Now who else can we suspect? Everyone's favourite scapegoats, asylum seekers, are also at the sharp end of the stick as usual. New draconian measures were revealed by David Blunkett on 29th October 2001, targeting some of the most vulnerable members of UK society. And this terrorising of innocent, disadvantaged and often bewildered refugees and asylum seekers is taking place under the umbrella of the "War on Terror"!
The new "reforms" include the introduction of smart cards containing fingerprint and photographic details in January 2002, which by September will replace the voucher system, allowing the Home Office to determine the location of any asylum seeker wherever they use it. And use it they must if they wish to eat. Various high security centres are being established to ensure that asylum seekers can be arrested, isolated and deported as quickly and efficiently as possible. Those even suspected of terrorism will have their application for asylum automatically rejected. This can include any form of radical dissent - under new laws both Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi would be classified as terrorists.
Most of these people are direct victims of our foreign policy and consumption-centred lifestyles; forced to leave their homeland because their way of life and their independence has been destroyed. When they try and seek a safer place to live here, we arrest and process them as if they were electric goods on a conveyor belt. They may well suffer abuse, beatings, detention, and isolation before they're sent straight back to the misery ­ or the death they were trying to escape. That's if they are not murdered by some random act of racism, as happened in Glasgow in August, to a young man who had been here for two weeks.
In a global economy, based on free movement of capital, where businesses can move where they like, preventing the free movement of people not only doesn't work, but it is also hypocritical. Trying to stop refugees seeking asylum and demonising those that try, fuels the fires of prejudice, instead of facing the real enemy. But no borders will ever stop people when they have absolutely nothing left to lose. And the more that ordinary people come to see things that happen to other people, can also happen to themselves, the more we will see what we have in common.