The Increasingly Changing Immigration Policies Research Paper

The Increasingly Changing Immigration Policies - Research Paper Example The ‘Geneva Convention’ provided refuge to millions of Refugees in the post world war period until the Cold War of the 1980s and it set the basis of immigration policies and laws in most of the countries. But in the post-Cold War period till today it has been faced with a number of issues and as a result of a number of member states especially the European countries have begun straying away from the basic policy, in order to block the huge flow of migrants every year due to the insufficiencies of the convention. It is an undeniable fact that the ‘Geneva Convention’ was the foundation of the Refugee protection regime and was the one truly universal instrument that gave basic principles on which the international protection of Refugees was built. But the essence of disapproval of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention is that it is archaic. The treaty was formulated in and for a specific era. While Western countries' refuge structures might have managed well enough un til the end of the Cold War, they were not intended to counter the current mass refugee outflows and migratory activities. The United Kingdom had a long custom of migration. Due to its ownership of a large number of colonies all over the world, the UK has been the centre for asylum seeker, working immigrants and refugees. Despite the huge influx of refugees in the UK even in the post-cold war period, the policy system was rather reactive in nature and a decentralized approach was maintained to the refugee issue until 1993. Politicization of the migration policies in most of the European countries since 1970s was rather less intensified in the UK’s case.