A decade on from the launch of its Hostile Environment agenda, the UK government is stepping up its campaign against asylum seekers, with indefinite imprisonment of migrants a central component. Fred Ashmore argues that immigration detention is expensive, ineffective and demeans us as a nation. It requires an urgent rethinking beyond the politics of fear.
Migration is a physical process that is used by the government to evoke physical fears of insecurity. A decade into the Hostile Environment, Brian Dikoff argues that the physical reality for many migrants in the UK is being inside but excluded, needed but not wanted, a convenient threat.
Government policy and practice consistently treat asylum and migration as security issues to be tackled via hard borders and military enforcement. Libby Ruffle describes how, in its Nationality and Borders Bill, the government is closing the door on those risking their lives in dangerous channel crossings in a desperate search for safety from war and repression.
Rethinking Security’s new Outreach Coordinator Joanna Frew and her partner live in Martha House*, a ‘house of hospitality’ in north London with forced migrants who have no other means of support. Here she shares what she’s learnt about the value of a community setting for security over the last seven years.
As the UK Government prepares to announce its new Sovereign Borders Bill in parliament, David Forbes argues that the very idea of ‘sovereign borders’ is false and ignores both the reality of international legal commitments and the disastrous precedent of Australia’s flirtation with the concept.
Refugees seek safety in the UK but what they understand by ‘security’ can be different to the understanding of those who have never had to flee. Alice Herve makes the case for putting refugees’ experience of security at the heart of reformed migration policy.
What has oil extraction got to do with migration to the UK? Birmingham volunteer worker Rosemary Crawley tells the story of one woman driven to leave her home in the Niger Delta, and her experience as she came to seek security in Britain.
Catherine Henderson argues that how we talk and write about migrants determines how we and others think about them and their place in our society. Welcoming migrants as ‘arrivers’ matters as much as recognising the reasons they had to leave other countries.
Loraine Masiya Mponela, the chairperson of Coventry Asylum and Refugee Action Group (CARAG), reflects on the unique challenges being faced by asylum seekers and undocumented migrants in the UK during the pandemic.
