Below we're featuring a guest blog piece from our Head of Fundraising, which digs into one of the proposals made in the Government's new Immigration and Asylum Bill.
The UK government has announced that people granted asylum in the UK may be required to pay back around £10,000 towards the cost of their accommodation and support once they start earning.
Let’s be clear about what that means.
People who have fled war, torture, persecution, authoritarian regimes, sexual violence, political repression, religious persecution, or disaster could be told that the basic support they received while seeking safety was not really the right thing to do and a fulfilment of our obligations as a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention, but rather an accrual of debt to be paid off before being allowed to settle permanently.
I write this as a white British man, not as someone with lived experience of seeking asylum, displacement, or racialised border violence. But I do think those of us who have benefited from Britain’s history and position in the world have a responsibility to speak honestly about what is being done in our name. This is not about speaking for refugees. It is about challenging a system that speaks about refugees as though they are burdens, costs to be recovered, rather than people seeking safety in a world Britain has helped shape.
This policy is being presented as fairness, as a reasonable contribution from people who have benefited from the “generosity” of the British public. But I see this as the latest step in a pattern in the UK asylum system that is an expression of colonial thinking and behaviour.
Older forms of colonialism often involved Britain and other European powers going abroad: taking land, taking resources, taking labour, redrawing borders, extracting wealth, and reshaping societies around imperial interests.
This feels like a modern version of the same logic. It is not identical or the same as the empire building of the past, but it is connected to a long history of extraction and racialised control and dominance. It is not always explicitly going and taking things, but instead we – the UK – are creating or contributing to the conditions that force people to move, then bringing people into a system where their survival is treated as a cost to be recovered.
The public debate often treats asylum as though people simply appear at Britain’s borders for no reason. But people do not leave their homes, families, languages, communities, professions, memories, and futures behind because it is easy. They move because staying has become impossible.
What is often missing is an honest conversation about why staying becomes impossible.
Many people seeking asylum come from countries shaped by war, occupation, authoritarianism, resource extraction, economic instability, climate breakdown, and the long shadow of empires past. In many of these histories, Britain and other Western powers are not neutral observers.
Western governments have sold weapons into conflict zones, backed authoritarian and cruel regimes when it has suited our interests. We have a long history of intervening militarily, economically and politically across the world.
We have benefited from wealth extraction, cheap labour and exploitation, and global systems that leave some countries exposed to instability and entrenched poverty while others accumulate wealth.
And then, when some of the people displaced by those systems arrive here, we shamelessly call these people a burden. We are encouraged to see the refugee as an isolated cost on a spreadsheet, not as a person moving through a world that Britain helped build.
We are told to ask: How much did their hotel cost? How much was their support? How much can we recover from those meeting the 'good refugee' stereotype?
But we are rarely invited to ask: Who profited from the weapons? Who benefited from the resources? Who supported the regimes? Who contributed to the instability? Who accumulated wealth while other countries were made less liveable?
The wider history does not mean every conflict is Britain’s fault; the world is more complicated than that. But it does mean Britain cannot keep presenting itself only as a generous but detached host, as though it has no relationship to the global conditions that produce displacement.
This is what makes the proposed repayment scheme so troubling. It does not come from nowhere, but sits within a wider system that too often treats people seeking safety as problems to be managed, delayed, disbelieved, and contained, rather than people to be protected. People are often prevented from working while their asylum claims are assessed. They are made dependent by the system. Then, once granted protection and finally allowed to rebuild their lives, they may be told they owe the state for the support they needed during the period they were not allowed to support themselves.
This places people in a logically impossible situation: they are prevented from supporting themselves, then held financially responsible for that enforced dependence.
Imagine if we told someone who had relied on Universal Credit during a period of unemployment that, once they found work again, they owed the state thousands of pounds for the support received. There would, rightly, be outrage.
Yet when the people affected are refugees - many racialised, many from countries shaped by empire, war, extraction and Western foreign policy - that same cruelty is repackaged as fairness.
We need to move away from this completely.
A serious asylum system would make decisions quickly and fairly, let people work, facilitate and prioritise integration, and treat protection as a legal and moral obligation, not debt. Offering protection and safety should not come with a shakedown.
Image credit: Kevin Dowling, Unsplash
How can I respond?
See how you can stand up against unjust policies like this one by reading our five ways to speak out listicle.
Share a copy of our new Impact Report with someone you know so that the stories of people with lived experience of the asylum and immigration system don't go unheard.
Give a gift to support our housing, support and advocacy work with people seeking safety.
