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The next government must dismantle our racist asylum system [1]

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Date: 2024-06 

Over the past 500 years, Western migration, colonisation, enslavement, imperialism, violence and wealth extraction have shaped the world we live in. They have created massive inequalities of wealth between countries and left people in many regions exposed to more violence, more poverty and at greater risk from climate change.

This is as much a problem of the present as it is a matter of history. Western governments continue to extract wealth from – and exert violence on – many countries around the world. Their actions are driving increased displacement and refugee migration.

But when the people displaced by current policies or the legacies of old ones try to reach the UK to ask for safety, far too often they are pushed back, detained, deported, and killed. And they are overwhelmingly people of colour. In fact, many are the direct descendants of people who faced the violence of the British Empire in the past.

Our new briefing ‘Asylum in the UK: a front line for racial justice’ reveals that since 2001, seven in 10 people who sought asylum in the UK were from countries that experienced British colonial rule or high levels of British violence and resource extraction.

Racism is a defining feature of British colonial history. This new work argues that it’s also a defining feature of the UK’s refugee protection system. They are two sides of the same coin.

The UK asylum system is racial injustice in action

Racism in the asylum system creates fear, abuse, self-isolation, poverty, and low life prospects for racialised minorities who have sought shelter in the UK.

Calling out this racism isn’t about posturing. It is absolutely critical to protecting refugee lives. Racialised minorities are far more likely to live in terrible homes, be excluded from the jobs market, face abuse from the state and the far right, and be at risk of detention and deportation than those who are not.

Why insist it’s racist, rather than just inadequate, not fit for purpose, or simply bad? The Annie E. Casey Foundation defines structural racism as “the cumulative and compounding effects of an array of factors that systematically privilege white people and disadvantage people of colour”. In other words, policies that generate negative outcomes primarily for racialised minorities are racist. And by this definition, the British asylum system is shot through with structural racism.

We must call it what it is in order to stand a chance at fixing it.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/the-next-government-must-dismantle-uk-racist-asylum-system-migration-general-elections/

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