Ongoing government funding cuts to British legal aid have resulted in the formation of legal deserts and uneven geographies of access to advice and legal representation. Asylum seekers, particularly those subjected to no-choice dispersal throughout the UK for housing, are enduring the impact of these cuts directly. This paper explores the spatial and legal marginalisation of asylum seekers, drawing upon the findings of a three-year study of the asylum appeals process. Already precarious, we analyse the manifold spatial marginalisation of dispersed asylum seekers from sources of legal advice and representation. We identify the frames of luck, uncertainty and dislocation as ways to further a spatially cognisant understanding of precarity, alongside identifying strategies employed to counter precarious positionalities.

Conveyor‐Belt Justice: Precarity, Access to Justice, and Uneven Geographies of Legal Aid in UK Asylum Appeals

The number of children seeking asylum alone in the UK and across Europe is increasing. Previous research has focused on the support unaccompanied children receive within children’s services, and highlighted their vulnerability and isolation. Limited research exists that considers their transition to adulthood, at which time the process of leaving local authority care may coincide with a need to re-engage with the immigration system in an attempt to achieve the right to remain in the UK permanently. This thesis therefore focuses on unaccompanied young people as they transition to adulthood. Focusing holistically on the social networks of the young people, this study is concerned with understanding the process of transition and its impact on the social worlds of the young people. Taking the life-course approach as iits conceptual framework, issues of time, space, structure and agency are emphasised. 
Based on interviews with both unaccompanied young people and professionals (accessed through statutory and voluntary services in one large urban local authority in the north of England) the findings suggest that unaccompanied young people’s social networks are active, complex and diverse, yet may be negatively impacted by uncertain and temporary immigration statuses. The findings illuminate previously unexplored aspects of unaccompanied young people’s social networks, including their continued embeddedness in multi-sited family networks. The findings also challenge current constructions of unaccompanied young people as vulnerable recipients of support, and repositions them as young people who provide care and support to others as they begin to develop adult identities.

The social networks of unaccompanied asylum seeking young people in the transition to adulthood

Als kinderen asiel aanvragen in Nederland onderzoekt de Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst (IND) of ze bescherming nodig hebben als vluchteling. Bij de beslissing over het asielverzoek moeten de belangen van het kind voorop staan, zoals dat op grond van het VN-Kinderrechtenverdrag geldt voor alle beslissingen die op kinderen betrekking hebben. Met dit onderzoek is gekeken naar hoe vanuit een orthopedagogische invalshoek de belangen van gevluchte kinderen onderzocht zouden kunnen worden. Dit gebeurt in zogeheten Best Interests of the Child (BIC)-Assessments. Uit het onderzoek is gebleken dat het belangrijk is om aandacht te besteden aan mogelijke klachten die voortkomen uit traumatiserende gebeurtenissen die de kinderen in het land van herkomst of tijdens de vlucht hebben meegemaakt. Ook is onderzocht hoe kinderen geholpen kunnen worden om hun levensverhaal te vertellen. Gevluchte kinderen vinden dit vaak moeilijk, terwijl dat wel nodig is om te weten waarom ze bescherming vragen. De BIC-Assessments zijn uitgevoerd bij 16 alleenstaande kinderen en 11 kinderen die samen met hun ouders zijn gevlucht. De BIC-Assessments bleken betrouwbare informatie te geven die de IND zou kunnen meewegen in de beslissing over het asielverzoek. Bij de meeste van deze kinderen was sprake van ontwikkelingsrisico’s in de opvoedingsomgeving in het land van herkomst. Een meerderheid van de kinderen kampte met sociaal-emotionele problemen. Het onderzoek heeft uitgewezen dat het mogelijk is om op een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde manier de belangen van gevluchte kinderen te onderzoeken. Om die belangen ook daadwerkelijk mee te laten wegen in de asielbeslissing lijkt het echter nodig dat de Vreemdelingenwet wordt aangepast.

