Refugees and asylum seekers

Since World War Two, from many conflicts have come looking for safety in the UK.

Key fact

KEY FACTS: Refugees to Britain after World War Two. Some examples:

Hungarians after the Soviet invasion in 1956.
Greek and Turkish Cypriots in the 1960s and 1970s fleeing civil war.
Asians expelled from Kenya and Uganda in 1968 and 1972.
Chileans and other Latin Americans following military coups in the 1970s.
Iranians following the 1979 Revolution.
Afghans fleeing invasions and civil wars from the late 1970s until the present.
Vietnamese ‘boat people’ in the 1980s.
Sri Lankan Tamils during the civil war from the 1980s onwards.
Turkish Kurds and Somalis as a result of civil conflict in the 1990s.
Bosnians, Serbs, Croats and Kosovans escaping conflict in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Eritreans escaping violent government repression, particularly since 2000.
Syrians, Iraqis and Libyans uprooted by foreign invasion and civil war in the 2000s.

This period saw an acute rise in the number of refugees and displaced people in the world, as a result of regional and . While many made their way to Britain, increasingly strict and laws made it more and more difficult to live here as an asylum seeker and to achieve refugee status. Wars and instability in the Middle East and many parts of Africa caused the of millions of people. Some of those who reached Europe, stayed in refugee camps outside Calais, hoping to find a way to enter the UK.

Key facts:

	A few of the many laws controlling immigration 1993-2002	What did it mean?
1993	Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act	Restricted who could be accepted as refugees.
1996	Asylum and Immigration Act	People who employed asylum seekers without a work permit were breaking the law.
1999	Immigration and Asylum Act	Asylum seekers were to receive food vouchers rather than welfare payments.
2002	Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act	People wanting to be citizens had to pass a ‘Living in the United Kingdom’ test.

	1993
A few of the many laws controlling immigration 1993-2002	Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act
What did it mean?	Restricted who could be accepted as refugees.

	1996
A few of the many laws controlling immigration 1993-2002	Asylum and Immigration Act
What did it mean?	People who employed asylum seekers without a work permit were breaking the law.

	1999
A few of the many laws controlling immigration 1993-2002	Immigration and Asylum Act
What did it mean?	Asylum seekers were to receive food vouchers rather than welfare payments.

	2002
A few of the many laws controlling immigration 1993-2002	Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act
What did it mean?	People wanting to be citizens had to pass a ‘Living in the United Kingdom’ test.

By 2007 there was a massive backlog of people claiming asylum whose cases had not yet been dealt with. The UK Border Agency was set up to try and deal with the problem.

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Economic migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, 1945 - present - OCR BRefugees and asylum seekers

Refugees and asylum seekers

Key facts:

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