I Work at a Migrant Hotel. Many of Them Will Never Work a Day in Their Lives

I am the clinical lead in an asylum hotel in the north of England. We’re right in the centre of town. Though we try to keep a low profile, that’s not always easy with 24-hour security guards in hi-vis patrolling the entrance. The building is modern, but it was never intended to house hundreds of people long-term. It’s starting to degrade quickly. My role is to provide a GP service within the hotel.

I have to be inexact about certain aspects – but let me tell you this: the Home Office is not focused on the details in any meaningful way. At the hotel where I work, the physical building is owned by a group of investors. The security is contracted to the lowest bidder for this kind of work. Day-to-day operations are run by a large housing management firm.

You have to comb their websites for any information about their activities in the area. The asylum-industrial complex is largely run by for-profit contractors, each leveraging their slice of the cake for further enrichment.

I don’t see an energised response to our recent change of government. There seems to be no plan. While I see a significantly expedited approach to resolving asylum claims in real time, these people are then ejected from the system into the care of local authorities. That burden on local services does not show up in national statistics, but it certainly does on school places and provisions for homeless people in any medium-sized British city.

My local authority contacts see no new money or initiatives to cope with the increased demand, and our only multiple-occupancy homeless shelter is entirely full with asylum seekers granted the right to remain. Among our share of residents, it’s an uncomfortable fact that a large number of people will never work a day in their lives, but I am optimistic that, in time, their children will.

The space I work in is extremely secretive. Part of that comes from the housing companies making phenomenal profits from commodifying people. This is a business led by algorithms and obsessed with process. Several of these providers also run prisons, probation services and custody suites; there’s a hardness to their culture – it can be unkind and arbitrary.

No pets allowed – not even a goldfish. No rugs, no extra furnishings. No electric scooters. No bicycles in rooms. It’s hard to make these spaces feel like home. I see hostility between fellow countrymen, with different factions watching each other carefully. It’s opaque and impenetrable – you can’t always tell where the tensions lie. It isn’t a dangerous place to be, but it has rules. In many ways, it’s like a prison: nobody has anything, so the only thing you have of value is your word. I’ve learnt never to promise anything I can’t deliver.

People are not always who they say they are. Most arrivals are undocumented, having disposed of their papers along the way. The Home Office assigns them a name and date of birth based on whatever they declare. People do this to reinvent themselves – they may have tried and failed previously under their original name, or they may be wanted overseas. There is no way to verify it. They are given a new identity and that becomes who they are in the UK. Some have already been granted the right to remain in other European countries and then left to try their luck here, where they have stronger family networks. I have met families who have been on the road for years.

I once met an Eritrean man who had left his home country and travelled overland via the north Africa route. He had been detained by one of the many Libyan militias, tortured and enslaved to work in a brick factory for two years. He had managed to escape and had made it to Italy on a small boat. Other people I meet have run down their asylum claims in multiple countries and taken years to get here.

We frequently see Home Office “investigators” visiting the hotel to talk to individuals. They seem to be older ex-policemen who are tight-lipped about what they are looking for. I suspect it’s boat drivers, gangmasters and traffickers. But not everybody comes by small boat. We see people who are failed overseas students, mostly from South Asia or Africa, who might have procured a university place. Fortunes might have changed back home and the fees haven’t been paid by their family, or they haven’t achieved the required language or edu­cational proficiency by the end of the first year. Sometimes they have fallen in love with someone from the wrong caste. Running out of options, they have entered the asylum system rather than face violence at home. Some families might have work visas that have expired as a family member has become ill and they have had to care for them. I have seen many nurses from Africa in this situation.

We see Ukrainians who found themselves on the wrong side of the conflict in Donbas and are shut out of the Government’s Homes for Ukraine sponsorship scheme. One woman swore she was Ukrainian, though the others insisted she was Russian – they said her clothes were too garish to be Ukrainian. She told us she’d lost all her documents while fleeing. She baked cakes for us constantly. There was a time we saw many Russian war refuseniks, mostly young couples where the husband didn’t want to be fed into the meat grinder in Bakhmut. The Ukrainian men were often here for the same reason – trying to avoid conscription, trying to stay alive.

