No safe route out of genocide

Ukrainians were waved through with no biometrics and free flights. Palestinians, under bombardment and siege, are forced to meet demands that cannot be met — biometrics that cannot be taken, interviews that cannot be held, borders that cannot be crossed. In law asylum is a right; in practice Britain grants it selectively, while shutting out everyone else.

There is no visa designed for claiming asylum from abroad. You must be on UK soil, which means finding some other way to get here – a visitor visa, a student visa or an irregular journey. Only then can the right be claimed.

If you have written to your MP about creating a safe route for Palestinians trying to leave Gaza, they may mention using “existing routes”. In reality, there are none. To call them “existing routes” is to tell refugees: stay and die.

The only people offered safe routes are Ukrainians and Hong Kong BN(O) status holders. Afghan schemes once existed, but are now closed to new applicants. For everyone else, no legal way exists.

In 2024, nearly a million people migrated legally to the UK for work or study. Only around 37,000 arrived “irregularly” by small boats, a fraction of the total. Ministers call them “illegal”, but it is Britain that created this trap. To claim asylum you must already be inside the country, but no safe route has been created.

Our charity is supporting 75 Palestinians applying for family reunion or student visas, and trying to get biometrics deferred. Because of conflicting advice and Home Office procedures, it took us days to decode how to request deferrals and prepare evidence. Even immigration lawyers have confessed they don’t know the new processes. The Home Secretary still gets the final say.

By contrast, over 200,000 Ukrainians were able to arrive in the UK without biometrics, with airline-funded free tickets and free onward travel in the UK. No “national security” smears were cast against them. Palestinians, left waiting in an active combat zone, are treated as suspects, not human beings.

Palestinians have been killed trying to reach Britain because the system is tortuous and slow, with no regard for life. This is not red tape. It is a bureaucratic siege.

Once someone does reach the UK and claims asylum, they face the official process: an initial screening interview to register their details, followed by a substantive interview, often months or years later, to test their story. Try proving your case with a bombed-out home or a family scattered in exile, with patchy interpreters and limited legal aid.

They are banned from working, forced to survive on £7 a day or less than £10 a week in hotels. At the same time, governments funnel billions to private contractors instead of building homes for everyone who needs one, while losing billions more by banning people seeking asylum from working and paying taxes. This racism is not accident or incompetence. It is state policy: immoral and self-destructive.

Racism is obvious in who gets protection and who is left to die: white refugees are waved through, while brown and black refugees are trapped in paperwork until they starve or are bombed.

This matters because asylum is not charity. It is a right rooted in the 1951 Refugee Convention, created after Jewish refugees were turned away by safe countries and forced back into danger. The Convention was meant to ensure that never again would people be denied protection because they lacked papers or arrived the “wrong” way. If Ukrainians had no safe routes, they too would have been on boats.

People will always move. If governments refuse to create safe routes, human smugglers will step into the breach. For Ukrainians, the UK stripped away red tape so families could survive. For Palestinians under bombardment, the UK insists on paperwork that cannot be completed, interviews that cannot be attended, and borders that cannot be crossed.

This double standard is not oversight. It is deliberate. Britain has built a system that keeps its promise of protection for some and denies it to others.

How do you leave a genocide? The answer, for most brown and black refugees, is: you can’t.

Robina Qureshi is CEO of Positive Action in Housing, a refugee housing and human rights charity based in Glasgow, which pioneered Room for Refugees, the longest running refugee hosting programme in the UK.

(A version of this was published as an op-ed in today's Scotland on Sunday)