In this government’s realm of sham politics, nothing is what it seems, nothing does what it claims and the public are taken for idiots. Yet synthetic policies don’t always fool the public, especially the ever more draconian rules to deter refugees.
There are 125,000 asylum seekers who are currently awaiting a decision on an initial claim or an appeal, or expecting removal from the country. Many have been in limbo for over six months – some for many years. Despite the pictures of boats arriving, asylum applications actually fell in the year ending June 2021, yet the backlog is at its highest ever, due to Home Office failure to process cases. Most applicants are young, fit and eager to work, but condemned to do nothing for years.
Typical of those lost in the appeals process is “Aliah”, from Trinidad, who has lived in that limbo for seven years. She tells me that she was forced into marriage at 16, against her sexuality, but fled her violent husband with her children. Through administrative chaos, she has never had the puny £5.66 a day support she’s entitled to, relying on charity and food banks: at one point she and her children camped in a Croydon bus shelter. She wants social care work but all work is banned.
With employers desperate to fill a million vacancies, letting asylum seekers work has strong public support. With pigs shot for lack of abattoir workers, milk poured down the drain for lack of drivers, care homes and restaurants closing for lack of staff, refusing this keen workforce the chance to earn their living is just perverse.
Boris Johnson assumes there’s no limit to voters’ appetite for a “hostile environment” for new arrivals, as Nigel Farage steals political capital from porous boats landing on Britain’s apparently porous borders. But on this Johnson miscalculates. Polls for a while now have shown the public is realistic about what happens next: more than 70% think asylum seekers once here should be allowed to earn their keep. Today, polling for the Lift the Ban coalition group of 250 charities, unions, faith groups and employers finds just as many back it in the home secretary’s Witham constituency and the prime minister’s Uxbridge seat – and in newly Tory “red wall” seats. Home secretary Priti Patel adamantly refuses to relax any rules, though her own department’s maladministration is responsible for this mushrooming backlog of people lost in its files.
Every element of her policy is bogus. These asylum seekers are here to stay, whether or not the Home Office, or indeed voters, want them to, because it’s virtually impossible to return them anywhere, when no country will take them: in 2019, only about 4,000 were forced to return. If most are destined to stay, there is no point in keeping people isolated and unemployed, instead of integrated, working and paying tax in Britain.
The theory arguing against such an idea is that allowing people to work would be a “pull factor”. A source close to Patel told the Sunday Times that, without the punishment of enforced idleness, “The number entering the country would rocket … Why would anyone come through the legitimate immigration system when they could just rock up and claim asylum and get to work the next day?” But that quite deliberately ignores the research – and there’s plenty of it – showing that new arrivals know nothing about rules on work or benefits. The European Council on Refugees and Exiles’ extensive survey on why migrants choose one country over another concludes: “Not one study has found a long-term causal link between welfare and work policies and numbers of asylum seekers.”
New immigration law since January makes an asylum claim “inadmissible” if someone has passed through a safe country – but that’s another phoney policy. Not one “inadmissible” arrival has been returned, with no EU country willing to accept them (the UK defaulting on the £55m promised to France to patrol its beaches may not help). Most “inadmissibles” and their children will stay for ever.
One “pull factor” is something of an irony: according to Refugee Action, many choose Britain because of our ancient – though increasingly unjustified – reputation as a good country that upholds the human rights of those fleeing tyranny. Another “pull” is relatives and fellow countrymen here already, in settled communities. Why? The empire bequeathed them the English language, that same empire most celebrated by those keenest to bar entry from the old colonies.
Many of those refused permission to stay will become “undocumented migrants”, vanishing into the netherworld of modern slavery – the worst work at the worst pay. Estimates of their numbers vary between 600,000 and 1.2m, according to the Migration Observatory. When he was mayor of London, Boris Johnson called for an amnesty to bring that workforce out of the shadows. By comparison, simply letting registered asylum seekers earn their living is far more modest step.
Because he thinks anti-immigration rhetoric, familiar to all populists and demagogues, helped to win his great Brexit victory and his 80-seat majority, Johnson will keep at it through to the next election. While blaming migrants for low wages sounds intuitively convincing to some, economic research show it has minimal effect.
Voters are more realistic: they think that, once asylum seekers are already here, they should be allowed to work. The Tories are split, with Dominic Raab declaring himself “open-minded” about letting them take jobs, backed even by hard Brexiters such as Steve Baker and Andrew Bridgen: Refugee Action says the Treasury could save as much as £650m a year. Brexit took back control over immigration rules, but the public are more realistic than the government on how best to exercise it.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist