Legal and Illegal Migration: Suspension

Carla Denyer Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)]

I am grateful to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I usually say how pleased I am to speak in a debate, but I have to admit that I am conflicted about being here today because I could not disagree more strongly with the petition’s demands. And yet, the thousands who have signed it have rightly identified that we face deep challenges in this country, and that people are being badly let down and are struggling. Those who have signed the petition want answers. They want politicians like us to take bold, decisive action that will genuinely change people’s lives for the better. Let me be very clear: stopping migration is not the answer to that problem—in fact, it is the opposite. But we do nobody any favours by pretending that the problems are not there.

The petition captures a view of migration that I fundamentally disagree with, but the view is clearly widespread, so I want to directly address the many people who have signed the petition and all those who feel frustrated, left behind and ignored. I want to give another view of the problems that we face as a country and give people another way forward—one that is determined to change things for the better, that is positive in the face of negativity, and that resolutely stands up to those spreading misinformation and prejudice from wherever it comes.

I will start with the positive. I am proud to represent Bristol Central, which is apparently the most pro-immigration constituency in the country. I know that that feeling is not universal across the UK, so I want to explain why I and so many of my constituents feel that way. The truth is that migration is good for this country. People come from across the world because they want to be part of our communities. They do vital work, as has been discussed, in our hospitals, schools and GP surgeries. They care for our children and our grandparents. They start businesses and create jobs. They pay tax and give to charity.

If we look at Spain, we see that, last year, its economy grew by five times the eurozone average and more than the US. Why? Because by welcoming immigration, its Government boosted demand in the economy and filled their labour shortages. Economic growth is not the best measure of the benefit to citizens, and I will come to that in a moment, but to pretend that migration is a problem and not an opportunity does a disservice to people who have grown up here and people who have chosen to make the UK their home.

The Government’s economics watchdog tells us that higher migration leads to lower Government deficits and debt. Instead of grasping the huge opportunity presented by people moving here to be part of our communities and contribute to our economy, the Government are subjecting immigrants to harsh arbitrary visa restrictions, forcing many to leave their families behind—one man’s economic dependence is another man’s children—and pushing many into jobs, such as in the care sector, where they are at risk of very poor treatment because they are under threat of deportation at any time.

A lot of people feel very protective of this country, and so do I. We should want to protect this country, our home, and a place where so many incredible things have been invented and created. We have such a strong culture, with inventions from the electric motor and penicillin to the first ever website—although arguably that has had some cons as well as pros. The UK is a wonderfully creative culture and economy. It has the most beautiful countryside and the most talented people. We should be proud and protective of this country, and I want to be, but who are we protecting this country against? Who does it need protecting from?

I agree with the petitioners when they say that

“we can’t even look after the people we have here at the moment”,

but why is that? It is absolutely true that people and powers in this country are making life harder for a lot of Brits—they are making it harder for families to feed their children, pay the bills, get a doctor’s appointment, get on the housing ladder, or even get a council house. But that is not the people who have moved to the UK from elsewhere; it is big corporations paying poverty wages and then taking their profits out of the country. It is energy companies hiking their bills time and again while polluting our environment, and water companies making us pay for the privilege of having sewage pumped into our waterways.

[Sir John Hayes]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Carla Denyer]

I will make a little more progress. It is the landlords who own hundreds of properties putting up the rent every few months, out of all proportion to incomes, so that people pay more and more of their wage packet each month. It is the big developers prioritising profit by building luxury developments rather than the affordable homes that we need. It is years and years of deliberate underfunding by Governments that have brought our public services to their knees.

None of this is inevitable. If the Government choose, they could raise the minimum wage so that it is genuinely enough to live on. They could take action on spiralling bills, put an end to rip-off rents and build the affordable housing we so desperately need. But some rich and powerful people have an interest in keeping rents high, or allowing public services to be sold off to the highest bidder, or letting the rich get richer while the rest of us struggle. Rather than answering difficult questions about why this economy has been designed in a way that benefits them, it is easier for them to point the finger at migrants.

