The misery and wasted talent of denying refugees the right to work

👤 Patrick Heaton-Armstrong, Adult Caseworker

The Home Office’s limited system for granting the right to work to asylum seekers is not fit for purpose. 

Asylum seekers can apply for permission to work if they have waited for 12 months or more for a decision on their asylum application through no fault of their own. If they are granted permission to work, they are permitted to work jobs on the Immigration Salary List. Many of these jobs require a university degree or some kind of exceptional experience, for example biological scientists or musicians in internationally recognised orchestras. This puts these jobs out of reach of most asylum seekers. 

Facilitating illegal working is a crime, and employers risk a fine if they don’t carry out the proper checks and employ someone who doesn’t have the right to work. Many employers are unaware of asylum seekers’ right to work, and they often prefer to refuse applications from these candidates to avoid any risk or complications. This creates a further barrier for asylum seekers to access employment. 

Most asylum seekers receive asylum support, which is accommodation and a small amount of monetary support. If an asylum seeker starts to work, they are asked to pay back any additional income so that they are no better off than if they just received asylum support. There is also no Home Office guidance on how to pay back additional income. This means that even if an asylum seeker has the right to work and manages to secure a permitted job, they would not be any better off than they were before, and it is confusing and potentially risky to start earning.

Suppressing success

We see and face these hurdles first-hand when supporting members of the CARAS community. M, who is an asylum seeker from Gambia, has been waiting for more than a year for a decision on her asylum claim, and so was recently granted the right to work. She worked as a police officer in her home country, but this job is not on the Immigration Salary List. Instead, she decided that she would like to work in care, which is on the approved list. We supported M to write her CV, to look for suitable jobs, to complete online application forms and to prepare for a job interview. We also supported her to provide further information about her right to work to prospective employers. She was interviewed, but unfortunately, she wasn’t offered the job. We think that she may have been refused because the employer didn’t fully understand her situation and didn’t want the potential risk and extra work of employing an asylum seeker. M is still applying for jobs. 

A, who was an asylum seeker from Eritrea, was accepted for a place to study at a London university. This is exceptional, and we were absolutely delighted for her! She couldn’t apply for a student loan, so she was also granted a scholarship award to pay for her accommodation and living costs. After getting some detailed advice from the Asylum Support Appeals Project, it became clear that A’s scholarship would be considered as a source of income by the Home Office, and that they may take steps to make A pay almost all of it to them. However, because of the lack of written Home Office policies, A couldn’t get any concrete information about what would happen if she accepted the scholarship. She felt anxious, confused and frustrated when she should have been able to simply accept this offer and focus on studying. In the end, we advised her to request that her university provide her with vouchers to pay for food, books, academic equipment etc, instead of subsistence payments, and to provide her with student accommodation directly instead of money to pay for accommodation herself. Luckily, she has now been granted refugee status, so she has been able to accept her scholarship award in full.

Lets enrich lives and communities

The Home Office seeks to make life difficult for people like M and A by deliberately making the right to work restrictive, by threatening harsh penalties on potential employers and by compelling asylum seekers to pay back any additional income without telling them how to do so. The Home Office states that they want to make it difficult for asylum seekers to work to avoid the “pull factor” of potential employment in the UK. However, the effect of this policy is to make life miserable for those who are already here, by discouraging them from applying for permission to work altogether. This keeps them in conditions of poverty and inertia, compels them to engage in exploitative, illegitimate employment, and denies them the chance to enrich their own lives and the wider community with their talents. 

This system should be greatly simplified and expanded to allow asylum seekers to access employment more easily. For example, the waiting time for applying for permission to work should simply be removed, asylum seekers with the right to work should be unrestricted in the jobs that they can apply for, and they should be permitted to keep their additional income (but pay tax accordingly). The benefit to individuals and to society as a whole are clear: lower poverty rates, improved integration and better mental health for asylum seekers, as well as higher tax revenues. We call on the new UK government to make these necessary changes as soon as possible not only for the benefit of people seeking asylum, but for all of us.