Persuasive essay - The problem of Asylum (written in 2000)

Essay by sileas451High School, 11th gradeA-, April 2004

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In Kosovo on 24th December 1998, Serbian Soldiers burst into the household of an innocent ethnic Albanian family. After savagely murdering the father and son, soaking their family in their persecuted blood, they dragged the terrified, screaming mother and daughter into nearby woods. Pinning the mother down, they forced her to watch as they brutally raped and beat her tiny nine-year-old daughter again, again and again. Chuckling in nauseating amusement, they shot the tormented, broken child eight times in the same arm. The mother and daughter later returned to find their village in ashes.

These are the traumatising conditions from which many asylum seekers escape, fleeing to Britain in search of help. For most people in Scotland, these forlorn families are just a nameless, faceless mass, making it simple to reject them on terms of political judgement. We do not experience the horrific circumstances they leave behind, feel the despair on arriving in a country full of prejudice, where you are seen as a statistic, not a human being.

Nor do we understand the broken pride they endure for a desolate country once full of prosperity. Instead we see only the overcrowding they cause in Glasgow's poorly conditioned prisons, they housing they 'use up' in Dundee's otherwise almost derelict high rise flats and the false sense of security they encounter having moved up a notch on the poverty ladder. It is all very well to nod and mutter 'hear hear' at the banter between Tony and Willie on the television. It is fine to feel justified in your arguments that 'Britain should help its own first'. So long as the perspiration that trickles down a child's face, and the gripping terror and helplessness that paralyses him in the seconds before he is bludgeoned to death does not penetrate your rational...