Just like to add that my grandmother was an asylum seeker, whose family were segregated, faced racist abuse and told, when she received govt help was told that Britain should look after its own and ended up in an East London Ghetto were being amongst her own race helped cushioned the blows of racist comments.
She was seeking asylum for Nazi Germany which claimed the lives of 4 of her siblings and all her uncles and aunts.
The sad truth is that few know the full horror of what people go through until it is too late. I personally would always want to see people given the benefit of the doubt. Too many nations refused to believe in concentration camps when the Nazis were at the height of their power and I would hate to see that happen again.
In the first quarter of this year there were 16,000 applications for asylum of these 3,990 left voluntarily or were deported. The remaining 12,010 remain whilst their cases are investigated. The top five applicant nationalities in the first quarter of 2003 in the UK were Iraqi, Somali, Zimbabwean, Afghan, and Chinese.
In China there are CURRENTLY an estimated 50 million people in concentration camps for "reform through labor". In Somalia and Zimbabwe the effects of the civil wars are well documented. And crikey I think we all know about Iraq and Afghanistan.
As these are where the majority of asylum seekers come from I find it hard to understand why anyone would think that there isn't a real need for the richest countries in the world to provide sanctuary.