perceived problems: • relegitimising the asylum route to migration; • allowing the voluntary clustering of asylum seekers in places of their own choosing, but ensuring that service providers in these localities are promptly and very generously funded so that local people do not lose out from giving refuge to asylum seekers; • constructing accommodation centres that can look after all the needs of asylum seekers during the period in which they await the outcome of their asylum claim; • re-engaging the public in the process of selecting and resettling refugees; • challenging the public mindset that sees asylum seekers as burdens through public education, positive and more responsible media reporting, and changing the nature of national debate. But none of this will happen as long as politicians of all persuasions fail to give a positive lead, and prefer, for the sake of short-term political gain, to stoke the moral panic that currently exists about ‘our’ ability to maintain the purity of our national and local space. Notes 1

For examples of all these positive contributions made by refugees to adopted countries, see the Refugee Council’s (1997) study of the UK.

2

Carey-Wood et al (1995) found that one third of their national sample had universitylevel educational qualifications.

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195

Index

Index Page references for figures and tables are in italics; those for notes are followed by n

A A status 41, 42, 55-6, 56, 57 Academics for Chile 113-14 Accommodation Centres (UK) 142-3 ACs 43, 48, 49, 55, 61 Adams, B.N. 111 Additional Accommodation for Asylum Seekers (Netherlands) 43, 45, 48, 52, 61 Adviescommissie Onderzoek Culturele Minderheden (ACOM) 29, 37 Afdeling Spreiding en Plaatsing (ASP) 52 Afghanistan 28, 83, 85 Africa 5, 6, 83, 103, 110 agenda setting 10-12 AGFA 75-6 Ahmad Ali, H. 35, 36 Algemene Rekenkamer 61 Aliens Act 1905 (UK) 103 Aliens Appeal Board (Sweden) 79 AMA-VTV status 42 American apartheid (Massey and Denton) 161 Amsterdam 34, 35, 36-7, 48, 59 Andersson, R. 65, 78, 90, 93 Another country (National Audit Commission) 126-36, 132 Another country, another city (NOTTAS) 140-1 Antilleans 27, 34-5 Antwerp 8 Appelqvist, Maria 65, 68 Arbetsmarknadsstyrelsen (AMS) 68, 71, 75, 76, 79 Argentina 72 Arlanda International Airport 74 Arnesson, Anders 10 Arnoldus, M. 50 Asia 5, 6, 81, 83 see also individual countries Asians 160 see also Ugandan Asians assimilation 105, 107-8, 164, 166-7 Association of Chief Police Officers 130 Assyrians 71

asylum chain 61 Asylum and Immigration Act 1999 (UK) 104, 123, 126 asylum myths 11, 15-16 asylum seekers 21, 165 European view 5-6 national debate 173 Netherlands 27, 28, 38 promoting positive value 175 relegitimising 172-3 spatial concentration 3, 6-10, 21-2 Sweden 81, 82, 85 UK 4 voice in media 11, 14-15 Asylum Seekers Centres (Netherlands) see AZCs Asylum Seekers Reception Service (Netherlands) see COA Audit Commission (UK) 7, 9, 125 Australia 154-5, 156, 176 Austria 67, 70 AVOs 43, 45, 48, 52, 61 AZCs 39, 42-3, 45, 46, 52 length of stay 61 location 48, 50, 51, 57-8 Azerbeidzjan 28

B Bahmani, Peyman 146 Bakewell, O. 141 Bangladesh 83, 85 Bassam, Lord 20 BBC 146 bed, bath and bread regulation 38-9 Beemer, J. 34 Belgium 8, 67 Bernadotte action 67, 70 Besluit Beheer Sociale-Huursector (BBSH) 54 Biervliet, W. 35 Bik, M. 37 Birmingham 107, 109, 145, 146, 166 Blackburn 161 Blunkett, David 149 Boal, F. 160

