The government’s latest announcements on asylum mark yet another alarming escalation of the UK’s hostile environment.

Under these plans, refugee status becomes temporary and reviewed every 30 months, and the wait for permanent settlement is quadrupled to 20 years. Alongside weakening legal safeguards, these policies threaten mass deportations to make the lives of some of the most marginalised people even more precarious and will further weaken the resilience and wellbeing of communities everywhere. 

The Home Secretary’s suggestion that so-called ‘illegal immigration’ is ‘tearing our country apart’ yet again conflates migration with our legal asylum obligations -  and is fundamentally inaccurate and dangerous. Our Creating a Crisis report shows how political and media elites manufacture concern about asylum and immigration using selective data, racialised rhetoric, and fear-based framing.

Refugees and people seeking asylum are not responsible for the serious crises facing this country. Once again, they are being used as scapegoats for failures of political leadership that have produced deep economic inequalities, crumbling public services, and growing social division. Policies that seek to criminalise, dehumanise and malign people seeking asylum will not fix these real issues. 

If the government is serious about rebuilding the country, it must invest in public services, implement fair wealth taxation, and build a social security system that lifts people out of poverty rather than performatively pursue cruel and unworkable asylum policies.

The government’s proposals represent yet another capitulation to racist, far right narratives that frame immigration as our most serious threat. They repeat patterns of exclusion and injustice that echo the Windrush scandal, and open the door to even more dangerous and damaging policies. Built on a manufactured ‘crisis’, these measures are bound to fail on their own terms. They will inflict irreparable harm on refugees and people seeking asylum, destabilise communities, and deepen social divisions. 

We can choose a future rooted in justice, dignity, and shared humanity, or we can repeat the same divisive scripts that scapegoat refugees and migrants, fuel fear - and ultimately, because they fail to deliver solutions - undermine our democracy. No one wins and we are all left poorer.