It is not always easy to stand up and tell the truth when we are swimming against the tide of what people across the country are being told day in, day out by public figures, newspaper headlines and posts on X. It is not easy to challenge the perceptions that have become the mainstream, but we have to, because as long as we chase false solutions to our problems and ignore the real sources of those problems, the things we care about—how much money we have in our pocket, whether we have a safe, warm, secure home, a roof over our head, and public services—will not improve.

I am going to have to turn to the negative for a moment. There is a serious problem of racism in this country, and especially in debates around immigration. That is not to say that everyone who has concerns about immigration is racist, though I fully expect that I may have my speech characterised as such. But we need to be honest about the fact that racism is thriving in this country. Like a hideous parasite, it feeds off people’s fear and suffering and is nurtured by politicians and media outlets that benefit from finding someone else to blame.

Last summer in Southport, we saw a horrific attack against children that scared us all. Such horrors make us angry, and rightfully so. But just as unacceptable and scary is what happened next and how that anger was deliberately misdirected towards totally innocent people: towards black and brown families minding their own business, who are no more responsible for the behaviour of one young man who happens to be the son of immigrants than I am responsible for the behaviour of all other left-handers. The despicable scenes we saw in the riots are a chilling snapshot and reminder of what is happening in this country and of what I am here to speak against: a spiral of misdirected blame, anger and fear that fixes nothing, helps nobody and harms many.

When the Minister responds, I ask him not to focus only on the perhaps easier, but not entirely honest, answer of being tough on migration, but to meet the petitioners with sincerity about the challenges we face and how we can really tackle them. To quote the petitioners one last time:

“We believe we can’t even look after the people we have here at the moment.”

They are right. Successive Governments have failed the people in this country. They have failed to provide jobs with fair wages, affordable housing, affordable energy, access to healthcare—I could go on. Rather than solutions, millionaire politicians and millionaire media moguls have inundated our phones, TVs and newspapers with images and messages depicting immigrants as the source of all our problems.

People are struggling. They are worried about not being able to pay their bills, about not getting paid enough and about their safety. An overwhelming tide of loud voices is telling them who to blame. That does not ease their worry or stop their struggling; it capitalises on their anger for political gain at the expense of some of the most hard-working and, sometimes, vulnerable people in this country.

It is a story as old as time to blame the stranger, the newcomer, the one who looks different. No one ever beat that story by accepting the narrative or overcame it by validating it. People’s feelings about being let down are valid, but the direction in which they are being pointed is not. It is the responsibility of all of us in this House, and especially of the Government, to be truthful, confront the real issues and not let people’s pain be channelled into hatred.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Tice]

The point is that life expectancy has grown and the pension age is growing because we are healthier. That is a great thing. People enjoy work—work is a great thing. However, the real point is that there are some 5 million-plus people not of retirement age who we need to get back into the workplace. We want a world-leading benefit system that looks after the genuinely vulnerable and sick as well as the genuinely unemployed who are looking for work. I would have thought that we could all agree on that.

Let us look at what really did work well: back in the ’80s and early ’90s, net inward migration was about 30,000 to 50,000 a year on average—in some years, there was a little bit of net emigration. It was working well. People came to work and integrated—and guess what? Our economy was growing at 2.5% to 3.5% a year. Everybody was getting better off. We had real per-person wage growth, above the rate of inflation, of some 2.5% per annum in the 1990s.

We now have no GDP growth but significant population growth through inward migration, so we are all getting poorer per person. That is one of the challenges that we all face. If we know that the system worked back then, maybe we should be willing to learn the lessons of history. That was a time when there was no immigration debate, interestingly. Until about the early 2000s, immigration was not an issue because it was working well, with numbers that could be sensibly absorbed. People were getting richer—and that is a good thing.

