Anti-Racist Social Work with Migrants, Asylum Seekers and Refugees

Work with asylum seekers and refugees has become increasingly politicised since the 1990s when public concern over the growth in numbers claiming asylum was strongly articulated in public policies aimed at curbing them. Armed conflicts, especially the one in Syria, have added substantially to these numbers, and Turkey alone is hosting over 3 million Syrian refugees. The European Commission’s contribution to their assistance constitutes one of its largest humanitarian projects ever. Policies subsequently enacted by the British government collapsed distinctions between citizenship, nationality and immigration, emphasising immigration control, partly over fears of large numbers of refugees reaching the UK following the 1991 wars in the Balkans (Vickers, 2012). Discourses of reducing numbers, played out against a backdrop of manufactured scarcity resulting from lack of investment in social resources such as well-paid jobs, housing, health services and educational facilities, have enabled political and media opinion-formers to blame policy failures in meeting the needs of both existing residents and people admitted as (im)migrants. By conflating different statuses regarding immigration and asylum seeking, and arguing for minimal numbers to be admitted to reduce demands on social resources, they legitimated racist political discourses that fanned the flames of xenophobia that bore fruit in the Brexit vote (The Independent, 2016). These circumstances call for social workers to be more active in the political arena and stand up for the rights of disenfranchised people who live precariously in fragile social circumstances. Making links between the precariousness of local residents and those from overseas would enable social workers to build solidarity across different ethnic (majority and minority) communities and contribute to social cohesion.