Muhammad is from Afghanistan and has a lot to think about today. He has good news – he’s received his asylum decision and he can stay in the UK. But that has brought up a new problem: he will have to leave the budget hotel in Yorkshire where he has been living for months – and he has nowhere else to live.
Still, Muhammad has offered to introduce me to some of the other people who live here. I work part-time for the Refugee Council, which means I sometimes visit asylum hotels. They are strange, sad places that are misunderstood, targeted by protesters and even – for instance, last summer – physically attacked. This one is next to an overgrown riverbank. Many of the guests here are from war zones – you might recognise the names of their home towns from maps on the news. In most cases, they are not allowed to work.
Outside the automatic doors, two men from east Africa smoke cigarettes, shivering in the cold. Inside, people sit at wood-effect tables in a dining area. A young man, injured in a roadside bomb, picks his way across the room on crutches.
“They are all genuine,” Muhammad says. “All the people here, everyone is suffering.” But from a distance, many don’t see it like this. Muhammad has been here for only three months but has already noticed the gap between the people in the hotel and the local community. “They think that immigrants are somehow criminals. This must be what someone is telling them.” He’d like more people to understand the reasons why people claim asylum.
Muhammad’s asylum decision didn’t take long – he feels bad for the other Afghans he knows, many of whom have been waiting much longer.
When women in Afghanistan were banned from attending university, Muhammad began teaching secret classes at home for his sister and her friends in English and biology. “I wanted to hold myself accountable, to feel I did something,” he says.
The authorities found out, and he was arrested last summer and held for seven days. It was his second time in prison – the first was for attending a protest against the education ban. “We were tortured, things happened in the prison,” he says. “The PTSD is something I will live with all my life because of what happened to me back at home.”
Before his second arrest, Muhammad had started applying for postgraduate courses abroad, and was given a place to study for a master’s degree in the UK. So when he was released, he came to this country and claimed asylum.
Most days, Muhammad makes the hour-and-a-half-long trip from the hotel to his university, where he’s still trying to attend classes – but not today. He has assignments due, but he can’t focus. The new problem is that he has received an eviction letter. He’s trying to work out his options. “Maybe I will become homeless as well,” he says, calmly.
Two young Eritreans are sitting nearby. Leul and Ledo are Pentecostal Christians. In Eritrea, which is a dictatorship, their religion is banned and followers are imprisoned or killed.
This is one reason to escape; another is that teenagers are rounded up and forced to fight in the army. “Most Eritreans are out of their country because of the government,” says Leul. He left with his mother when his father was imprisoned due to their religion. In neighbouring Ethiopia, his mother was caught selling “small things” on the street and beaten by the police because she was “illegal”. “I haven’t heard from her for a long time,” he says.
Leul travelled for two years to get to the UK. His journey, through multiple countries, sounds horrifying. “In Libya, it’s crazy,” he says.
This hotel is supposed to be for adults, but teenagers under 18 turn up here regularly. If they are lucky, they are collected by a social worker after a few weeks and taken into care. Others spend months or even years trying to prove their age. Some give up or turn 18 before their real age is accepted. It’s a surreal, stressful and bewildering process for hundreds of young people escaping from war zones every year.
Leul says he was 17 when he arrived, but Home Office officials didn’t believe him, and he is now 18 anyway. He has been in the hotel for 11 months. “Here, it’s like a modern prison … We don’t do anything – no work, no learning, just sit in the hotel,” he says. He seems crushed and has been prescribed medication. “I can’t live in my country and I can’t live in another country.” He says if his family were here, they wouldn’t allow him to be as low as this, “but I don’t have family, that’s why it’s happening to me like this”. At least he and Ledo have found a local church – they go to services twice a week and the congregation are “very kind”.
My colleague Caroline also works for the Refugee Council and is in the hotel today with Amy, a medical student on a placement. They are giving advice on accessing healthcare. A crowd gathers around them, Muhammad and some other volunteers from the hotel are helping. There are dental problems and minor injuries, sometimes gunshot wounds, people who have fallen from moving vehicles and mental health issues. It’s very busy. People have arrived in flip-flops, or without a coat, and need help to get clothes.
Aziz also volunteers for the Refugee Council, and lives in the hotel. He’s writing a PhD thesis on applied machine learning and AI – he normally goes to a library to work.
Aziz tells me he is from a minority group in Afghanistan, the Hazara. He explains that Hazara people are “especially targeted under the Taliban – at the mosque, education, on the bus, they even targeted maternity hospitals”. His house in Kabul was near the graveyard, and “all the people they have killed are buried in one place”. One of his friends was killed at a Hazara demonstration against discrimination: “He had just completed his study, but he lost his life.”
Aziz is clear: “We would not escape just for a happy life or a comfortable life. But there is no hope.”
Spread across several tables, a larger group of Afghan men are having lunch served on paper plates – rubbery scrambled egg, dry rice and something watery and yellow made with lentils. They are grateful to be fed, but dream of the freedom to choose what to eat – they are not allowed food in their rooms.
