Campaigner Spotlight: Farhad's Dissertation
Farhad, one of Safe Passage’s Grassroots Campaigners, recently finished writing his dissertation on the impact of Nationality and Border’s Act. We are delighted he was willing to share it with us as well as a few words:
The Nationality and Borders Act: Fixing the broken immigration system or promoting anti-refugee discriminatory policies?
“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark … I wouldn’t have put my children on the boat unless I thought the sea was safer than the land.” Warsan Shire, 2011
This summer, as I finished up my research into the devastating impact of the Nationality and Borders Act (NBA), I knew it was more important than ever to fight the hostile environment, debunk myths around the UK’s ‘broken asylum system’ and expose the consequences of this Act on asylum seekers’ and refugees’ lives. As a refugee myself, I was stunned to hear the Act had passed through Parliament despite fierce opposition from activists, refugee advocates, and human rights organisations. Would the NBA ‘fix the broken immigration system’, or, as I feared, promote anti-refugee discriminatory policies?
I set out to answer these three research questions:
Will the Nationality and Borders Act achieve its stated aim of “making the UK immigration system fairer and more effective, and tackling illegal immigration” (Home Office, 2021)?
What potential harms and unintended consequences could the new Act cause for refugees and asylum seekers?
What needs to be done to create a genuinely “fairer and more effective” immigration system?
The NBA brings in significant changes to our asylum laws. Asylum seekers can now be criminalised based on how they arrived in the UK (the two-tier system), the Home Secretary can take away your citizenship without warning, and family reunion has been drastically restricted. By speaking directly with affected refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, I want to cast a light on their concerns, and how they feel we can deliver a genuinely fair and more effective immigration system. After many interviews and conversations, every person emphasised that the NBA will not deliver a more effective immigration system. In reality, the NBA will make the system harder, more unfair, and cause more harm to people who have experienced trauma. It will put their lives at risk by taking a discriminatory and punitive approach towards asylum seekers based on the mode of arrival. The disastrous consequences include: impacts to people’s physical and mental health, barriers to people’s integration into society, increasing racial segregation and discrimination, deepening the vulnerabilities of refugees, and undermining the international refugee protection system.
The refugees and asylum seekers shared their expertise in how we can create a genuinely fairer and more effective immigration system. They recommended expanding safe routes, developing global resettlement schemes, improving the Home Office’s work, dismantling hostile policies, and creating a culture of compassion and easing of the rules to regularisation.
The UK was one of the founding members of the Refugee Convention and has a leading role to play in protecting refugees whether they are coming via irregular routes or legal ones. Refugees should not be penalised or discriminated against just because they are seeking protection and have no other alternatives but to use irregular and dangerous paths to join their families and loved ones. If a wealthy country like the UK neglects its responsibilities to protect people that are not protected by their own oppressive governments, then the whole system of international human rights and humanitarian law breaks down. Refugees should be welcomed into our communities, rather than seen as a burden to society, and we must work collectively to protect their human rights and integration to our country.
All around the world, families are being forced to leave their homes every single day in pursuit of safety and a better future, risking everything to escape persecution, wars, and violence, and often leaving with only the clothes on their backs and the will to survive. Migration is not a crime that must be prevented. It is a complex international phenomenon that must be managed with humanity, compassion and integrity.