‘It’s hard not to feel like the government is doing it deliberately, not just to create a hostile environment for people who are here “illegally” but also to make it more difficult for people supporting them … and I think everyone anticipates that at some point there will be legislation deliberately aimed at the organisations that support, for example, undocumented people to make it more difficult for them to be accommodated and to make it more difficult for people to get advice.’
This advice is essential because it’s hard to make sense of the UK’s labyrinthine network of ever-changing rules and regulations. While politicians claim immigration is a taboo subject, one estimate suggests that, since the early 1990s, there has been, on average, a piece of legislation on immigration every other year.11 Between 2010 and 2018, over the course of the Coalition and then Conservative governments, there were seven immigration bills containing all kinds of changes.12
‘It’s actually designed to isolate you, to bring you down, to make you want to give up and pack your bags and just go,’ Diana, who has tried to claim asylum here, says. ‘People have to really own their situation, you can’t rely on somebody else. You have to know your rights and without that … you’re headed for downfall.’ She adds, ‘I’m not really a bad person. You’ve [Britain] treated me so bad for just wanting to have a life to live.’
Diana isn’t the only person I meet who feels like that. After applying multiple times for the right to extend her study visa and then being detained in the notorious detention centre Yarl’s Wood, Christina agreed to go home. But when the day came for her to pack up all her belongings, take them to the airport and board a Nigeria-bound plane, she was left standing at the check-in desk without her passport. The Home Office was holding it hostage. Numerous emails, letters and meetings with her lawyer hadn’t been enough for them to relinquish it. She was in a country that didn’t want her to stay but that wouldn’t let her leave. When I met her in early 2018 she was still struggling to either get papers that would enable her to finish her studies or to go home. ‘I feel like I just want to talk to them face-to-face to ask them why they’re not doing their job. I’m thirty-one, I came here when I was twenty-two; it’s drained my years.’
As well as being at the forefront of giving advice and support to migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, support organisations see first-hand some of the biggest problems with the UK’s immigration rules. Lindsay Cross runs West End Refugee Service (WERS) in Newcastle. Hidden among housing estates and beside a church in the west end of the city is a small detached house that WERS have turned into office space. When I first arrive in the middle of the afternoon at what looks like someone’s home, I’m not sure if I’m in the right place. But I knock on the door and as soon as I’m welcomed inside, I see the appeal of having the organisation in what might be considered an unconventional building; it’s a homely, unintimidating atmosphere and it’s where WERS offer support and advice for people seeking asylum.
Like so many other immigration and asylum services, WERS struggle from year to year to make the money they need to support everyone that comes to them for help. They rely on volunteers giving their time and energy to stay in operation. As well as struggling to survive in a climate hostile to organisations like them, WERS have also witnessed what this environment has meant for asylum seekers. Some have been left destitute and hopeless, and many others have suffered thanks to private companies who provide asylum housing.
People who have been given refugee status or who have indefinite leave to remain have very similar housing and welfare rights to British citizens. But since the 1990s, people seeking asylum have had their rights stripped back through successive immigration and asylum acts, including the ability to choose where they live.13 Introduced by New Labour, under the ‘forced dispersal’ policy, people seeking asylum are sent all over the country, usually to some of the poorest areas, regardless of whether they know anyone there or anything about the place.14 ‘It’s not easy to start a whole life again,’ says Diana, who was sent from Nottingham, where she had friends, a job in the NHS and a rented flat, to Birmingham, a place she didn’t know at all. But the disorientation that comes with being shipped off to an area you don’t know can be made even worse if you get to your new home only to find it damp, rotting or infested with insects, mice and rats.15
In 2012, estimated to amount to £620 million, six contracts shifted housing provision into the hands of three private companies, G4S, Serco and Clearel. It wasn’t ever apparent what qualifications the first two had to be given this responsibility; only Clearel had any experience of providing housing.16 When the new housing providers were announced, security firm G4S was probably best known for having been involved in the death of forty-six-year-old Jimmy Mubenga when, in 2010, three of the company’s guards restrained him on board a flight to Angola. After seventeen years in the UK, Mubenga was being deported to the southern African country and in the process being separated from his wife and five children. One passenger claimed they heard him cry, ‘Let me up, you’re killing me. You’re killing me. You’re killing me. I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe.’17 He died in seat 40E of the plane as it sat on the tarmac at Heathrow. A year later an inquest concluded that he had been unlawfully killed but a subsequent trial ended with the jury finding the three guards not guilty of manslaughter. Sixty-five racist texts found on two of the guards’ phones weren’t shown to the jury; defence lawyers argued they would ‘release an unpredictable cloud of prejudice’. But a coroner’s report that had been written three years after Jimmy’s death said the texts were ‘not evidence of a couple of “rotten apples”’ but seemed to ‘evidence a more pervasive racism within G4S’.18 By the time the report was released, G4S had already been given the asylum housing contract.
Before the switch went ahead, a mix of local authorities, housing associations and private contractors had been responsible for the accommodation of asylum seekers. Cross says the shift away from local authorities was ‘very obvious’ and the private sector offered much lower cost contracts, but that came with ‘absolute pairing down in the contracts’. Support for people was ‘pretty much annihilated’, putting more pressure on organisations like WERS. Though these private companies claim to take housing quality into account, there is a growing body evidence to the contrary.
In 2016, G4S – a company that paid no corporation tax in 2012, the same year it was given the contract – was fined £5.6 million for the low standard of the asylum housing it provided in 2013/14. In Middlesbrough, when G4S inspected housing provided by Jomast – a company G4S subcontracts to – they found urgent defects in 14 per cent of properties. Later, Home Office inspections found urgent defects in 91 per cent of properties. Jomast was reported to be taking £8 million from the taxpayer.19 As asylum seekers were being sent to live in squalid conditions, the government was still handing millions of pounds’ worth of contracts to the private housing providers.
The people I speak to aren’t just victims of the immigration regime; they’re much more than their immigration status. But they’re angry about the way they’ve been treated; they talk about their experiences to expose the impact of the UK’s immigration and asylum rules and to advocate for change. ‘You know they’re really brutal the way they treat people,’ Kelly says. ‘I’ve been here since I was nine years old. I feel like they treat me like some kind of alien. There’s no sympathy or any form of understanding. They have to look at everyone as an individual, not just “you’re a migrant, get out”.’
Kelly describes the treatment she receives when she goes to sign in at the immigration reporting centre at London Bridge – part of the requirement for those waiting for a claim or appeal to be processed, so the state can keep track of them. She has been made to queue outside in the rain – ‘When we told them oh it’s raining, they’re like “it’s only water, do you not bathe?”’ – and describes the policy proscribing phone use: ‘Because they know that if you use your phone you can record something. If you use your phone, they’ll kick you out.’ One undercover report exposed an official at this same reporting centre telling a thirty-nine-year-old man,
We are not here to make life easy for you. It’s a challenging environment we have got to make for people. It’s working