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Britain Acts to Discourage Applicants for Asylum

Last year, more than 70,000 people applied for asylum here, compared with about 5,000 just before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. And with a backlog of more than 100,000 people and their families waiting to hear whether they qualify for asylum, the Labour government has been under intense pressure to act decisively, even to the point of including provisions in the new law that many of its members might well have criticized as draconian a decade ago.

Under the law, asylum seekers will be given vouchers redeemable for goods worth about $58 per person per week instead of cash welfare benefits. And instead of being able to settle where they want, asylum seekers with nowhere to go will be sent to one of 13 designated areas around Britain, some of them far from refugee support networks.

The government has also pledged to speed the asylum process and to close most avenues of appeal for rejected applicants. And it is imposing steep penalties, about $3,300 per passenger, on drivers caught with foreign stowaways on their cargo trucks.

Even as the European Union has ostracized Austria for including in its government a rightist party whose rise is largely attributable to widespread anti-immigrant sentiment there, the British government - like many others in Western Europe - faces a version of the same sentiment at home.

The tabloid press here is virulently anti-immigrant, and there is a growing public belief, reflected in and fueled by overtly anti-refugee statements from both main parties in Parliament, that most asylum seekers are taking advantage of Britain's generosity and do not have legitimate asylum claims.

When a group of Afghans applied for asylum here after hijacking a plane and diverting it to Britain in February, the government and the opposition nearly fell over each other in their rush to condemn the applications - apparently overlooking the fact that Afghanistan is controlled by one of the world's most oppressive governments.

And recently, responding to an increase in the number of Gypsies begging in London's streets, the government promised to accelerate the asylum applications of Gypsy women caught begging with children, with a view toward turning them out of the country as quickly as possible.

''We have a situation at the moment where we have manifestly unfounded claims that are coming into the system, undermining its very integrity,'' Barbara Roche, the Home Office minister, said at a conference on refugees late last year, expressing the government's view. ''They're seeking recourse to a better life in this country, for economic migrancy, and the system can't sustain them.''

The new Immigration and Asylum Act makes Britain the latest European country to enact legislation explicitly intended to make the road to asylum more difficult when legal immigration is already severely restricted. A similar German law that replaced cash benefits with vouchers and dispersed immigrants around the country has already helped lower the number of asylum applicants to 90,000 in 1999 from 166,000 in 1995.

Under pressure from a flood of immigrants from Eastern Europe, particularly from war-scarred Bosnia and Yugoslavia, Austria had severely restricted its liberal asylum and immigration laws even before the Freedom Party then led by Joerg Haider entered the government in Vienna in February. Other countries that have recently passed or are considering more restrictive laws include Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands.

In the past few years, refugee organizations say, individual countries have worked hard to present themselves as tougher on asylum seekers than their neighbors are, so as to deter even refugees with legitimate claims.

''It's a typical politician's and bureaucrat's response,'' said Guy Goodwin-Gill, professor of international refugee law at Oxford. ''I've heard this all over the world: 'Our country is where everybody wants to come, and we mustn't be seen as a soft touch.'''

Signers of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees are obligated to provide havens for people being persecuted in their home countries, and the European Union has pledged to develop a common policy reflecting the convention's commitment to humanitarian principles.

But no such policy has emerged yet, and the result has been a patchwork of laws that is making the climate increasingly unwelcome for refugees, said Peer Baneke, general secretary of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, an umbrella group of refugee organizations.

In Britain, immigration has developed into one of the trickiest political issues confronting Prime Minister Tony Blair. With immigrants from around the world, but particularly Eastern Europe, flooding into the country, the number of people applying for asylum rose to 71,160 last year from 41,500 in 1997 and 5,900 in 1987.

Nick Hardwick, chairman of the Refugee Council, a London-based group that works on behalf of refugees, said, ''The figures are higher than last year, but so are the instances of human rights abuse, political persecution, internal conflict and turmoil raging around the world.'' He added, referring to last year's conflict over Kosovo, ''This period also contains a European war described as the greatest humanitarian disaster since the end of the Second World War by the NATO spokesman, Jamie Shea.''

In most years, fewer than half the people who apply for asylum are ultimately allowed to stay in Britain. Last year the Home Office ruled on 32,330 cases, granting asylum to 36 percent and allowing 11 percent more, under a category known as exceptional leave, to remain.

The remainder of the applications were rejected; but the vast majority of those people have appealed and are still in this country.

Under the new law, refugees whose applications are turned down will be allowed only one appeal before, in theory at least, they are ordered to leave the country.The backlog of cases has mushroomed to where 103,000 people, and their families, are now waiting for decisions on asylum applications. Some have been waiting for more than five years.