Introduction

In October 2010, Birmingham City Council's cabinet member for Housing, John Lines, announced the local authority's proposal to stop providing housing and support for asylum seekers, noting that in ‘these difficult economic times … my people have got to come first’ (Bloxham 2010).

Lines’ words were an explicit articulation of a process of abjectification (Squire 2009) by which asylum seekers and other undocumented migrants are excluded from the mainstream of social welfare provision. This discourse constructs asylum seekers and other irregular migrants as ‘illegal’ – or, perhaps more accurately, as ‘illegals’, with the term becoming a noun by which those subject to immigration control are dehumanised and set apart from the rest of us. (Dauvergne 2008: 10). Quite bluntly, as the BBC reported in relation to the lives of people seeking asylum in Glasgow, ‘the Government says these people should not exist’ (Nye 2013). This chapter will seek to explore the implications of this imposition of illegality on both the lived experiences of those subject to immigration control, and on those professionals working to provide – or, increasingly, to deny – services and support to them. It will draw heavily on my own experience as a practitioner working in a small, grassroots voluntary sector agency advocating on behalf of asylum seekers and other undocumented migrants in Birmingham although the opinions voiced are my own and not necessarily those of the agency itself.

Leaving vulnerable people unable to meet their needs

One consequence of this discourse is that some thousands of refused asylum seekers are left destitute due to policies that seek effectively to starve them into agreeing to return ‘voluntarily’ to their countries of origin.