Channel Tunnel a Conduit for Phony Asylum Seekers

Along with the tourists and traders speeding in air-conditioned comfort through the Channel Tunnel linking Britain and the rest of Europe, increasing numbers of undocumented immigrants are arriving in London seeking political asylum.

The traffic is orchestrated, British officials say, by legally savvy and technologically sophisticated people movers--a tony European version of the “coyotes” who work the Rio Grande.

Alarmed at the growing traffic, Britain and France began scrambling last week to stop the flow--mostly from developing nations--made possible by an embarrassing loophole in regulations governing rail travel through the 31-mile tunnel.

The Gare du Nord, the Paris terminus of the cross-channel Eurostar train, is the smugglers’ den, officials say. There, Africans, Asians and East Europeans--who typically pay thousands of dollars to organizers for illegal passage to Britain--board Eurostar trains bound for London.

Until French police began random checks last week, there were no document controls at the Gare du Nord. It has been easy for illegal travelers to embark in Paris and “lose” their nonexistent documents on the train.

At London’s Waterloo Station, the travelers simply announce to British immigration officers that they have no papers and are fleeing persecution in their homeland. The claims are often bogus, but under British law the mere assertion of persecution guarantees a four-month stay and the prospect of at least a year more of subsidized living as legal appeals are pursued.

“Every criminal gang in Europe knows that Eurostar is an open door to London. It is the only way to get into Britain without a document,” said John Tincey, an immigration inspector and spokesman for Britain’s immigration workers union.

“This no longer is ordinary illegal immigration but a coordinated criminal assault on a wide-open breach in our frontiers. It started with Somalis, spread to Turks, and now criminals in other countries are joining in,” Tincey said.

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From January to June, 404 Somalis without documents arrived in Britain, 229 of them at Waterloo by train. In July alone, more than 400 other Somalis without papers arrived at Waterloo, according to a spokesman for the Home Office.

During one weekend this month, 118 Somalis and 42 Turks walked off trains from France to request asylum. Officials say Paris is the preferred jumping-off point for the people smugglers because service from there is more frequent than from Brussels, the other major continental terminus, and Paris offers a larger multiethnic community in which to operate.

“We were near meltdown that day at Waterloo; the staff couldn’t cope,” Tincey said. “It takes around five hours for an immigration officer to complete the initial interview with an asylum seeker.”

Under British law, a person requesting asylum cannot be expelled from British soil. Such people are housed, fed and cared for at government expense until a tribunal rules on their claims--by which time many have gone underground, intending to remain illegally.

In theory, there are no longer frontier controls in the 15-nation European Union, but island Britain insists on tightly controlling its borders. There are special walk-through lanes for Europeans arriving in this country by air or ferry, but all others, including Americans, face potentially long lines and one-by-one examination by an immigration officer.

Airlines and ferries that bring undocumented passengers into Britain face fines of about $3,000 a person.

When regulations for the Chunnel train were drawn up, however, frontier-free was the byword, and train operators were exempted from such liability. So Eurostar does not check documents either in Britain or at its terminals in France and Belgium.

As it competes with airlines in the time-is-money world of international transportation, Eurostar prides itself on its short check-in times: as little as 10 minutes before departure for first-class passengers, 20 minutes for others. Travel time from central Paris to central London is three hours.

Britain’s Home Office, which is responsible for internal security, said that when the number of asylum seekers began to swell, British Immigration Minister Mike O’Brien demanded that Eurostar officials “tackle without delay the problem of asylum seekers arriving without proper documents.” O’Brien warned that “racketeers are the worst enemy of genuine asylum seekers.”

“We fully agree that there is a problem, and we are working with our colleagues in the French national railways to find a permanent solution,” Leslie Retallack, a spokesman for Eurostar, said last week.

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Making Eurostar liable is being considered, O’Brien said. The company could be required to establish expensive document checks and perhaps also to increase check-in times.

For now, the new random document checks by French police at the Gare du Nord are being applauded, but O’Brien describes them as “a temporary solution.”

According to Home Office figures, there are about 53,000 asylum cases awaiting final decision in Britain, the second-largest number in Western Europe. Germany has about 10 times as many.

As in the United States, examiners find that most people who arrive in Britain from developing countries are fleeing poverty more than politics.

Immigration inspector Tincey said: “Sometimes people don’t tell us what they have been coached to say but tell us what really happened: ‘A man came to town and said if I paid him money he would take me to Britain, where I’d be given a nice house and have the prospect of a job.’ ”

Nearly all asylum requests in Britain are eventually rejected. Among 3,710 decisions made on requests by citizens of India last year, five applicants were granted asylum and 15 others were given exceptional leave to remain in Britain.

Britain has also had its fair share of desperate stowaways.

Last March, a 12-year-old Kenyan boy was found dead in the wheel assembly of a 747 after it arrived in London on a flight from Nairobi.

A few months earlier, the body of Vijay Saini fell into a London suburb after he froze to death in the landing gear bay of a plane arriving from New Delhi. His brother, Pardeep, survived the flight.

Last week, as hopeful Somalis and Turks rolled through the Channel Tunnel to London, the Home Office refused Pardeep Saini’s appeal for asylum. The government says it will review his case.