This 2023 article by Professor Louise Ryan, Professor María López and London Met PhD candidate Alessia Dalceggio discusses the experiences of Afghan refugees evacuated from Kabul following the arrival of the Taliban in 2021 under the Conservative government’s immigration policy, focusing in particular on the Afghan resettlement schemes that involved evacuees spending extended periods in temporary hotel accommodation.
Against the backdrop of a ‘hostile environment’ in which the government is primarily concerned with controlling and reducing migration, the authors also argue that Afghans are presented differently in both political and media discourse depending on their route of arrival, either praised as heroic allies of Britain in Afghanistan and/or vilified as an invading ‘swarm’ of ‘illegal’ migrants (Lopez and Ryan, 2023).
Drawing on their 2022 research project in London to understand the experiences of recent arrivals from Afghanistan (Ryan et al, 2022) and their 2023 project to understand how evacuees are getting on two years after leaving Afghanistan (Ryan et al, 2023), the authors argue that the range of humanitarian immigration policies and resettlement schemes have been introduced by the government on an ad hoc basis, with no apparent evaluation of their effectiveness.
Drawing on interviews with 30 newly arrived and long-established Afghan migrants in London, the authors present the stories of some of the research participants to illustrate the impact of such prolonged insecurity, and argue for a more coordinated, efficient and effective approach to supporting refugees by properly evaluating previous schemes and learning lessons across these programmes.
You can read the article in full on the Discovery Society website.
Photo credit: Fallon Michael on Unsplash