---

Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

The Government have introduced several Bills on immigration and asylum since 1999. This Bill has several aspects that are very welcome, notably measures to control the unscrupulous and thoroughly irresponsible employers who have exploited immigrant workers. I welcome those aspects of the Bill and commend the Home Secretary for them. I want today to address the asylum aspects of the Bill, not in the terms that the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) has just referred to, but looked at from the point of view of fulfilling our international obligations, which I think he recognises are serious. Each of the Bills the Government have introduced since 1999 has in various ways curtailed the rights and protections of those who turn to Britain for asylum because their life and liberties are threatened in their own country. Ministers, including this Home Secretary, are committed to our living up to our international obligations and I recognise and believe that they are honourable in those commitments. However, too many aspects of the policy as displayed by those immigration Bills have been driven not by a sense of responsibility to our international obligations but by what the Government see, I think wrongly, as the British public’s impatience with those seeking asylum, and too much by the popular press. The policy is rightly hostile to those who apply for asylum when what they actually want is to come to this country as economic migrants and who mislead and abuse the asylum system, but it is also hostile to genuine refugees or those who are seeking asylum because of the horror that they face at home.