Nick Cohen on Zimbabwean asylum-seekers:
All the fuss about New Labour temporarily suspending the deportation of Zimbabweans for fear of spoiling this weekend’s euphoric self-satisfaction missed the point that the government has done its best to stop all refugees from Zimbabwe getting to Britain in the first place by imposing visa controls.
I asked Sarah Harland of the British Zimbabwe Association to name one opponent of Mugabe who had been granted a visa. She laughed. The whole point of visas is to stop refugees. The more wounds you can show, the faster you are shown the high commission’s door.
Zimbabweans go to Malawi and South Africa. The few with the money and inclination buy fake passports and rely on people smugglers to find a way into Britain. They’ve no choice, but their desperation means that a government that has driven them into the arms of people smugglers can maintain they’re con-artists using criminal gangs who aren’t really Zimbabweans.
‘People were claiming to be from Zimbabwe and turning out to be from somewhere else,’ said Tony Blair last week, while former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook went on Radio 4 to denounce the people smugglers. They sounded like Dr Frankenstein railing against his monster.
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