No one in their right mind thinks accommodating asylum seekers in hotels is a good idea. No one in their right mind thinks we should just live with undocumented, life-threatening migration routes into the UK. And no one in their right mind thinks the experiences endured by most migrants could be a rational choice for anyone. Forget for a moment the ludicrous, inflammatory posturing of many who should know better; we ought to be able to begin from these shared acknowledgments.
Using hotels for housing vulnerable migrants is the equivalent of what prison reform campaigners have long called warehousing – make sure a problematic group is simply corralled somewhere more or less secure, and hope their issues will somehow sort themselves out. The chaos and under-resourcing of the legal processes involved and the shocking levels of delay mean that the conditions are created for maximal insecurity and rootlessness – at worst, resentment and criminality. And we have to face the fact that, so long as safe and legal routes for asylum seekers are inadequate, we are colluding in the flourishing industry of lethal and illegal systems whose effect is to create communities for whose safety and integration government is unable to plan, and who are trapped in a situation both dehumanising for them and challenging for localities where they are placed.