197

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Board for Health and Social Affairs (Sweden) 71 Board for Labour Market Issues (Sweden) 68, 71, 75, 76, 79 Board of Migration (Sweden) see SIV Böcker, A. 41, 42 bogus asylum seekers 11, 12, 21, 121 Bolivia 72 Bosnia-Herzegovina 28, 83, 85 UK refugees 100, 101, 117-20 Botkyrka 10 Boyle, Lord (Edward) 105 Bradford 109, 136 Breton, R. 160 Breunissen, K. 35, 36 Bristow, M. 111, 112 British Council for Aid to Refugees 113, 114 British Red Cross 117, 120 Bronkhorst, D. 25, 27 Browne, A. 113, 115 Bruce-Lockhart, Sandy 20 Brussels 8 Bulgaria 83, 85 burden sharing 5, 23 Burrell, I. 146

C Cabinet Office (UK) 149 CAG Consulting 175 Camden 8 Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF) 17, 21 Canada 155, 176 Cantle, T. 105 Cardiff 7 Cardiff University 174-5 Carey-Wood, J. 7, 8, 177n Cebeon 56, 58 Centraal Bureau Uitvoering Vestigingsbeleid 35 Central Reception in Dwellings regulation (Netherlands) 45, 45, 46, 48, 60, 61 Centre for Management and Policy Studies (UK) 149 charities 111, 116, 120-1 Children Act 1989 (UK) 8, 125 children see unaccompanied minors Chile 71, 72, 83, 85, 113-15 Chile Committee for Human Rights 113-14 Chile Solidarity Campaign 113-14

198

China 28, 83, 85, 103 Christian Aid 114 Christian Democrats (CDA) (Netherlands) 6 clusters see spatial concentration COA 43, 45, 46, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63 COW regulation 45, 46 dispersal 52-3 reception centres 48, 49, 50-1, 50 Cohen, B. 106-7 Cohen, R. 155 Cohen, S. 167-9, 171 Coleman, C. 119, 153 Coleman, P. 11-12, 14 Colombia 83 colonies 160 Commissariaat voor de Ambonezenzorg (CAZ) 32, 33 Commissie Geelhoed 47 Commissie Verwey-Jonker 32 Commission on Immigrant Policy (Sweden) 71-2, 74, 97 Community Charge 9-10 community involvement 156, 176 Compass Partnership 120, 121 concentration see spatial concentration Conservative Party (UK) 6, 105, 111, 117, 170 Dover 9, 20 cooperation 69 COW regulation (Netherlands) 45, 45, 46, 48, 60, 61 Cuba 83, 85 Cullingworth Committee (UK) 107 culture policy 30 Czech Republic 83 Czechoslovakia 70, 72

D Dag, Firsat 146 Daily Mail 12, 13-14, 15, 16, 17 Daily Telegraph, The 17-18, 20 Davies, H. 149 Deakin, N. 106-7 decision making 153-4 Delf, G. 110 Denmark 67, 70 Denton, N. 161 Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) (UK) 134, 139 Department of Education and Science (DES) (UK) 105-6, 114

Index

Department of Immigration, Local Government and Ethnic Affairs (Australia) 176 Departure Centre (Netherlands) 45, 46, 48 descriptive conglomerations 11 Dienst der Domeinen 34 Dines, M. 112 disabled persons 71 dispersal 171, 177 challenging rationale 165-7 continuing demand 150 desiderata for success 150-7 moral panics and purity of space 167-71 rationale 164 see also individual countries Dispersal: Facilitating effectiveness and efficiency (Zetter et al) 142-3 Dispersed: A study of services for asylum seekers in West Yorkshire (Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust) 138-40 Dodd, V. 9 Dover 3, 7, 9-10, 170 media 16-18, 174 public opinion 20-1 Dover Express 16-17 Dover the land of plenty 21 Dublin Convention 5, 52, 60 Dutch Association of Municipalities 47, 52, 60-1 target-setting 53, 54, 55 Dutch East Indies see Indonesia Dutch Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute 25-6 Dutch Refugee Council 38, 57, 60

E East Africa 110 Eastern Europe 72, 77 see also individual countries economic migrants 5, 11, 12, 15, 172 education changing public perceptions 175-6 UK 105-6, 134, 136, 139 Eindhoven 36 Ekberg, J. 74, 100, 101 El Salvador 83 Ellemers, J. 26, 31 emigration Sweden 67 UK 103 employment 22

