For Afghan refugees Britain’s warm welcome will soon become cold comfort
For a brief moment, it would appear that the UK isn’t quite so “full up”, as the government launches Operation Warm Welcome to relocate refugees from Afghanistan. As the name – evocative of bold military action in the face of the Taliban’s triumph – suggests, this change in attitude is a result of a unique combination of guilt, media attention and a sort of colonial obligation to help those who helped us.
There will be photos of grateful families arriving in the UK, and earnest promises from politicians that Britain will do its part. But soon these headlines will fade; and as Afghanistan recedes from our consciousness, those we have let in will be left to the cold business of building a life in the UK.
In the war movie script of the Taliban’s dramatic takeover, the film ends with the British showing compassion and selflessness by saving thousands of lives. But once the credits roll and the audience leaves, no attention will be paid to what comes after the welcome. Refugees will soon find that Britain’s generosity extends little further than the point of entry.
What awaits is another trial. In addition to the ravages of relocation, there will be the distress of navigating an immigration system that is cruel and chaotic. Refugees will come up against the intersection of the two most compromised institutions in the country – a punitive Home Office and underfunded local councils.
Already the cracks are beginning to appear. About 10,000 Afghan refugees are currently housed in quarantine hotels across the UK, with little but the bags they were allowed to carry on to the evacuation flights. The infrastructure that has met them has been – as any refugee, immigrant or asylum seeker in the UK will immediately recognise – mostly informal, voluntary and, in the long term, utterly unsustainable.
A lattice of nongovernmental organisations and volunteers has kept the reception going so far. The Afghan charity the Afghanistan and Central Asian Association, based in west London, has been overwhelmed by requests for basic provisions and legal advice, and arranging foster care for unaccompanied minors. Its founder, Nooralhaq Nasimi, came to the UK as a refugee in 1999 and set up the organisation to help others navigate the challenges he and his family faced. His small team of volunteers is stretched and on its own. “Unfortunately we didn’t get any support from the council or the government,” he told me.
Once the evacuees are out of quarantine, they will almost certainly run into housing scarcity, bureaucratic holdups and poor translation services, despite the high-profile pledges of funding. For every shortcut the government manages to make, a barrier is raised. Westminster is constantly making promises the Home Office can’t keep.
Take the decision to give highrisk Afghans resettled in the UK indefinite leave to remain, an open-ended immigration status that allows them to work in the UK and eventually apply for a British passport. Their visas will be processed and fast-tracked without fees; they will be exempt from some of the usual paperwork requirements, and come with exceptional banking privileges allowing refugees to open bank accounts that enable them to work without permanent addresses.
But the system is not joined up in that way, and so applicants will themselves have to ping-pong between bank, employer, Home Office and local council. They will in all probability have to do so from temporary accommodation. Hotel stays will have to be extended until housing stock is secured. “Bridging solutions”, such as military barracks run by private companies, will serve in transition. The first state Afghan evacuees can expect after their arrival is a limbo of waiting.
In this limbo, they will join – despite the immediate political attention and fast-tracking of their entries – the other thousands of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants who roll through the crucible of Britain’s settlement system. In it they will risk harassment from the far right inside their temporary accommodation, and experience deterioration of their mental health, as well as lack of access to healthcare.
The Afghan evacuation had to happen suddenly, but even if there were time, the settlement difficulties would have been inevitable. Years of intentional policy have created an immigration and asylum network that allocates as few resources as possible to those within, from allowing local authorities to veto Home Office requests to house asylum seekers to shifting the legal load of challenging unjust decisions rejecting settlement on to stretched charities.
The heroics of helping the dispossessed, both on the part of the government and the thousands of British people who are sending in donations, are in sharp contrast to the usual status quo – indifference to the plight of asylum seekers at best, and hostility towards them at worst. The focus on the large gestures of saving our helpers from the villainous Taliban allows us to see the British as heroes. But some of the moral outrage that triggered that epic effort to help those in desperate need of relief should be directed internally. Saving a life is not enough if it is then sentenced to languish in the purgatory of process. Soon Britain’s warm welcome will freeze into a cold reception.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
return to one day as an adult.
The land of Lanka is a chequered melting pot of ethnicity and religion, scribbled over by successive centuries of colonisation. From 1983 onwards, a civil war exploded, affecting island life in a multiplicity of ways. During one return visit in 1987 as a 13-yearold, I witnessed something that completely changed my attitude towards this country. There, on the road outside my grandparents’ big red gate, was the charred body of a man, a burning tyre necklaced around his neck. This killing occurred amongst many other murders as the government tried to quash a Marxist uprising. Suddenly, I didn’t want to be Sri Lankan anymore.
Later, in 2007, I returned to Sri Lanka with my Kiwi husband, to work with the World Health Organisation as it sought to help largely Tamil civilians in the north and east of the country. Again I became aware of how much blood soaked this beautiful country. There was a stark discrepancy between the realities of life lived in refugee camps by people afflicted by the twin terrors of civil war and the 2004 tsunami, and the somewhat bombastic, nationalistic media that we’d read back in the capital. Being from the majority Sinhalese ethnic group and minority Christian faith, I felt a grievous sense of injustice for my Tamil brothers and sisters.
A funny thing happened in 2021, though. I went to a play called The Mourning After by my friend Ahi Karunaharan. For the first time, I saw a Sri Lankan-New Zealand story being depicted on stage, and I was overcome with nostalgia (The baila dancing! The kabaragoya, a large lizard I used to run shrieking from as a child! The well-meaning but meddling relatives!).
Memories washed through me, of mistwreathed tea plantations, ancient ruins, the lapidarian waters tickling Dutch forts; but mostly I thought about the people of Sri Lanka, those gorgeous smiles that are truly the most beautiful in the world, the deferential tilting of the head, the warm brown eyes and overflowing hospitality. I knew I had to make a different kind of reckoning of what it truly meant to be a Sri Lankan New Zealander.
New Zealanders are amazing at responding the right way to so many things. My theory is that this is due to the relative smallness of our communities; people are people, not simply inhuman labels. I am confident that the majority in this country will recognise the complexity inherent in each New Zealander, of whatever ilk they may be, and respond with compassion – as well as disgust – to this terrible event.
Himali McInnes is a Sri Lankan New Zealander who is a family doctor and writer. Her book of medical essays, The Unexpected Patient, will be released by Harper Collins this month.