One of the migrants who sticks most in Nicola Kelly’s mind is Parwen, an Iraqi Kurdish mother she met in a camp near Dunkirk. Kelly played with Parwen’s seven-year-old daughter and heard about how, before one attempt to cross the Channel, French police had fired teargas and nearly hit her four-year-old son. Kelly drove away from the camp, and made the crossing – easy for her, with her British passport – that so many people were risking their lives to make. “I was about to go home to my husband and son, warm and safe in a house, knowing that probably their tents were going to be ripped away from them that night, and they’d have to sleep out in the rain and the mud,” she says. “There’s a guilt attached to that. It’s like, I wish I could do more, help in some way, other than just writing, which never really feels like enough.”
Kelly’s book, Anywhere But Here, brings such a human and humane perspective to an issue that is politicised and toxic. At the camp, Parwen wished her a safe journey home and, as she was driving away, Kelly spotted some graffiti on a wall which she took for her book’s title – something an asylum seeker might think as they decide to flee, or while forced to survive in a makeshift camp thousands of miles away, but just as easily something people might think about migrants arriving on these shores, or some politicians who wish the issue would go away.
A journalist, Kelly has written about immigration for many years, including for this newspaper. It has always been a politicised issue, she says, but in recent years, the problem of the small boats has become particularly explosive. Last year, nearly 37,000 people crossed the Channel in boats and at least 78 people died, making it the deadliest year on record; so far this year, at least 10 have died attempting to cross. We hear a lot about what people have been through to get here, she says, but not about what happens once they arrive. “I wanted to tell stories from on the ground of the people who are making the system work,” she says. Or rather, those who are trying to, within a system that is sprawling and broken. Kelly meets volunteers and activists, solicitors and caseworkers, and a coastguard who carried an unconscious and hypothermic toddler from a dinghy, and was trying to do his job in an overstretched and underfunded service, while dodging abuse from people who think people in flimsy dinghies shouldn’t be helped ashore.
Kelly quotes a statistic that seems impossible to believe now: in 1997, only about 3% of people in Britain considered immigration a major issue. By the time of the 2016 Brexit referendum, it was nearly half. “Now it’s one of the top issues across Europe. That’s how politicised it has become – this tinderbox of an issue that doesn’t need to be,” says Kelly.
In 2014, the era of the Conservatives’ “hostile environment” policy, Kelly was working as a press officer at the Home Office. The issue of immigration, she says when we meet at her home in London, was “huge”. The year before, vans had been driving around multicultural areas with billboards telling people who were in the UK illegally to “go home or face arrest”. Kelly had worked for the Foreign Office for the previous five years, in Brussels and Istanbul, then during the Arab spring she worked as a media adviser for the Syrian National Coalition, the opposition organisation. Back in London, the Home Office felt like a culture shock.
“It was much more hierarchical. I found it really competitive, brash and macho, and I felt that everyone was talking over each other to try to get their voices heard.” One of the biggest issues at the time was British fighters travelling to join Islamic State, and Kelly was at a meeting when a colleague made a dismissive joke about the difference between Sunnis and Shias. “Just a total lack of interest in the world around them,” she says. “I look back on it and think I should have said something.” But she says it never felt the sort of place where she could challenge senior colleagues. There were constantly policies she would have to defend to journalists, hating herself for it. “There is a sense that you’re morally compromised on a day-to-day basis.” Kelly left and became a journalist herself, covering immigration from the start – some former colleagues, she writes, see her as a “traitor”.
The first time she watched a dinghy arrive was in 2021, at Dover. For years she had interviewed asylum seekers who had made the crossing, or were waiting to, and she spent time at the camps by the French coast, but nothing could have prepared her for seeing a dinghy hauled in, its 50 or so occupants transferred on to a Border Force boat and wrapped, shivering, in foil blankets. “It was quite a visceral reaction.” She was standing near a group of far-right protesters, “and they were shouting: ‘Go back to where you came from.’ I was hearing all of this, and looking at this boat being tugged in, watching these people coming up and seeing a dad carrying his little kid.”
She felt angry with the protesters, but still writes with empathy about the people with whom she doesn’t agree – the group who find a kind of camaraderie up there on the Dover clifftops, watching for “invaders”, in a town where jobs are scarce and poverty is rife; the communities angry that asylum seekers were housed in former miners’ homes in villages around Doncaster that had never recovered from mine closures. “Everyone I spoke to was utterly despairing about the lack of opportunities, the housing crisis, unemployment levels, austerity that has decimated the community. Huge social issues.” But she is scathing of politicians who inflame the issue for political gain, or don’t seem to care about the inhumane and sluggish system – a system in which a backlog of tens of thousands of people were waiting for months or years for their claims to be processed, with potential life or death decisions in the hands of low-paid, low-trained staff virtually straight out of school. And she is scathing about the private sector companies making huge profits – in 2023, Kelly wrote about allegations that there was a culture of “institutional abuse” at hotels in and around Liverpool run by Serco, which was awarded a £1.9bn contract to run asylum accommodation. (Serco described the claims as “without foundation”.)