Netherlands 63 Sweden 74, 75, 79, 100, 101 UK 134 see also labour migration empowerment 154 enclaves 160 Enschede-Almelo 34 Entzinger, H. 32 equality 69, 165-6 Ericsson, U. 18 Eritrea 77 Estonia 67, 70 ethical arguments 37-8, 57, 81, 101, 154 Ethiopia 72, 83, 85 ethnic clusters 136-7, 139, 155, 157 ethnic minorities Netherlands 29-31 UK 104, 105-8 Eurobarometer 19-20 Europe in global refugee system 3-6, 21 refugees 83 European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) 1, 63 European Union 5 Eurostat 4, 5 Eurosylum 173 evidence-based policy 149

F Fevre, R. 104 financial costs 8-10, 23, 151-2, 163, 165, 166 Sweden 98, 99 UK 135, 147 Finland 67, 68, 70 Fletcher, G. 141 Flett, H. 107 folk devils 167-9, 170 Folkestone Herald 16, 17 Foreign Office (UK) 109 former Yugoslavia labour migration 27, 68 refugees 27, 28, 70, 71, 72, 79, 81, 83, 85 France 103 freedom of choice 69, 107

G Garvie, D. 137 Gatwick 7 Gävle 76

199

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Geelhoed Commission 47 Geneva Convention 38, 71 Germany 67, 70, 165 Gerrichhauzen, L. 35 Ghent 8 ghettoes 160 Gibney, M. 129 Gieseck, A. 165 Gilze-Rijen 52 Glasgow 146 Glazer, N. 107 Goldman, T. 17, 18 Gooszen, A. 38 Götaland 73 Gothenburg 10, 73, 89-90, 89 Greece 27, 67, 72 Greenwich 7 Griffiths, D. 141 Groenendijk, J. 36 Guardian, The 12, 21, 126 Gustavsson, B. 74 gypsies 108

H Hackney 7 The Hague 34, 35 Hale, S. 7, 116, 117 Halfacree, K. 108 Hammar, T. 8 Hammarstedt, Mats 99, 99 Hammersmith and Fulham 9 Hardwick, Nick 126 Hargreaves, A. 11 Haringey 7 Harvey, C. 141 healthcare 133, 136, 139, 147 Heathrow airport 10 Hillingdon 8, 10 Holmes, C. 104 Home Office (UK) 126, 148n, 156, 166 Bosnians 118 Chileans 114-15 Immigration and Nationality Directorate 123, 129, 135, 173 internal review 141-6 Kosovans 120 and media 17, 175 Poles 109 Vietnamese 117 Hong Kong 115, 116 housing 23, 157 Netherlands 36, 38-40, 39 repatriates 31

200

Surinamese 34, 35 target setting 53-5, 58, 62-3 Sweden 72-3, 74, 81, 86, 96 UK 22, 107, 124 Chileans 114 Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust 138-9 National Audit Commission report 132-3 NOTTAS report 141 Refugee Council 137 Ugandan Asians 112 Vietnamese 116, 117 Housing Acts (Netherlands) 37-8, 54, 55, 57 Huitzing, A. 59 Hull 146 Hulshof, M. 39, 61 Hungary 67, 70, 71, 72, 83 Husbands, C. 105

I immigration 41 moral panics 169 Netherlands 6, 25, 26-7, 29, 36 Sweden 65, 66-71, 80, 86-7, 88 UK 6, 103-4, 110, 111 Immigration and Asylum Act 1996 (UK) 8 Immigration and Asylum Bill 1999 (UK) 22-3 Immigration and Nationality Directorate (UK) 123, 129, 135, 173 Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) (Netherlands) 43, 61, 62 Immigration Research and Statistics Service (IRSS) (UK) 141, 143 Independent, The 12 India 85, 103, 104, 160-1 Indonesia 25, 26 see also Moluccans Induction Centres (UK) 142, 157 information 146-7, 152-3 Institute of Race Relations (IRR) 165, 174 integration 154-5 Netherlands 30, 40, 60 Sweden 86, 87-8 UK 107 Inter-agency Management Group (IaMG) 120 Iran 5, 28, 72, 76, 77, 83, 85 Iraq 28, 72, 76, 77, 83, 85

