Michael Dummett: How to solve the problem of asylum

From a talk given at Tate Modern by the University of Oxford's Professor of Logic and author of 'On Immigration and Refugees'

What duties has a state towards those who seek refuge and those who want to? We are of course bound by treaty, not indeed to admit genuine refugees but not to send them back to the country from which they have fled; if another country, which will not send them back, is willing to take them in then, if they would be humanely and sympathetically treated there, we may allow them to go there instead; otherwise we are in effect bound to admit them ourselves.

We all think that no individual has a right to act solely to benefit himself; we do not think a family or a corporation can rightly act solely for the benefit of its own members, but we often believe this of a nation-state, which we suppose to exist in order to protect and gain advantages only for its own citizens.

British politicians, coming back from a conference, are wont to say, "We have accepted this; we believe it will be to the advantage of Britain," or "We opposed it because we think it would be bad for Britain"; President Bush has rejected the Kyoto treaty because he thinks it would be to the disadvantage of the United States. But the question should not just be whether something would benefit our own people but whether it would benefit our fellow human beings generally.

National selfishness is no more attractive a quality than individual selfishness. A state exists to represent its citizens before the world. An individual is bound to give what help he can to others in distress who ask for it: and a state has an absolute duty to give refuge to those fleeing from persecution, from the threat of false imprisonment, torture, rape or death.

The duty of accepting genuine refugees requires impartial examination of their claims. We have heard much of bogus asylum-seekers. They are considered bogus if their applications are refused: but many are refused through "non-compliance", which means failure to submit, within 11 days I believe, detailed statements of their circumstances written in English. If you arrive after a long and distressing journey, not knowing the language and knowing no one who can help you, you do not show yourself bogus by failing to get a detailed application in on time.

Recently the Government gave itself permission to discriminate against whole ethnic groups, such as Tamils, Kurds and Roma, and those coming from nations from which unfounded claims are statistically likely to come. Discrimination against whole groups is obviously unfair to individual claimants.

The justification offered was that this had been going on already, as indeed it had, for instance when Roma were sent back en masse from Dover. In 1996, 80 per cent of Tamil asylum-seekers were admitted to Canada; the equivalent figure for Britain is 0.2 per cent. It is hard to be confident that applications for asylum in Britain are assessed impartially and objectively.

We also hear of economic migrants. A British professor taking a post in the United States for a higher salary and a lighter teaching load is an economic migrant but so is someone fleeing inescapable poverty who has seen his children die from malnutrition, and hopes, if allowed in, to be able to send his family money to live on until they can come to join him. I believe that we ought to admit anyone trying to escape conditions that deny him or her the chance of a tolerable human life, whether these are persecution, war or destitution.

We need to overhaul our dealings with asylum-seekers: humane, impartial assessment of their claims, an end to detention centres, thoughtless dispersal, vouchers and other punitive measures, and an amnesty for those who have been waiting for three years or more.

We also need to adopt a far more liberal immigration policy, not just poaching the highly qualified. That will help our economy, resolve our demographic difficulty, discourage the "evil traffickers" and, at the same time, go far to solve the "problem of asylum".