I meet Yemenis and Sudanese who’ve spent decades working in the Gulf states and now have no way to renew their passports; their home countries no longer have functioning governments. For them, the only option left is to fly to the UK and claim asylum.

Some of what I’ve witnessed has been surreal – people boiling chickens in the kettle, fights breaking out over who gets to sit on the sofas in the lobby, men carefully folding and hiding Deliveroo bags on their way in (asylum seekers aren’t allowed to work while their claims are processed).

I’ve been handed falsified medical documents – complete with strange instructions for how I might help validate them to support an asylum claim. I’ve seen residents buy bicycles on Facebook Marketplace – only to have them stolen the same day. Some arrive on motorcycles or in cars, which are then hidden around the corner and eventually towed for being untaxed and uninsured. I once tried to explain car insurance to a resident but he just couldn’t grasp the concept.

If a resident brings me a delicious meal that is unsolicited, I know a request for some kind of favour is likely to follow. Sometimes it’s to make me bend the rules, for access to fertility treatment or a futile letter to the Home Office to consider the claim more favourably because of everyday medical conditions. I sympathise, but this is work for an asylum solicitor and they are overestimating my actual clout. They might receive an expedited interview and a favourable decision if they have a terminal illness and a short time to live, but that’s as far as it goes.

People flee death threats and torture abroad. Many of my residents arrive deeply traumatised by the lethal small-boat crossing right at the end. I have seen petrol burns from the boat trip and trench foot and scabies from the Calais Jungle. I have seen landmine injuries and bullet wounds from years ago. I have seen men with 100 cigarette burns on their body; women who were forcibly separated from their husbands crossing Libya and can now barely speak of it. I have heard first-hand the brutality of Pakistani politics and what happens if you back [former prime minister] Imran Khan’s party and organise for them. I hear of the secretive Christian churches in Iran where the authorities seize a congregation list and suddenly 50 people have to flee the country.

While London still has the highest number of asylum seekers in total, the Government’s policy is to impose mandatory dispersal to all parts of the UK to share the burden. There is no access to public funds from councils, nor is there access to public housing. Residents are offered dispersal accommodation: houses and flats owned by private landlords and subcontracted to the housing company and paid for by the Home Office. They are supposed to stay only for three-to-six months in hotels, but it is often much longer. Our residents learn early on that a refusal to travel carries no penalty. The Home Office makes you sign a waiver saying that you have declared yourself destitute and will accept any transfer anywhere in the UK, which is mandatory. It’s the same tool used to transfer prisoners around the UK prison estate. Our residents know that a refusal generates a warning letter, but then has no consequence. I have people under my care who have refused a dozen times. They have skin in the game: their kids are in school, healthcare is immediately available and they like the city.

The real kicker for anyone in the asylum system is what happens at the end. Our government might grudgingly accept your asylum claim. Because everything they do, they do grudgingly: every letter and every email reminds you of the inconvenience you have caused. You don’t get a letter congratulating you. You get a letter saying you have 28 days to vacate the accommodation. If you don’t, that means they will come and remove you.

You will no longer receive the £49.18 a week you were getting if you are self-catering, or £8.86 if you are provided three meals a day by yet another for-profit contractor. Regardless of whether you are in a hotel or a dispersal property, you will still be evicted. You have five years’ leave to remain. You are now homeless. You need to go to a Jobcentre and sign on, and you need to declare yourself (and your family) homeless at the council offices. You are no longer in the asylum system. You are an ordinary British citizen, except this time, our government doesn’t have the same duty of care to you. You can still enjoy universal free healthcare, but this time it’s now six weeks for an appointment instead of the one or two days you got used to.

I have seen whole families banging on the hotel door to see the doctor days after departure. But we can’t see you; you are no longer our patients, security won’t let you in – now, you are civilians. You are not asylum seekers anymore; you are ordinary British citizens. I think you finally realise: after the right to remain comes the hard part, the one that nobody had really told you about.