Stephen Lloyd, they were deemed ‘too poor’ to be granted a temporary visa to come to the funeral in the UK. The Home Office offered a more technical verdict: they hadn’t previously left Zimbabwe, couldn’t show they had regular incomes and therefore were considered at risk of absconding.
The three grieving relatives – Mona Lisa Faith and Grace and Stanley Bwanya – were desperate to be at Andrea’s funeral. They tried every solution possible, from offering to wear electronic tags to saying they would report regularly to a police station while they were in the UK. Recognising how unfair the rules were, people rallied around their cause. Lloyd guaranteed that, if they were allowed to enter the UK, he would personally make sure they left the country after the funeral, and members of the community raised £5,000 to help cover travel costs. But the government rejected the application for a second time. Then slowly their case began to make headlines. The attention resulted in a petition asking the government to reverse their decision. Over 120,000 people signed it. Finally, the Home Office relented. Without public pressure and media attention, this could have been just one more story among countless others in which people are kept apart by uncaring and inflexible immigration policies. ‘Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty’, wrote essayist James Baldwin, ‘knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.’10
Worryingly and somewhat inevitably, the few organisations that exist to help people struggling with their status are overstretched, laden with more responsibilities than they can manage and struggling to survive. But they are vital. ‘It’s become almost impossible for people with most kinds of immigration issues to get any advice,’ says Benjamin, who gives assistance to destitute migrants. ‘And it’s become much more difficult for people who’ve got that legal advice to find routes to regularising their status.’ And as successive governments have talked and acted tough on immigration, migrants – documented and undocumented – feel able to trust very few people. ‘Just from the point of view of people who have jobs in the sector and get paid to do advice work it’s really frightening. Caseworkers are burning out, and it’s only possible to imagine that services are just going to become more and more strained than they already are,’ Benjamin explains.
He calls charities that hold regular drop-ins for migrants, asylum seekers and refugees ‘advice factories’; they’re under immense amounts of pressure, people can’t stay in the line of work for long and, as they leave, knowledge goes with them. This slowly depletes the level of experience within organisations, which is necessary to help people navigate what is an intentionally onerous and complex set of rules.
‘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
