LONDON: Strong circumstantial evidence shows that “get tough” asylum policies lead to more illegal immigration and people-trafficking, according to the UK Home Office’s own research, published here on Monday.

The independent experts who looked at the impact of asylum policy across Europe over the last 10 years concluded that the restrictive measures that were most successful at reducing unfounded claims also forced genuine refugees to go underground.

The report, by Roger Zetter, David Griffiths and others, also suggests that far from reducing the overall numbers coming to the European Union, asylum policy since 1990 has only succeeded in moving asylum seekers within Europe to those countries with more liberal regimes.

The Home Office research report does say that “direct pre- entry measures” such as a visa regime which stops asylum seekers travelling to Europe are the most effective in the short-term at stemming or redirecting asylum flows.

“Indirect measures such as reception facilities, detention and the withdrawal of benefits appear to have had a much more limited impact,” says the report.

It says that generally changes in asylum policy often have unpredictable or limited effects on asylum flows and application rates. The researchers suggest that the role of existing asylum networks, established ethnic communities, ex-colonial links of language and culture, and pre-existing migration patterns can all have a bigger impact.

Heaven Crawley, of the UK’s Institute of Public Policy Research, said the report showed that the impact of specific asylum policies designed to reduce application rates was nowhere near as clear or decisive as many governments assumed.

Dr Crawley said it demonstrated a clear need for governments to tackle the root causes. “The number of asylum seekers in Europe is co-related far more strongly and clearly with conflict, political unrest and human rights abuse than with asylum policies designed to keep people out,” she said.

The Liberal Democrat spokesman Simon Hughes said it was a damning piece of research. “Every year the barriers are built higher, blocking the genuine refugees along with the economic migrants,” he said. “At the same time, Labour’s policy of raising the draw bridge has strengthened the criminal gangs who smuggled them in.” But Beverley Hughes, the UK Home Office minister, said the research was “useful contribution”, which supported the government’s policy that pre-entry measures and border controls are the most effective way of reducing the number of asylum applications.

“The last quarterly asylum statistics showed a fall of 32 per cent — more than three times the fall across Europe,” she said. “We are confident that our policies are working to reduce the number of applicants by half by September.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.