The other day, I saw an article in The Guardian titled Councils ‘keen’ to help Home Office move asylum seekers out of hotels. You can read it here. The opening paragraph read thusly:

Councils across England and Wales have said they are keen to help accommodate asylum seekers as the government attempts to move as many as possible out of hotels, in part to try to ease community tensions.

On one level, this is to be applauded. Asylum seekers sent to stay in hotels fails to serve anybody very well. Families holed up in one room together, with no means to cook and often under strict curfews does them little good. At the same time, the perception – not always, but often, wrong – that asylum seekers are all in 5* hotels is not good. It is astronomically expensive, which serves nobody except the hotels happy to fill otherwise empty rooms, whilst not being very helpful for asylum seeker families nor local community relations.

But it seems worth teasing out some of the issues that have got us to the point of paying eye-watering sums to house asylum seekers in hotels. Because the principal cause of putting them into these hotels in the first place was *checks notes* community tensions. Namely, the tension of a lack of affordable local housing and the belief that asylum seekers were blocking affordable housing for indigenous Brits. Any newly proposed HMO was normally greeted with hollers of disgust that this is one less house for British families. An increase in violent attacks on asylum seekers and immigrants more broadly were previously cited as one of the reasons for freeing up their houses by putting them into local hotels.

And so, we seem to be caught back in our particular political loop, trying to square a circle. Having freed up local houses and sent asylum seekers into hotels for the sake of community tensions, it seems new community tensions formed over the expense being paid to house asylum seekers “in the lap of luxury”. Violence – particularly that precipated by the misinformation floating around following the riots in Southport and the various attacks on hotels (that were not 5*) in the copycat “protests” elsewhere – are now being cited as the specific grounds for taking asylum seekers out of hotels and putting them back into local housing. Just imagine my shock when we next hear calls – because of community tensions – to free up housing stock being “blocked” by asylum seekers and moves to shift them into some sort of large scale accommodation. A hotel if they’re lucky; some sort of delapidated barracks deemed too unsafe for continued use if they’re not.

The reason these calls never work is because there is a coming together of several issues, none of which are ever adequately addressed. The inadquate answers to some other tangential, but related, issues allows others to exploit the situation with simple solutions. Solutions, it should be said, that always require a scapegoat, who seem happy to always let it be asylum seekers and immigrants and whose own solutions tend to get rowed back later only to lead them to scapegoat those same people for an entirely inverse problem. In this case, housing being blocked is asylum seekers fault and being put up in expensive hotel accommodation is their fault too. All this, it bears saying, despite them having no say where they are housed at all!

The primary issues at stake are (in no particular order) a lack of affordable local housing, a ludicrous voluntary (opt-in for local councils) asyum dispersal policy and a fundamental political problem. Namely, that we are signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention and have a stated desire to help asylum seekers whilst also not wanting to have them in any way that costs us anything financially, socially or culturally. It is further compounded by the issue of votes with, on the one hand, a set of voters who are adamant that we ought to be far more welcoming than we are to asylum seekers whilst, at the same time, hoping to obtain the vote of those who are fundamentally opposed to almost all immigration of any sort, considering asylum seeking to be the least preferable of all. Political parties, therefore, aim to be hard and soft, ultra-welcoming whilst hard and strict on immigration and asylum claims at the same time. It is, truly, Shroedinger’s immigration policy.

The issues here are not all as straightforward as some may seem. The easiest of them is the housebuilding problem. We simply need more houses than we have. There are all manner of ways we can resolve this. We’re just starting from a long way back and the definition of what is ‘affordable’ is not really any such thing these days. But more houses is what is needed and would fix the fundamental issue at the heart of the constant swing between complaining of blocking homes and paying for expensive hotels. Even if the solution to this is more straightforward than other things, it isn’t a quick fix.

The voluntary opt-in system for asylum seeker dispersal is not as straightforward as we might assume. Whilst there is some sense in dispersing asylum seekers more fairly across the country, we can’t avoid the fact that there are places not well setup to welcome them. It is clearly going to be easier to be an asylum seeker in Manchester, Birmingham or London than it is in Lockinge or Ardington (if you even know where they are!) Without finding means of supporting asylum seekers with the various services they will inevitably need, it isn’t as straightforward as simply dispersing everyone equally. It is ludicrous that asylum seeker dispersal is a matter of local councils voluntrily opting in (this should not be the case) but there is equally sense in dispersing people to areas best set up to support them in their needs. This issue defies simple or quick answers.

The intractable political problem is ultimately the one that rules here though. Government wants to simultaneously welcome and not welcome asylum seekers. This is in response to two sections of the electorate who, between them, want to both welcome and not welcome asylum seekers. Governments (both national and local) are chasing both sides and all those who find themselves somewhere in between. There are clear and obvious things we can do to resolve the stated issues, but they often aren’t done because it would alienate significant sections of the electorate. These issues are the live ones at play when it comes to both ‘saving lives’ and ‘stopping the boats’, ‘smashing the gangs’ yet ‘being the most welcoming country on earth’.  They are similarly the issues at play when it comes to these questions of housing and, to a lesser degree, how we have found ourselves in our existing situation concerning dispersal.

Unless we are prepared to grasp the nettle on these surrounding and related issues, we are consistently going to be having these discussions. Certain areas – like Glasgow and Rochdale who have disproportionate numbers dispersed to them – will consistently feel hard done by on these issues. The pressures on housing will continue to cause people to press for other means of accommodating asylum seekers whilst every solution will be tried and eventually rejected as either too expensive (hotels) or inhumane and unsafe (decommissioned barracks; floating barges; etc) depending on the particular side of the elecorate on which you fall. In the meantime, failing to deal with the issues that cause people genuine issues make easy scapegoats of asylum seekers whose lives are used as a political football and who – it cannot be said enough and should be said again – have absolutely no say over where they live.