There are about 20 Afghans in this hotel – all fled persecution under the Taliban. “There was a huge regime change,” Muhammad says. “Everyone knows what happens when a regime changes. Someone’s father worked in the army, someone’s brother is an interpreter – my family is directly on their list.” The men nod – one was in the Afghan national army and shows me an ID card. “Even people who worked with Nato, they are still waiting for a decision.”
What do they think about our new government’s promise to “smash the gangs”? The idea gets a cautiously positive reaction, with an important addition. “If there’s an alternative way to come, that will be better,” Aziz suggests. “Smugglers don’t care about others, the only thing they care about is themselves.”
Afghans were the top nationality to cross the Channel last year, and many of those around the table came in a small boat. Muhammad interprets for one of the men, who says: “We have seen death with our own eyes.” They describe being crammed together, people crying or losing consciousness, their clothes drenched with seawater and petrol from the boat. “We could see waves getting bigger, we were about to sink,” says one young man. Another says he nearly died twice – once in a bomb blast in Afghanistan, and again crossing the Channel.
I ask why they didn’t stay in France, or elsewhere. They say that they were not “given the option” to stay, or that they were homeless and sleeping on the streets. Someone mentions being able to speak English and having friends or relatives here. But the fact is that many more people do stop somewhere else, and at least two-thirds of all refugees remain in a neighbouring country.
People talk about missing their families. The strain and uncertainty of waiting, without anything to do, affects all of them. “Everyone is behaving strange. If they spend six months, their behaviour changes,” one of the men tells me. Since arriving, he has started self-harming. “Just the thoughts, the thoughts,” he says.
Sometimes people are refugees twice over. Abdullah is a Palestinian refugee, born in Lebanon. He grew up in a camp for Palestinians, rented by the UN from the Lebanese government. He says they have no rights there to work or own a house, so live in slums.
There are undercover Palestinian organisations that operate in the camps, and it’s hard to survive without them – they provide badly needed medicine and offer work opportunities. But when the recent war broke out, “they sent me a military order, saying I have to fight with them”. If he didn’t obey, he would be in danger. The organisation is related to Hezbollah, he explains, and “the Lebanese government can’t do anything about it”.
He doesn’t know any other Palestinian refugees in the UK. He says this hotel is OK as something temporary. “I couldn’t even think, when I first came here. I was really struggling inside.”
Waqar, also from Afghanistan, has been here a bit longer. He had his asylum claim refused and has lodged an appeal. He is bewildered by the decision letter. “They said you are able to escape your country, and you survived, so we are not sure that they will kill you! This is a strange reason,” he says. Poor decision-making is a big problem, and leaves people (including Afghans who are afraid to return) completely stranded. The Home Office admits that only half of decisions meet its own quality checks – and almost half of the challenges are successful.
Waqar plays cricket with a local club. “Whenever I mention I’m an asylum seeker, I get hate,” he says. “Some of the media influence the thoughts of the people. They say, oh, asylum seekers have done this or that, and have taken the jobs.”
There are many other refugees in this hotel – from Sudan, Iran, central Africa, Yemen and elsewhere – all with their own dramatic stories. There are also Syrians – delighted by the fall of the Assad regime, but still struggling with the impact of so much death and displacement. They have been told that their asylum claims have been paused and are wondering what will happen to them next.
As dusk falls, the Afghans sometimes play cricket in the empty hotel car park (no one has a car, and they couldn’t apply for a licence even if they did). Table tennis is popular – a table is unfolded from a side room, and a crowd gathers to watch and cheer. A Sudanese boy and a young Eritrean dart at the ball and enjoy the applause – for a short while, smiles break out.
I ask the men what would help. Most would like to be allowed to learn English sooner – they have to wait six months to start formal classes, although two teachers from a local college sometimes come in to lead them in a chorus of Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes. But mainly, people suggest a quicker, more efficient asylum process and the chance to work, perhaps after six months.
If they can work, Waqar says, “people will engage, and pay their taxes. It’s good for the economy.” Muhammad suggests some kind of training, to help them integrate.
Sadly, some of the men are nervous about going outside – Aziz says he doesn’t walk around at night because he was told by a shopkeeper that he might get stabbed. One man says his Afghan friend, now in this hotel, was attacked last summer at the time of the riots and spent two weeks in hospital. Leul remembers how frightening it was then, when the security guards at the hotel told them they couldn’t leave the building.
Nobody loves asylum hotels. They are expensive and isolating; the system works mostly for the benefit of shareholders. But experiments with barges and barracks have shown that worse accommodation causes greater harm and can cost even more. It’s better to focus on making faster and better decisions, and to help people rebuild their lives in communities.
Just 7% of recent immigrants to the UK came through the asylum system, so it seems strange that this group attracts so much attention. And the media obsession with counting migrants obscures a simple, more hopeful truth. Given half a chance, the people in this hotel have a lot to offer, and will become care workers, academics, drivers, shopkeepers – like anyone else, except that they once escaped from danger, as people have throughout history. “This is not invading a country – this is finding a safe place for their lives. It’s a different thing,” says Muhammad.
Some names have been changed