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Best Interests of the Child-Assessments for recently arrived refugee children: Behavioural and children’s rights perspectives on decision-making in migration law

This article addresses the tense relationship between national and municipal approaches to the inclusion and exclusion of irregular immigrant ‘non-citizens.’ While national policies in the UK have created hostility for irregular migrants, municipallevel cities of sanctuary offer a ‘warm welcome’ which has been extolled as immanently progressive in the face of hostility. This article assesses the extent to which city-based sanctuary movements in the UK provide effective resistance to the national policies of hostility. Building on critiques of the City of Sanctuary (CoS) movement, effective resistance is redefined using a Foucauldian counter-conduct approach. Through applying a counter-conduct lens to a document analysis of the CoS newsletter archive and online resources, the article shows it is not easy to dismiss sanctuary as ineffective resistance, as some earlier critiques have argued. Rather, CoS is demonstrated as both effective and ineffective counter-conduct due to its uneven approach to the various discourses within the hostile environment.

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Hostile Immigration Policy and the Limits of Sanctuary as Resistance: Counter-Conduct as Constructive Critique

A growing body of research and rise in public awareness highlight multiple risks to separated children who seek asylum in the UK. Concerns usually revolve around their past trauma experiences, which are deemed to increase vulnerability. More recently post-migration stresses have been highlighted to negatively impact on wellbeing. Concerns about how to protect separated young people from further trauma within hostile asylum processes have been raised. Legal and healthcare professionals in particular have expressed concerns about the process of age assessments and their impact on young people trying to settle in the UK. This study aimed to qualitatively explore separated young people’s experiences of undergoing an age assessment. Participant perspectives on the age assessment processes, outcomes and impacts on their lives were sought. Findings are presented from interviews with seven male young people who experienced age assessments when they first arrived in the UK. Qualitative findings based on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis revealed three broad themes; ‘Confusion’, ‘Power’ and ‘Consequences’. Participants’ experiences of ‘confusion’ was influenced by unfamiliarity of language and customs, but also by a lack of transparency and communication about the age assessment process. Misunderstandings and cultural differences in the conception of age further confused and unsettled the young people. Mutual misunderstandings between the assessors and young people, confusion and lack of power over the process led to the participants feeling categorically disbelieved, judged, dehumanised and interrogated. Participants’ accounts offered an insight into the wide-reaching consequences on young people’s psychosocial wellbeing, their development and relationships with their past, present and future. Attention was paid to multiple layers of contexts involved in the age assessment process. Participants’ experiences and their perspectives are utilised to outline implications for future research and practice.

Separated Young People Seeking Asylum and their Experiences of Undergoing and Age Assessment in the UK

The UK’s ‘assume illegal unless prove otherwise’ style of immigration control, highlighted in Theresa May’s 2013 announcement to create a ‘really hostile environment’ for illegal migrants, started long before Theresa May, and has affected many more than those here illegally. Not just the well-publicised fate of ‘Windrush’ people, lawfully present for decades, but also lawful migrants facing Home Office mistakes or unable to afford Home Office application fees have found themselves treated as unlawful or even becoming unlawful. 
In this article I examine the range of ‘hostile’ immigration measures starting during the 1980s Thatcher regime and continuing through the 1997-2010 Labour government. Access to rights and entitlements in civil society have become increasingly based on immigration status, in relation to which the burden of proof lies wholly on the applicant. This has led to a shift in the meaning and use of the term ‘illegal’ as in the phrase ‘illegal migrant’, etc. As proof of those rights and entitlements increasingly rests on showing increasing numbers of specific original documents in a multiplying set of circumstances to diverse bodies, the very definition of ‘illegal’ shifts from being an objective definition of a person’s status under the law to a contingent relation between the person and whichever private or public entity she faces in order to obtain a right or entitlement. Then, as responsibility for immigration control and enforcement has increasingly been outsourced, migrants have become legally distanced from decisions made about them: deprived of agency and left without remedies. Thirdly, the UK’s ‘hostile’ immigration policies consist in far more than the recent ‘hostile environment’ measures. A combination of decades of Home Office mismanagement, coupled with the more recent deep cuts in Home Office, tribunal and court staff, the increased number, cost and complexity of immigration applications, cuts in rights and grounds of appeal and withdrawal of legal aid leaves applicants both practically and legally precarious. I conclude that far from reducing numbers of ‘unlawful migrants’, as the ‘hostile environment’ policies were designed to do, effectively it is Home Office policies which themselves create and perpetuate illegality.