Index

Ireland 103-4 isolation 155 Italy 27, 67, 103

J Jay, E. 166 Jews 66, 70, 103, 160 Johnson, M. 141-2 Joint Committee for Refugees from Vietnam 116 Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants 126 Joint Working Group for Refugees from Chile (JWG) 114-15 Joly, D. 114 Jones, P. 105 Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust 13840

K Kampuchea 72 Kay, D. 113, 115 Kaye, R. 6, 10, 12 KCO regulation 46, 62 Kensington and Chelsea 8, 9 Kent 9, 17 KNIL 26 Kohler, D. 110 Kornalijnslijper, N. 35, 36, 38 Kosovans Netherlands 52 Sweden 77, 86 UK 120-1, 129 Kropman, J. 34, 35 Kruyt, A. 30, 36, 37 Kuiper, H. 25 Kumar, S. 112 Kundnani, A. 22

L labour market participation see employment labour migration 172 Netherlands 26-7, 29, 34, 60 Sweden 67-8, 71, 73 UK 103-4 Labour Party (UK) 6, 170 Lagen om mottagande av asylsökande (LAM) 81 Lambeth 7, 8 language 69-70, 134

language clusters 136-7, 139, 155, 157 Latin America 71, 72, 83 see also individual countries Latvia 67, 70 Lebanon 71, 72, 77, 83, 85 Leenders, M. 29 Leeuwarden 56 legal support 133, 136, 155 Leicester 112, 113, 121, 136, 175 Leuven 8 Levin, M. 115 Liberals (VVD) (Netherlands) 6 Liege 8 Lithuania 67 Liverpool 122, 137 local authorities 157 Netherlands 30-1, 32, 33-4, 35, 36, 40, 47 reception centres 50-2 target-setting 53-7, 56 Sweden 65, 75, 76-7, 79, 88, 96, 98 UK 8-9, 122-3, 124, 125 Kosovans 120-1 National Audit Commission report 129, 130-1, 135 Ugandan Asians 111 Local Government Association (LGA) 7, 9, 22-3, 122, 123, 125, 135 London Bosnians 119 children 8 Chilean refugees 114, 115 clusters 7, 8 Poles 109 secondary migration 145 spending 9, 10 Ugandan Asians 112, 113 Vietnamese 117 London Asylum Seekers Consortium 123, 125 Lord Chancellor (UK) 133 Lundh, C. 68 Luttelgeest 52

M McCart, M. 112 Macedonia 86 Mail on Sunday 16, 19 Malmö 10, 73, 73, 89-90, 89 Manchester 109, 112, 137, 145 Marett, V. 110 Massey, D. 161 matching 156-7

201

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Matelussi, I. 32 media 3, 18, 22, 150 managing 174-5 moral panics 168, 170 Netherlands 27 positive interventions 151 spatial exclusion 171 Sweden 68-9 UK 10-11, 20, 122-3, 129-30 agenda setting 10, 11-12 asylum myths 15-16 asylum seekers’ voice 14-15 Dover 10, 16-18 negative reporting 12-14 Ugandan Asians 111-12 Medicinalverket/Socialstyrelsen 71 Meloen, J. 51 Memorandum on Minorities (Netherlands) 29-30 migration 22 see also emigration; immigration Migrationwatch 173 Ministry of the Interior (Netherlands) 29, 40, 46, 57, 58, 61 asylum chain 42, 45 residence permits 42 target-setting 53, 55, 56, 57 Ministry of Justice (Netherlands) 41, 60, 61 asylum chain 42, 43, 47 reception centres 48, 50 Ministry of Labour (Sweden) 68, 75 Ministry of Labour (UK) 109 Ministry of Spatial Planning, Housing and the Environment (VROM) (Netherlands) 37, 40, 57, 58 asylum chain 45, 47 residence permits 42 target-setting 53, 54, 55 Ministry of WVC (van Welzijn, Volksgezondheid en Cultuur) (Netherlands) 40, 41 asylum chain 42, 43, 47 target-setting 53, 54 minority policy see ethnic minorities Mollard, C. 12, 13, 14, 15 Moluccans 26, 29, 31-4, 33, 36, 37, 60 Monitoring Group 145-6 Moore, R. 166 Moors, H. 26 moral panics 167-71 Morocco 27, 160 multiculturalism Netherlands 26

