Sam J 💙🧡

On Monday, I will announce the most significant changes to our asylum system in modern times 👇

Tomorrow marks the beginning of my 19th year in the United Kingdom. I arrived here as a frightened 13-year-old in November 2007, alone, searching for safety. Since then, I have spent nearly two decades campaigning, advocating, and speaking across this country about refugee rights. Over that time, I have watched successive governments repeat the same cycle of cruelty: deterrence, detention, deprivation, deportation. The latest proposal by the Home Secretary to “copy the Danish immigration model” is just another version of that cycle. It divides refugees into the “deserving” and the “undeserving”, trapping people in permanent uncertainty rather than offering stability and the chance to rebuild their lives. It is wrong. It is immoral. It is ineffective. And history shows it has never worked. The real impact of “temporary protection” People cannot rebuild their lives when every 30 months they face the threat of removal. They cannot start businesses, pursue education, build families, or contribute fully to society. I know this personally. It took me: •5 years to finally receive refugee status •11 years to get settlement •15 years to become a British citizen And that was under a system far more humane than what is being proposed today. If I had been kept in limbo for 20 years, I would never have been able to: •finish school, college, university •earn a degree and a Master’s in governance •write The Lightless Sky •speak at hundreds of schools and universities •travel to 30 countries •carry the Olympic torch •start a business serving my local community •get married and raise two beautiful children Everything I have achieved happened because I was eventually given stability, safety, and the ability to plan for the future. This policy is not only cruel — it will fail For two decades, governments have tried deterrence-based policies. None of them have stopped people seeking safety. Since 2011, the UK received around 150,000 asylum applications; after Brexit, that number doubled. And yet the narrative remains the same: “Make it harder. Make it harsher. Make people’s lives miserable.” The Rwanda scheme failed. The “two-tier” system failed. The Illegal Migration Act has not stopped crossings. Priti Patel tried the same approach — it didn’t work then, and it won’t work now. Deterrence does not work because people are fleeing: •war •oppression •collapsed states •persecution •genocide (like in Gaza) •regimes such as the Taliban •conflicts ignored or worsened by global powers When there are no safe routes, people will take dangerous ones. Not because of hotels, or £6 a day, or fantasies the media spread — but because they have no alternatives. And if all these harsher laws still don’t “stop the boats”? What then? The far right will still not be satisfied. The protests outside hotels will continue. People of colour — including British citizens — will still be targeted. The problem will be blamed on refugees, rather than war, foreign policy, or lack of safe pathways. The same cycle will continue into 2029 and beyond, unless we change course. Britain cannot keep legislating against humanity For decades the UK has poured money and energy into making life unbearable for asylum seekers rather than addressing root causes. Instead of: •building safe routes, •creating humanitarian corridors, •processing claims efficiently, •investing in integration, •talking to people with lived experience, we build systems of limbo. There is a better way Refugee policy must be: •fair but firm, •effective but compassionate, •controlled but humane, •rooted in evidence, not fear, •shaped by lived experience, not tabloids, •designed to give people dignity, safety, and a future, not trap them for 20 years in uncertainty. I am sending my book, The Lightless Sky, to every MP because they must understand this reality. They need to hear from those who lived it …

Shabana Mahmood: immigration is tearing Britain apart (parents who are immigrants) Me: the constant politicisation of immigration to appeal to base racist instincts to cover up the constant failures and weakness of central government is tearing Britain apart. A full hour of TV with politicians screeching ‘migrants’ like they’ve got nothing else to say. It’s vile!!!