My view is that we are not short of people, and the anxiety of those who signed the petition is that population growth is too great. We cannot cope with our existing population, and there is a need for pause—perhaps a policy of net zero immigration: one in, one out. About 400,000 people leave the UK every year; we could welcome a similar number in—that will ebb and flow—as long as they are highly skilled and highly qualified where we have shortages, while we train our own people.

Back in the ’80s, the interesting thing was that our healthcare system, the NHS, was working very well—

[Carla Denyer]

It was funded very well as well.

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

Order. Through the Chair, please.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Carla Denyer Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 10th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)]

The Government deserve credit for swiftly scrapping the disgusting, immoral and illegal Rwanda plan, but we need to scrap the attitudes that underpinned it too. The demonising of vulnerable people and of anyone who is different—pandering to the nasty, dog-whistling of Reform and the Tories—is divisive and dangerous. It is shocking, then, to witness the Government trying to mimic the Tories and Reform with migrant raid videos and adverts boasting about deportations. Do they not understand that that just serves to reinforce Reform’s scapegoating rhetoric? Let us not forget that last summer we saw mobs, driven by hate, trying to burn refugees alive in hotels. The Government should be challenging those narratives head-on and helping communities to heal from divisions, not publishing videos that risk encouraging further animosity towards migrants and anyone perceived as being one.

Let me turn to the Bill. I share the Refugee Council’s concerns about the potential for clauses 13 to 16 and 18 to lead to the unintentional criminalisation of refugees who are forced to make decisions under coercion when their survival is at stake—by being forced to steer a small boat under threat of death, for example. Although I am pleased to see the repeal of child detention powers, 1,300 children were wrongly assessed to be adults over an 18-month period, so how do the Government plan to address that? I welcome the repeal of much of the Illegal Migration Act 2024, but I am concerned that some aspects that should have been scrapped will remain, including, for example, the automatic inadmissibility of asylum and human rights claims from certain countries, which is particularly dangerous for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers.

Let me come to my central point. Focusing solely on enforcement simply is not saving lives. The number of deaths in the channel remains horrifying. Enforcement against criminal gangs is of course needed, but that is not going to work on its own when refugees have no other choice. Instead, if people have a choice not to go with gangs, not to put their children in a deathly dinghy and not to risk their lives, the gangs lose their power.

I hope that Ministers have seen the report on safe routes published by the APPG on refugees, of which I am a member. It contains three recommendations, all of which are already tried and tested in other countries and should, in my view, be totally uncontroversial. First, we must urgently fix family reunion. Refugee children are being intentionally kept apart from their parents by the UK’s asylum laws. That is unconscionably cruel. We must move in line with the majority of European nations by bringing parents and children together, which would likely reduce the number of parents making dangerous journeys across the channel to be reunited with their children.

Secondly, Ministers must improve the UK resettlement scheme, which has a lot of potential but has consistently failed to help enough people—only 435 people were resettled last year. My inbox—like those of many Members, I am sure—is full of heartbreaking pleas from people caught up in delays and huge backlogs, and that step could help to fix the system. Thirdly, I would like the Government to pilot a humanitarian visa, to provide a safe option for refugees with strong asylum claims to travel here and make their claim. It is based on successful schemes in the US and Switzerland that have helped to reduce people smuggling.

In conclusion, bits of the Bill are important and hugely welcome, but let us be clear: scrapping something illegal, immoral and unworkable is the bare minimum, and now we need Ministers to build something better that helps this country to rise above the far-right narrative that demonises all migrants. Before I end my remarks, I invite everyone in the Chamber to join me in a very short thought experiment. “The political environment in your home country has become extremely dangerous for anyone with your political views. People in your movement have been murdered. Last month, your children got followed home by an unmarked car, and you have received threatening calls. You have a family member in the UK who successfully claimed asylum a few years ago and is very worried about you. He implores you to join him. Your options are to stay in your home country, risk being murdered and leaving your children orphaned, or to flee to the UK.” Who among us could say with 100% certainty that we would stay?