202

Sweden 69-70 UK 20 municipalities see local authorities Munniksma, R. 47 Musterd, S. 27, 60, 63, 161 Muus, Ph. 39, 39, 63

N National Assistance Act 1948 (UK) 8 National Association of Citizen’s Advice Bureaux (UK) 130 National Asylum Support Service (NASS) (UK) 123-4, 129, 153 Home Office internal review 141, 142, 144, 145, 146 Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust report 138, 139 media 175 NOTTAS report 140, 141 Shelter recommendations 137 transitional arrangements 124, 125 National Audit Commission (UK) 126, 127-36, 132, 141 National Front (UK) 170 NCIV 54 negative measures 59-60 Netherlands asylum seekers 6, 28 dispersal 25, 31, 40-1, 58, 62-3 administrative mutterings 47-8 appraising 60-2 asylum chain 42-3, 43, 44, 45-7, 45, 46 asylum seekers 52-3 measures and goals 59-60 Moluccans 31-4, 33 New Admittance and Reception Model 41 reception centres 48, 49, 50-2, 50, 176 residence permits 41-2 status holder and target setting 53-7, 56 Surinamese and Antilleans 34-5 temporary end 35-8 within target setting 57-8 housing 38-40, 39 immigration 6, 26-7 labour migration 67 media 18 minority policy 29-31 segregation 160 Netherlands Antilles 27, 34-5

Index

New Democracy (Sweden) 80 New Foreigners Act 2001 (Netherlands) 60 New York protocol 71 Newham 7 newspapers see media NGOs 97, 98, 102 NIDI 25-6 Niessen, J. 30, 36, 37 Nieuwe Toelatings- en Opvangmodel (NTOM) (New Admittance and Reception Model) 40-1, 53, 60, 63 asylum chain 42-3, 43, 44, 45-7, 45, 46 Norrland 73 Norro, P. 8 Norway 67, 70 Nota Minderhedenbeleid 29-30 Nottingham 109 Nottingham Asylum Seekers (NOTTAS) 140-1 Nutley, S. 149 NWR 54

O Ockenden Venture 113 OCs 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 52 Office for National Statistics (ONS) 4 Ohlson, M. 100, 101 Olsson, R. 68 One Stop Shops 139, 140-1, 142, 148n opinion polls 19-20 Ostendorf, W. 60

P Pakistan 5, 85, 104 Palme, Olaf 71 Panayi, P. 105 Parliamentary Audit Office (Sweden) 97 Patterson, S. 109 Peabody Trust 148n Peach, C. 103, 104, 105 Pearl, M. 133 Penninx, R. 60 Performance and Innovation Unit (UK) 149 Peru 83, 85 Poland refugees Sweden 71, 72, 83, 85 UK 104, 108-10, 111, 112 transit controls 79

police officers 130 Polish Resettlement Corp (PRC) 108-9 politicians 3, 6, 151, 173 Portugal 27, 72 positive measures 59 Powell, Enoch 110 print media see media Professional policy making for the twentyfirst century (Cabinet Office) 149 public opinion 22, 150, 175-6, 177 UK 19-21, 121, 173 purity 170-1 Puts, J. 26, 31, 32, 35

R Race, community and conflict (Rex and Moore) 166 racism 22, 105, 110, 145-6 Readers Digest 19 reception centres (Netherlands) 40-1, 42-3, 45-6, 61 location 48, 49, 50-2 see also ACs; AVOs; AZCs; OCs Red Cross 111, 117, 120 Refugee Action 120, 138 Refugee Awareness Week 175-6 Refugee Council (Netherlands) 38, 57, 60 Refugee Council (UK) 126-7, 131, 134, 136-7, 177n Bosnians 117, 119 Kosovans 120 refugees European view 3-5 Sweden 70-1, 72, 81, 82, 83-4 UK 103 see also asylum seekers Registration Centres (Netherlands) 43, 48, 49, 55, 61 repatriates, Netherlands 26, 31, 60 repatriation 5, 20, 173 residence permits, Netherlands 41-2 Reubsaet, T. 34, 35 Rex, J. 166 Rijsbergen 48 Riksdagens revisorer 97 Riksrevisionsverket 65, 77, 81, 96 ROA regulation (Regeling Opvang Asielzoekers) 39-40, 39, 46, 53, 55, 60, 61

