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How we’ve managed to make a bad, sad situation much worse

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There’s a new level of toxicity around the intertwined issues of race, immigration and asylum seekers, and in this latest Andrew Fisher Interview, our columnist talks to Dr Maya Goodfellow, the academic and writer, about how far-right rhetoric has been allowed to enter the political mainstream

Dr Goodfellow is the author of the 2019 book, Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats.

Yet in this interview, Dr Goodfellow suggests matters have become far worse in the last six years in this country, as “‘culture’ is often used as a sort of proxy for ‘race'”, and she talks about how the “racialised nature of the debate and policy about who’s seen as acceptable and who isn’t”.

Included in the discussion is the use of flags in an attempt to provoke a response against asylum seekers housed in hotels, while they await their immigration applications to be processed by the Home Office.

And the current level of hostility to asylum seekers is compared to the welcoming response over the past three years to more than 200,000 Ukrainians fleeing the war in their country.

Dr Goodfellow also debunks the persistent and pernicious myths that anyone staying in an asylum hotel is somehow living a life of luxury, with all mod cons and facilities.

The use of hotels to house migrants was an emergency measure brought in during the covid pandemic by the previous Conservative government – at a time when most hotels were forced to be empty because of lockdown health rules.

Yet many politicians now try to score petty points, at the expense of these displaced persons, often fuelling public disquiet.

“One of the things that I think is quite important to say about the hotels issue is that when we use the word ‘hotels’, it makes it sound like people are in luxury accommodation or like really, really nice digs,” Dr Goodfellow says to Fisher.

“But actually what it often is is really substandard accommodation… really not suitable for the people who are needing to use them.

“I’ve heard stories about women with small babies where they don’t have fridges in the room, so they can’t have milk in the refrigerator for the baby.

“That is the reality of what people are living in… but actually the conditions and the kinds of things that these people are having to put up with are broadly pretty terrible and so this idea that anyone would want to be stuck in one of these hotels is absolutely mad.”

Hear more: Listen to the previous Andrew Fisher Interview, with Jeremy Corbyn

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