In recent years, public attention has been focused on asylum seekers, but their numbers have fallen sharply. They are now less than 40,000 a year of whom only a quarter are given permission to stay in Britain, yet only one in five is actually removed. Meanwhile, other forms of immigration have risen very sharply. Net foreign immigration reached 340,000 in 2004. It is hard to see how we can achieve a successful integration of immigrants on this scale. The Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) has warned that we are "sleepwalking towards segregation" but he does not appear to have made the connection with the massive levels of immigration that have occurred in recent years. To get a full picture of this complex problem, it is necessary to consider asylum seekers, family settlement, labour migration and illegal immigration together.
[...] Unlike in the United States and elsewhere, these children were not granted German citizenship at birth and were treated as foreigners in a legal sense. By the end of the 1980s, Aussiedlers were not the only immigrants whose numbers had increased. Changing geopolitics and numerous crises within continental Europe led to dramatic increases in the number of people seeking asylum in Germany. Whereas in individuals applied for asylum, between 1988 and 1992 a total of 1.1 million asylum applications were lodged. [...]
[...] white paper on immigration and asylum policy, expressed concern that the current detention regime in the U.K. would violate the U.K.'s obligations under the ICCPR, as described in the authoritative conclusions of the U.N. Human Rights Committee noted above. Moreover, continuing the U.K.'s policy of detaining asylum seekers solely for administrative reasons may amount to a violation of the 1951 Refugee Convention. It is also contrary to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' Detention Guidelines and conclusions reached by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention after a 1997 visit to the U.K. [...]
[...] Since the mid-1950s, Germany has become one of the most important destination countries for immigrants. In this sense, it has been similar to other industrialized countries such as the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. Germany's post-World War II immigration history is distinguished by the nature of its parallel flows: one of ethnic Germans returning from abroad, and another of foreigners with no German ancestry. At different times, immigration laws have made the distinction less or more important, especially in terms of the privileges granted to ethnic Germans. [...]
[...] By 1971 it was believed that primary immigration had been brought to an end. However, in practice, there was only a modest reduction in Commonwealth immigration. The average number of New Commonwealth acceptances for settlement in the 1970s was 72,000 per year, in the 1980s and early 1990s it was about 54,000 per year. Since 1996 the overall settlement figure has doubled from 61,000 to 125,000 in in in 2002, and 139,000 in 2003 and 2004. The total since 1963 is nearly 2.5 million (some of whom, of course, will no longer be living in Britain). [...]
[...] Acts already in force on these subjects are: Immigration Act 1971 Immigration Act 1988 Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993 Asylum and Immigration Act 1996 Special Immigration Appeals Commission Act 1997 Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 The Race Relations Act 1976 and Human Rights Act 1998 are also very important in relation to immigration and asylum. The British Nationality Act 1981 and the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 have some marginal relevance. [...]
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