It is not that Kelly favours open borders. “I would advocate more for a better-managed system, rather than the chaos we’ve got at the moment, which is beneficial to nobody. There are such a broad range of reasons why people flee, and they should be taken on individual merit rather than, ‘Economic migrants, bad; people fleeing conflict, OK, we’ll consider it.’ It’s too broad-brush to do that. It needs to be on an individual case-by-case basis.” She says that, compared with other European countries: “We take a fraction of people who are fleeing. We’re one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and we play a really minor role in international refugee protection.” The support for Ukrainians fleeing the war showed, she says, “how easily we can set up these schemes”, even if, longer term, many Ukrainians are now facing homelessness. “One hundred and twenty thousand people can be brought over, people can open their doors, give them their spare rooms, teach them English, fly Ukrainian flags. But we can’t do that for Palestinians, or people from Sudan.” At about the same time that Ukrainians were being welcomed: “We couldn’t do it for Afghans. We could completely leave them to their deaths. The double standards are infuriating. In very recent memory, we intervened in that country. Afghans are now the top nationality crossing by small boat, and dying in greater numbers than any other nationality. We have a direct link, a direct reason to be responsible for these people because of what we’ve done in their country.”
Kelly has heard numerous accounts of racist abuse. The night before we meet, an Iraqi Kurdish man she knows got in touch to say at that he was experiencing a racist online pile-on. “He was saying, ‘I didn’t think the UK would be like this.’ That’s the sort of thing I hear all the time, and I don’t want people to lose hope, because they are safer than they were in their home countries, than they were on the migration trail, than they were in northern France. Although it’s really hostile and a completely broken system which is going to leave them likely languishing for many years, they are safe. So I don’t want them to give up hope entirely.”
It is hard, though. One man she met, Arian, an Iranian Kurd who had been an engineering student in Iran, was staying with other asylum seekers at a hotel in Knowsley, near Liverpool; two weeks earlier, a mob whipped up by fascist groups had rioted outside the hotel. When Kelly met him, they got the bus into Liverpool but had to get off when a group of teenagers started abusing him. In 2020, a man turned up with a knife and a Nazi flag at the offices of her friend, the leading immigration solicitor Toufique Hossain, with the intention of killing him. She too has been threatened – including, online, by someone who said they knew which nursery her son went to – and has had to think more about it in the run-up to publication of the book. “They’re trying to intimidate people working in the sector.”
The far right are loud, and parties such as Reform have other political parties nervous, but that is not the whole story. Kelly points to polls that show broad public support for asylum seekers, including allowing them to work while their claim is decided. It would be great if that narrative could prevail, she says: that immigration “would benefit the economy, and does benefit us culturally and socially”. She had hoped Labour would be different. “The Rwanda plan was scrapped, there were positive noises early on and it seemed as if they had a bit of a grip on where the system is broken – they know that they need to restart processing, and that’s the only way to get people out of hotels, which is politically toxic.” But the rise of Reform, and the racist riots last summer, have meant the “issue becoming even more politicised. [Labour have] moved further and further to the right, or that’s the way it seems.” One recent announcement is that anyone arriving on small boats will be refused citizenship.
This week, Labour confirmed that thousands of people who were due to be sent to Rwanda will have their claims processed in the UK. “It’s great to hear that people who had been kept in limbo will now have their claims processed,” says Kelly. However, Labour “should commit to scrapping all externalisation plans including returns hubs. That would give asylum seekers an added level of certainty.”
There is very little about the system that Kelly says she doesn’t feel incensed about: from the unwieldy and inefficient bureaucracy to the brutality of dawn raids and detention centres, to the lone children who go missing from adult accommodation, the migrants forced into modern-day slavery, and the trafficked women giving birth alone in hostels so as not to alert immigration authorities. Most enraging is “the politics, because the politics informs the way in which the system runs. Instead of it being chaotic, they could choose to manage the system well or better, and the change in rhetoric is part of that. But I don’t think it will ever be a system that’s invested in because, politically, it’s not beneficial for them to do it.”
The migrants she meets are present throughout the book – brave, resourceful and resilient people who have endured unimaginable suffering in their home countries and during their journeys to the UK, and, for some, in this country too. They bring real value to this country, such as those working in care, but we miss out when we don’t allow asylum seekers to work legitimately – I am thinking of the young Ethiopian medical student desperate to finish her training, but forced to take underground work as a food delivery driver.
If the aggression towards migrants and racism which Kelly has seen has made her despair and question what she thought this country really stands for, she says: “It definitely helps meeting lovely people, volunteers, asylum seekers themselves.” I love Kelly’s account of the retired GP who runs a mobile clinic for asylum seekers around Doncaster, or the woman in her 80s who visits immigration removal centres and offers support and friendship to desperate detainees. “This is part of the reason why I wanted to write the book,” says Kelly. “To tell the stories of the people who are making it work, to show that it isn’t just Reform and the far right and the people capitalising on the politics of it – that there are people giving up their time and being offered nothing in return, who are just kind-hearted, and there are many people within communities, even hostile communities, who are doing this work. It’s not all bad.”
• Anywhere But Here: How Britain’s Broken Asylum System Fails Us All by Nicola Kelly is published by Elliott & Thompson(£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