I will abstain on Second Reading, because although I support the scrapping of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act and the Illegal Migration Act, if the Government truly want to modernise the asylum system, they must be honest about the need for safe routes and respect for human rights.

Oral Answers to Questions

Carla Denyer Excerpts

Monday 29th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Diana Johnson]

Let me first offer my condolences to the families of my hon. Friend’s constituents who so tragically lost their lives. Tackling serious violence and halving knife crime is a core part of our safer streets mission, but to be successful it will require action across Whitehall and with all partners including police, probation youth services, technology companies, charities and community organisations. My hon. Friend mentioned the preventive element provided by our young futures programme. The young futures hubs will be staffed by a range of trained professionals to support young people and help to prevent them from being drawn into violence.

[Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)]

6. What steps she is taking to help prevent asylum seekers from becoming destitute.

[The Minister of State, Home Department (Dame Angela Eagle)]

The last Government lost control of the asylum system, which has meant sky-high asylum accommodation costs but also too many cases in which people have fallen through the net and ended up destitute. That has added to the already heavy burden that local authorities have to deal with. This Government will get a grip. We have already set out plans to process asylum claims that have been stuck in record high backlogs, and have given assurances to the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government that we will take action to reset the relationship between the Home Office and local authorities.

[Carla Denyer]

No recourse to public funds is a policy that prevents most migrants in the UK from accessing most forms of welfare support. I would like to see the policy scrapped altogether to reduce child poverty and homelessness, but, at the very least, will the Minister stop applying it to the visas of any parents of children under 18 to ensure that children can be adequately protected against poverty and destitution?

[Dame Angela Eagle]

No, the best way to deal with the issue of destitution, in my view, is to decide asylum claims quickly and accurately so that those who are entitled to work can do so and can have such recourse, and those who are not can be swiftly removed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Diana Johnson]

The Government have a manifesto commitment to ban ninja swords and other weapons and will be taking it forward as soon as possible. I have listened carefully to what my hon. Friend has said. Ensuring that lethal blades that have been used to kill teenagers on our streets are no longer available to buy or sell is a key priority. We will also implement the ban on zombie knives and zombie-style machetes, which was approved by Parliament in April.

[Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)]

T7. The Government have rightly scrapped the Rwanda scheme, but the UK is falling behind our international counterparts in providing safe routes for refugees. We are now one of the only countries in Europe where refugee children cannot sponsor their family members to join them here. Organisations such as the Refugee Council have documented the harm that causes. Will the Home Secretary please confirm that the Government’s mission to improve opportunity for all extends to refugee children, and that they will amend the immigration rules accordingly?

[Yvette Cooper]

I think most people in this country want to see strong border security and a properly controlled and managed asylum system, where we do our bit for those who have fled persecution and conflict, but where those who have no right to be here are returned. We do not have any of those things at the moment. That is why we are strengthening our border security and why we continue to support important routes such Homes for Ukraine and the support for Afghanistan.

Border Security and Asylum

Carla Denyer Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)]

It is a huge relief that the vile Rwanda scheme has been scrapped. I have listened carefully to the Home Secretary’s statement. Given that 94% of people seeking asylum in this country are ready and eager to work to support themselves, and that freezing them out of work leaves them in destitution and means that the UK misses out on tax revenue from their work, and on much-needed specialists and professionals such as the nurse I met recently in an asylum seeker project in Bristol, will the Home Secretary take the advice of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and urgently lift the ban on asylum seekers working?

[Yvette Cooper]

No, I do not believe that is the right approach, because we need to make swift decisions and ensure that the rules are properly respected and enforced. I am concerned about employers who exploit those who have sometimes arrived as a result of criminal gangs, trafficking or smuggling. I do not believe that employers should be able to exploit those kinds of routes and journeys. If people who have fled persecution are granted asylum in this country, of course they should be able to work and to do so swiftly, but if they are not entitled to be here—if they have not fled persecution—and should be turned down and returned to their home country, they should not be able to work in the UK.