203

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Robinson, V. 3, 5, 7, 24n, 103, 104, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, 119, 127, 131, 141, 142, 144-5, 152, 153, 156, 157n, 160, 161, 166, 175 Roche, Barbara 20 Roma 16-17 Romania 83, 85 Rotterdam 34, 35-8, 59 Royal Dutch Indies Army 26 Russian Federation 83, 85 Russian revolution 70 RVK regulation (Regeling Rijksvoorkeurswoningen) 31, 34, 35, 38, 59

S safe countries 5, 15 St John Ambulance 111 Sandberg, A. 65 Scheffer, P. 26 Schiphol airport 48 Scientific Council for Government Policy (Netherlands) 29 Scottish Daily Express 14 Scottish Daily Mail 13 Scottish Refugee Council 120 Scottish Sun, The 13, 14 Screening and Reception Centres (Netherlands) 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 52 Second World War 66, 67, 70 secondary migration 145, 154, 156 Secure borders, safe havens (Home Office) 142-3 segregation Netherlands 32, 160 Sweden 101 Segrott, J. 127 SGBO 58 Shadid, W. 36, 60 Shelter 137 SIB see Swedish Integration Board Sibley, D. 170-1 Singh, Gurbux 174 SIV 65, 69, 71, 82, 83-4, 85, 86, 87, 100 evaluating dispersal policy 96, 97-9, 98 Sweden-wide policy 75, 76-7, 78, 79-80 Smakman, N. 27 Small-Scale Central Reception Facility regulation see KCO regulation Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (SCP) 37, 60

204

social control 169, 171 Social Democrats (PvdA) (Netherlands) 6 Social Exclusion Unit (UK) 149 social services 23 Somalia 28, 72, 77, 83, 85 SOU 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 82, 97 Southall 105 Southwark 7 space, purification 170-1 Spain 27, 165 Sparkbrook, Birmingham 166 spatial concentration 3, 21-3, 155, 157, 159 easing local pressures 176-7 justifications for doing away with 163-4 Netherlands 25, 35, 36-7, 59, 60, 62 Moluccans 32, 33 Tamils 38 as problem 150, 159-63 Sweden 8, 10, 71-5 UK 6-8, 20, 105, 122, 136-7, 139 Bosnians 119 costs 8-10 Kosovans 121 sponsorship 176 Spreekmeester, R. 35, 36-7, 38 Sri Lanka refugees Netherlands 27, 28, 38-9 Sweden 83, 85 UK 5 Stansfield, R. 140-1 Statens Offentliga Utredningar see SOU status holders (Netherlands) 38, 40, 41, 63 dispersal and target setting 53-8, 56 Stockholm 8, 73, 73, 89-90, 89 Stockholm City 10 Straw, Jack 17 Sudan 28 Sun, The 13 Sunday Mercury 16 Sunday People 13 Sunderland 146 Sundsvall 76 Surie, H. 26 Surinamese 6, 27, 34-5, 36, 37 Svealand 73 Sweden 65-6, 100-2 dispersal 23, 75-7, 78, 79-80, 80, 152, 176

Index

current organisation 86-8 evaluating policy 96-9, 98, 99 geographical impact 88-91, 89, 90, 92, 93, 93, 94-5, 96 reforming policy 80-1, 82, 83-4, 85, 86 immigration 66-71, 66 refugees 70-1, 72 media 18 spatial concentration 8, 10, 71-5 Swedish Board for Health and Social Affairs 71 Swedish Board of Migration see SIV Swedish Integration Board 65, 66, 86, 87-8, 99, 100, 101 Swedish National Audit Office 65, 77, 81, 96 Swedish National Labour Market Administration see AMS Swinerton, E.N. 111 Sword, K. 108 Syria 72, 77, 83, 85

