Refugee Action have launched a new report: Locked Out and Locked Up: Experiences of asylum policy and systemic racism in the UK and northern France.

Based on a year of research, co-led by people with lived experience, and with interviews with 32 people across UK asylum hotels and northern France, it exposes how current UK asylum policies are impacting people’s lives and driving systemic racism.

In northern France, people are forced to survive in brutal conditions. Police raids happen every 48 hours. Tents are destroyed. Belongings are taken. Teargas is used. Not even children and babies are kept safe.

And when people reach the UK, they face more hostility. Policies like the “one in, one out” scheme and temporary refugee status continue to deny people’s safety, stability and dignity.

These policies disproportionately target people of colour from countries across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. People fleeing war and persecution are treated with suspicion, criminalised for seeking safety, and subjected to harsher conditions and longer uncertainty. At the same time, safer and faster routes have historically been made more accessible to others.

The findings are stark:

• People are “locked out” of safe routes in northern France, facing violence, deprivation and racial profiling.

• Those who reach the UK are often “locked up” in de facto detention, unable to work, living in poor conditions and stuck in limbo. In the words of one participant, they are in an “open prison”.

• Political rhetoric and media narratives around “small boats” are fuelling dehumanisation and racial injustice.

Participants describe feeling treated “like animals” and being denied basic dignity on both sides of the Channel.

The report calls for:

– The government to immediately end its cruel “one in, one out” policy, and instead fund safe routes for people to arrive in the UK and seek asylum.

– The government to immediately end its new policy of limiting refugee status to thirty months.

– The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI) to urgently launch an inspection focused on racial disparities in the treatment and outcomes for people arriving in the UK.

– Politicians of all parties and media outlets to cease referring to people seeking asylum in the UK as “illegal”. Seeking asylum is a legal right under the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, regardless of the route a person takes to reach the UK.

For more information, see here.

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