The experience of asylum seekers/ illegal immigrants coming to Britain today.

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The experience of asylum seekers/ illegal immigrants coming to Britain today

Asylum seekers and illegal immigrants have been in the media recently because the government is facing problems over the number of immigrants coming into the country every year, due to financial problems and the backlog of applications waiting to be approved. Over the past couple of months newspapers have reported tragic incidents where illegal immigrants in their desperate need to come to the West have gone to extremes, putting their lives at danger to escape from their home country.

There is a difference between asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. Asylum seekers are genuine refugees that if they remain in their native country will be persecuted for their religious beliefs, nationality, race or membership in a social of political opinion. They wish to come to Britain because they see it as a way to freedom. Illegal immigrants however are people that enter the country for none of these reasons, most probably because they want to take advantage of the benefits given to asylum seekers like candy by the government. However, most illegal immigrants when arriving in Britain will claim asylum, however this is not genuine.

The main countries of origin of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants are those that are significantly less well off than the West, usually with a communist government and/or places where there is conflict. These are countries like Afganistan, Yugoslavia, Romania, China, Iraq and Iran.

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The ways in which illegal immigrants and asylum seekers arrive in this country vary enormously. In the news a couple of months ago, 58 chinese men were discovered dead in the back of a lorry where they had suffocated to death while being smuggled across the Channel. These were all illegal immigrants. Families of these paid a human trafficking gang "the Snakeheads" £14,000 to smuggle one individual from China to England. Only two men survived, and were found semi-comatose under a pile of corpses. Most illegal immigrants are smuggled into the country by gangs who hide them in lorries under ...

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