T Tamils 27, 38-9 Tannahill, J.A. 108 Telegraaf, De 18 Temporary Residence Permit (Netherlands) 41-2, 55-6, 56, 57 Ter Apel 45, 46, 48, 52 Tesser, P. 37 Thalhammer, E. 20 Times, The 12, 126 Togo 85 tolerated status 41 travellers 108 Turkey labour migration 27, 68 refugees Netherlands 28, 160 Sweden 71, 72, 77, 83, 85 Tuynman-Kret, M. 26, 32, 33, 37 TWCM 60 Tweede Kamer (TK) 34, 42

U Uganda 5, 72, 83, 85 Uganda Resettlement Board (URB) 111, 112 Ugandan Asians 71, 110-13, 175 Ulrich, R. 165 Umeå 76

unaccompanied minors Netherlands 41, 42, 52 UK 7-8, 9, 10, 124-5 unemployment Sweden 74, 97, 100 UK 4 United Kingdom 3, 146-7 asylum seekers 4, 5 community involvement 156 dispersal 104-5, 108, 121-36, 125, 132 Bosnians 117-20 Chileans 113-15 ethnic minorities 105-8 Home Office internal review 141-6 Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust report 138-40 Kosovans 120-1 NOTTAS report 140-1 Poles 108-10 Refugee Council 136-7 resourcing 152 selecting areas 153 Ugandan Asians 110-13 Vietnamese 115-17, 118 evidence-based policy 149 housing 22, 157 immigration 103-4 media 10-18, 111-12, 174-5 national debate 6, 173 public opinion 19-21 Refugee Awareness Week 175-6 relegitimising asylum seeking 172-3 spatial concentration 6-10 unemployment 4 United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) 4, 5, 151 United States 66, 72 Uruguay 72 Utrecht 35, 36

V Vaillant, R. 26, 31 Valeny, R. 113 Valkonet-Freeman, W. 35, 38 Van Amersfoort, H. 35 Van Amersfoort, J. 26, 31, 32 Van Beetz, F. 38, 39, 55 Van den Berg, W. 35 Van Egeraat, A. 30 Van Gent, W. 37 Van Hoorn, F. 35 Van Kempen, R. 27, 160 Van Mulier, L. 37

205

Spreading the ‘burden’?

Van Praag, C. 27, 36, 37, 60 Van Rossum, S. 57 Van Weesep, J. 27, 160 VC 45, 46, 48 Veenman, J. 26 Vereeniging van Nederlandsche Gemeenten (VVG) 31 Vergunning voor Bepaalde Tijd Asiel (VBTA) 42 Vergunning voor Onbepaalde Tijd Asiel (VOTA) 42 Vietnam refugees Sweden 72, 83 UK 7, 115-17, 118, 156, 176 Visram, R. 103 Visser, T. 57 Vluchtelingenwerk 38, 57, 60 VNG see Dutch Association of Municipalities Volkskrant, De 6, 18 voluntarism 111, 116, 120-1 Voluntary Services Unit (UK) 114-15 VTV status 41, 42, 55-6, 56, 57 VVTV Act (Netherlands) 55 VVTV status 41-2, 55-6, 56

W Wadden Islands 56 Wagenmaker, P. 38, 39, 40, 47 waiting refugees 74 Wales 7, 110, 130-1 Walvin, J. 103, 104 Watson, J. 103 Webb, J. 149 Weiner, M. 4, 169 Welsh Refugee Council 174-5 West Germany 67 West Indians 104, 107 West Yorkshire 138-40 Wetenschappelijke Raad voor de Regering (WRR) 29, 30 white flight 161 Widdecombe, Ann 20 Widgren, Jonas 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70 Williamson, L. 7-8, 10 Wilson, R. 14, 138-40 Wirth, L. 160 Women’s Royal Voluntary Service 111 Wong, L. 104

206

Working Group with the Responsibility for Refugees 75-6 World University Service (WUS) 114 World War Two 66, 67, 70

Y Yugoslavia, Federal Republic of 83, 85 see also former Yugoslavia

Z Zetter, Roger 133, 143-4 Zevenaar 48 Zubrzycki, J. 109 ZZA (Zelfzorgarrangement) regulation 45, 45, 48, 60, 61-2

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