Introduction

The world continues to change rapidly – for example, just in the relatively brief time that I have been writing this book we have had the withdrawal of troops from – and subsequent disasters in – Afghanistan, and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which, at the time of writing, had led to possibly more than 12 million Ukrainian people fleeing their homes (BBC News, 2022). Such events, combined with an increasing number of economic and environmental disasters, mean that the likelihood of people having to move around the world increases almost daily – an estimate by Zurich Insurance, for example, suggests that there could be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050 (Zurich, 2022).

Responses to people seeking sanctuary and other new arrivals

Responses by different countries to different groups of people seeking sanctuary vary considerably. As we have noted throughout the book, responses are shaped by a range of factors (including poverty, racism, perceptions of ‘others’): this means that some refugees are perceived as ‘good’ refugees and some as ‘bad’. The UK's response to Ukrainian refugees in 2022, for example, is noticeably different to that towards Syrian or Afghan refugees, for reasons outlined in a blogpost by LSE (Pettrachin and Abdou, 2022). There is considerable contrast between the welcome (in theory, at least) being offered by the UK government to Ukrainian refugees and the real welcome on the ground, which has been described as ‘underwhelming and out of step with the rest of Europe’, with problems over obtaining visas and even accessing the visa processing centres (Sigona, 2022) – and, even with these problems, there is a huge difference in this approach compared to the likelihood of being sent to Rwanda: ‘The Home Office has said that people who arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel will be among the first group notified that it plans to send them to Rwanda.’ (Cooney, 2022)

Political responses to new arrivals

We know too that sanctuary can be a political ‘hot potato’, especially with pressure from right-wing media and politicians and, in Chapter 2 particularly, we have looked at the impact that politics have had on the UK's stance towards new arrivals from the 1940s to the present day.