The New Plan for Immigration 2021

Ruth Cigman

The Cotton Tree is appalled by the Government’s New Plan for Immigration. If implemented, it will intensify hostility towards the vulnerable people it claims to protect and obstruct justice for many who legitimately seek sanctuary in the UK. The Cotton Tree is calling for the government to apply basic principles of decency and law to those who are denied essential protections by their own states.

At the Cotton Tree we work closely with asylum seekers and refugees. We know what they suffer by way of accommodation, diet, living allowances, waiting times and numerous indignities. We also know how much they have to offer the UK, and we regularly invite our members to do paid or voluntary work so that others can be enriched by their skills and creativity.

Many of our members have experienced devastating miscarriages of justice that kept them in limbo for years. The New Plan for Immigration threatens to make things a great deal worse. It fudges basic principles of decency and law at a time when the inhumane treatment of asylum seekers (shamefully tolerated by the government in the name of deterrence) is at a peak. (See https://www.cottontreetrust.org.uk/blog/an-apology; https://www.cottontreetrust.org.uk/blog/good-morning-ms-patel)

The plan fudges two distinct ideas, with transparently hostile intent. It runs together the idea of illegal migrants with the idea of ‘non-genuine need’, need that is claimed but exaggerated or invented. It suggests that legal migrants are the only ones with ‘genuine needs’; these are the ones who arrive by safe and legal routes. It claims that our tolerance of illegal migrants, so-called, makes it hard or impossible to give the legal ones the attention and resources they deserve.

It’s offensive nonsense. The vast majority of undocumented or irregular arrivals have needs that are not only genuine but extreme. This is recognised by the government in the form of a high grant rate for asylum seekers in the UK. Why do people denigrate these vulnerable individuals, who seek nothing more than the protection that is offered by the 1951 Refugee Convention, to which the UK is a signatory?

You don’t have to come from Ukraine or Hong Kong to be unable to live safely in your country. Safe and legal routes are few. War and persecution are ubiquitous. This doesn’t mean the UK should admit everyone who claims asylum, but it’s unethical to try to control numbers by insulting people who want nothing more than to build honest, productive lives.  

Priti Patel, here’s a proposal. Please join us for a few weeks at the Cotton Tree. We can offer you a work placement, and you might find it revelatory. We’d like to draw a fine cord of humanity around our asylum seekers and you, one of the most powerful second-generation immigrants in the UK. On such encounters, true justice may be built.

Edited 23.9.25