Not everyone has to clamber onto a dangerous inflatable dinghy in the middle of the night. Some refugees fly to Britain. They are welcomed at the airport and often taken directly to furnished houses, where smiling volunteers and case workers help them register with doctors and local schools. They can work and claim benefits immediately.
Since 2010 Britain has resettled some 65,000 refugees, not including Hong Kongers or Ukrainians. Such people were deemed legitimate and deserving of protection by the un High Commissioner for Refugees or the British government. A decade ago most were Syrians. Today Afghans are the largest group.
Being picked is like winning the lottery, but with added pressure. Khadeja Alamary, who fled Syria for Jordan, got a phone call from the un asking if she would like to be resettled in an unspecified Western country. She had to answer immediately, without waiting for her husband to return from work. “They didn’t give me any chance to think,” she says. In November 2017 she and her family arrived in a Devon village.
Ordinary asylum-seekers are often dispersed to cities and towns, especially poor ones where cheap hotels abound. Resettled refugees are scattered more widely. If a local council or a community group can find an appropriate house in a village, they go there. Breckland, in rural Norfolk, has 106 resettled Afghans but no asylum-seekers. Argyll and Bute, a beautiful part of Scotland, has 61 resettled Afghans and no asylum-seekers.
British villages are not always well supplied with mosques and halal food. Lubna al Zain, a Syrian woman who was resettled in rural Nottinghamshire, says that “everything” is in Nottingham, an hour away by bus. Members of her family have struggled to find jobs. On the plus side, says Duncan Wells, the head of resettlement programmes at the Refugee Council, a charity, people sometimes learn English quickly if they are plunged into a monoglot world.
Despite their lack of control, and the difficulties they face, resettled refugees are hugely grateful. Their accounts of Britain are full of words like “cosy”, “nice”, “sweet” and “love”. Tamanna, an Afghan refugee, requested a home in southern England but was placed in Yorkshire. She applied for more than 200 jobs before getting one. Still, she says: “When I compare myself to people who came through illegal ways, we are very fortunate.”
Indeed, the main problem with the resettlement schemes is that they are so small. Last year just 7,815 refugees were resettled in Britain. Almost five times as many people arrived in small boats, and 14 times as many claimed asylum. They are drops in a vast ocean. ■
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