Megan: Sorry if this sounds really basic, right, but can you tell us the difference between an immigrant and a refugee?

Mr Tran Dinh: Immigrant is someone who comes here to work, or to join a relative already living here, or to marry someone already living here. Refugee is someone escaping from a country where they might be put in prison, tortured or even killed because they disagree with the government, or belong to the ‘wrong’ religion or tribe.

Bal: Right… can you give us some examples…?

Mr Tran Dinh: Okay. Thierry Henry is an immigrant. He came here to work and seems to have settled here. Madonna is an immigrant too, though she didn’t exactly come needing work. The Japanese managers at Nissan are immigrants.

Bal: Okay.

Mr Tran Dinh: And the man who runs a little shop in the town selling food from Eastern Europe is an immigrant, from Poland. You seen the shop?

John: Yeah but I haven’t been in. I don’t even know what Eastern European food looks like!

Mr Tran Dinh: I had to have something done to my foot in hospital last week. Filipina nurse - immigrant.

John: What about students?

Mr Tran Dinh: Good question. Temporary immigrants, coming here to work, sort of. Usually they go back home when their course is finished.

John: All right, got that…

Mr Tran Dinh: But let me really stress, right, that mostly immigrants come for work. I’ve said they might come to marry someone, but the big thing is about work. If no work, people don’t come. Talk to someone else about this, but from some countries anyone can come here, like EU countries. From most countries in the world you need a visa, you can’t just turn up at Gatwick and say ‘let me in’. Even Madonna needed a visa, I guess…..

Bal: What, didn’t she come here to get benefits?

Mr Tran Dinh: Why you smiling?

Bal: It’s what people have always said about us Asians, innit? We come over to sign on, laze around and claim benefit (and take people’s jobs at the same time of course).

John: So…. moving on?

Megan: Yeah, what about examples of refugees?

Mr Tran Dinh: Well, there’s me. Also Claire here at this centre. She escaped from Rwanda after husband was shot in front of her. Gunmen said they were coming back for her.

Bal: Uhuh ...

Mr Tran Dinh: And there’s footballer Lua Lua, who’s from the same country as Hussain, who you might have met here. Then there’s Albert Einstein, maybe the world’s most famous scientist. He was refugee. The guy who designed the Mini, the man who thought of www.ilearn.to (he was from Vietnam, like me), Alek Wek, Sudanese supermodel…..

Megan: And what’s an asylum seeker?

Mr Tran Dinh: Asylum’s just a word that means a safe haven. Someone seeking asylum is asking to be able to stay safely. Once they are what’s called ‘granted asylum’ they are known as refugees. It’s like their claim to be genuinely escaping something bad has been accepted as true.

Megan: So how come people seem to get so confused?

Mr Tran Dinh: First off, there’s a lot of fear and stuff about more people coming into the country. People think it’s a small island, there are some people without jobs, there aren’t lots of spare houses, some schools are full, not enough money in the health service…

Bal: So more people will just cause more problems….

Mr Tran Dinh: Exactly, that’s what they think.

Megan: Well….. aren’t they right though?

Mr Tran Dinh: I just know about refugees, okay, so I’m not going to get into whole immigration thing. But I will say that although there’s those problems I just said….

Megan: Houses and hospitals and that….

Mr Tran Dinh: Yep, but Britain is also one of the richest countries in the world, as well as a safe one, and of course lots of people in the world have learned at least a bit of English. It acts like a magnet.

John: People really want to come here.

Mr Tran Dinh: Yes. Three kinds of people, if you like. One, immigrants wanting to work, and you have to talk to someone else about that. Two, people from poorer countries wanting a better life, who might lie about needing asylum because they won’t get in any other way. Three, refugees escaping from terrible danger.

Bal: Which group is the biggest?

Mr Tran Dinh: Oh, no doubt, immigrants wanting to work. But me, I think we have to allow refugees in. Every country in the world has to take its share of people escaping from wars and persecution.

Megan: But don’t we take more than our fair share?

Mr Tran Dinh: No way. You can look at some figures about that in a minute. It’s a big myth. Okay, like I’ve said, Britain is like a magnet, but other countries take more than we do.

Bal: Yeah but we’re only small….

Mr Tran Dinh: No, that’s the big mistake people make. Many other countries take a higher percentage of their population than we do.

Bal: I see, I think…..

Mr Tran Dinh: I see it this way. If we turn people away who may face death or torture, it makes us worse people. It means we can’t say we’re civilised. It means when Britain claims to be a fair, reasonable, civilised, humane country it would be a lie.