The ‘hostile environment’: How Home Office immigration policies and practices create and perpetuate illegality

In 2012 the Court of Appeal acknowledged, in the case of KA (Afghanistan) [2012] EWCA Civ 1014, that the Home Office had systematically failed to endeavour to trace the family members of young unaccompanied asylum seekers. For a short period it appeared that there might be an opportunity for a ‘corrective remedy’ for some of these young people. 
This paper summarises our detailed analysis of the cases of 20 refused Afghan asylum seekers assisted by Kent Law Clinic, and critically examines the legal concept of 'corrective remedy' in the light of evidence from our cases and post-KA court and tribunal decisions. Our work focused first on whether any of our clients could make fresh claims based on KA, and then reflected on the whole asylum process from arrival to exhaustion of all appeal rights, as revealed in these cases. Our evidence supports a wider concern amongst both practitioners and academics that specific common factors contribute towards children eventually becoming ‘failed asylum seekers’. Despite detailed published guidance, quality oversight, critical inspection reports and regulation of immigration advice, all parties formally involved with the young people, including the Home Office , Social Services, legal representatives and the tribunal, were variously responsible for legal errors, debatable choice of legal strategy and delays that arguably damaged the young people’s claims.
We then critically review the courts’ development of the ‘corrective remedy’ principle since KA in relation to young people’s asylum claims. We ask whether in the light of these developments the courts are ever likely to provide a ‘sanction’ against errors of the Secretary of State, and consider what alternative strategies might assist young asylum-seekers.

How children become failed asylum-seekers: Research report on the experiences of young unaccompanied asylum-seekers in Kent from 2006 to 2013, and how ‘corrective remedies’ have failed them.

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO) 2012 declared the end of legal aid in immigration in England and Wales except for a few strictly specified exceptions. Access to justice will be denied for large numbers of migrants and their families. The changes will also mean the large-scale removal of effective legal checks on UK Border Agency decision-making in immigration matters, a significant increase in litigants in person in the Tribunals and the High Court, an inevitable drop in quality of legal argument, and, arguably, in judicial decision-making. Immigration is of course not the only area of law in which this decline is likely to take place, but is the only area in which the loss of legal aid is likely to lead directly to the break-up of families and the removal of long-term residents from the UK in breach of their human rights. 

However, before we simply blame the recession, or the present government, we should look back over the years to see how the management of legal aid and legal advice in the broadest sense in the areas of immigration and asylum has been littered with unintended consequences including the chaos of perverse contractual incentives and the driving out of excellent, committed and brilliant lawyers, exhausted by the attempt to make quality pay. In this analysis we can see the declining quality of provision of publicly-funded legal services in immigration and asylum as a paradigm for a wider problem of how to maintain and improve standards in a public service delivered by a profession but controlled by price.

The end of legal aid in immigration: A barrier to access to justice for migrants and a decline in the rule of law

Enforced destitution: impediments to return and access to section 4 ‘hard cases’ support

Evidence shows that there may be more than 800,000 migrants living unlawfully in the UK, of whom a significant proportion, especially those who have been here a long time, may find it difficult to obtain national documents and return to their country of origin. The 2000’s saw extended delays in Home Office casework and growing backlogs in several categories of migrant, especially asylum-seekers, but also foreign national prisoners targeted for deportation. However, inspection reports and evidence in leading cases show that the increasingly shrill pronouncements about removing unlawful migrants, and in particular foreign prisoners, is not being matched by any significant increase in numbers removed. The recent Home Office measures aimed at ensuring a ‘hostile environment’ for unlawful migrants such that they will make a voluntary departure cannot achieve that aim unless those migrants can be documented and there is a country willing to accept them. Since the law provides only a limited basis for granting leave to remain in such circumstances, the effect of such policies can therefore only be the further immiseration of those migrants.

Sheona York

Papers

The ‘hostile environment’: How Home Office immigration policies and practices create and perpetuate illegality

How children become failed asylum-seekers: Research report on the experiences of young unaccompanied asylum-seekers in Kent from 2006 to 2013, and how ‘corrective remedies’ have failed them.

The end of legal aid in immigration: A barrier to access to justice for migrants and a decline in the rule of law

Enforced destitution: impediments to return and access to section 4 ‘hard cases’ support

Revisiting removability in the 'hostile environment'