Immigration lawyer Paul Ward has spoken to refugees and heard why they want to come to live in the UK.

He is based in Brighton and this is his story.

Emilie let out a cry, wrapped her arms around her stomach and began to rock backwards and forwards.

I had just begun reading out the Home Office decision to refuse her asylum claim and knew there was worse to come.

Her home town in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo had been attacked on five occasions during the war that continues there. The latest soldiers to arrive accused her ethnic group of supporting the opposition and her husband had run for his life during a night of massacres.

Over the next six weeks, Emilie walked with other refugees 500km through dense forest, carrying her two young children. Bandits, probably former Government soldiers, attacked the camp where she rested halfway through the journey.

In the darkness and confusion she lost her son but managed to keep her daughter in her arms. The next morning she was repeatedly raped before being left to carry on walking.

When she eventually reached the capital, Kinshasa, she found hostility towards anyone from the east and government-inspired lynchings.

Emilie turned to the Church and a Belgian priest bought the passport and ticket needed to fly her and her daughter out of danger.

On arrival at Heathrow, the authorities sent them to a bed-and-breakfast hotel near Brighton.

Emilie had given me a clear, detailed and chilling account of everything she had suffered. The attacks on her town were described in the French media and British journalists reported the killings in Kinshasa. I had promised her she was safe.

Given the number of names and places I needed to spell for him, I doubt whether the Home Office official who interviewed Emilie had ever left Croydon, let alone known about the Congo.

I now had to tell Emilie our government thought she was a liar. No real refugee would leave her son in the forest. A real refugee would leave their country quickly rather than spend two months walking.

Two years later, Emilie is settled near London with refugee status and a new baby.

After appealing against the decision, I traced a US journalist who had witnessed many similar journeys and a Belgian academic who had studied the hostility to Emilie's ethnic group.

A doctor specialising in traumatic injury confirmed her scars could only have been caused by the brutal form of rape she described.

The Home Office never said sorry for calling her a liar and never volunteered to let her stay here. It took a day of legal argument and a court order to force it to do so.

In my work in Brighton representing asylum-seekers I meet a new Emilie every week.

With growing shortages of specialist help, each day I have to turn people away who may never see their unjust decisions overturned.

Emilie is the reality of asylum-seeking, which those who organise roadside protests in Saltdean refuse to face.

The majority of asylum claims are not bogus. About 70 to 80 per cent of cases are ultimately accepted.

Britain is not being swamped by waves of people. The UN estimates there are almost 20 million refugees in the world, of which less than a quarter are in Europe.

While Britain has only a few hundred thousand refugees in total and howled at receiving 88,000 applications last year, Germany is helping close to a million.

Most remarkable are the poor nations around trouble spots, such as Pakistan and Tanzania, who have helped millions over the last decade.

What is the difference between the people of Tanzania who give their food, their money, their homes and the people of Saltdean who stand by the side of the road waving hostile placards?

Asylum-seekers did not queue up in Sangatte to scrounge from our benefits system. Most lost their entitlement to benefits in 1996, with the remainder doing so in 2000.

A Home Office study aimed at proving benefits were an attraction found Sangatte occupants wanted to come to England because of our language, our colonial past and the draw of powerful figures like Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill.

Asylum-seekers bring huge benefits to their host communities. They are doctors and nurses, with many already propping up our ailing NHS.

They are scientists, journalists, politicians, planners, police officers and more. They bring music, food, poetry and literature, while their children keep our schools open.

Two separate Home Office studies show refugees are more educated than average, more economically active than average and pay more taxes than average.

I have met and spoken with asylum-seekers almost every day for the past 12 years.

None of them wanted to leave their homes, families and communities. All of them spoke tearfully of what they had lost and left behind.

Building ever-tighter controls will not change anything. To do this we need to tackle the causes of asylum-seeking.

War, torture, poverty and environmental destruction cause asylum-seeking.

The UK, with its leading international role in the arms trade and financial services industry and its above-average energy and resource use, has a particular responsibility.

When the residents of Saltdean go off to work each morning in banks, insurance companies or major energy users, they create asylum-seekers.

When they elect MPs who allow exports of guns to oppressive regimes they create asylum-seekers.

Asylum-seekers are not asking for huge piles of cash and luxury accommodation.

What they ask for is to be accepted as normal people like the rest of us and to be allowed normal homes and work opportunities like the rest of us.