Glaswegians have long been proud of their city’s reputation as the most welcoming in Britain for asylum seekers and refugees, encapsulated in a local migrant charity’s jaunty slogan: “We’re all fae somewhere.”
But now the local council is threatening to refuse to take in more asylum seekers sent under the UK’s “dispersal city” policy, which is meant to spread the load around Britain.
Separately, cash-strapped Glasgow City Council’s homeless services are also straining due to a recent influx of refugees – former asylum seekers with leave to stay. They flock to Glasgow from the rest of the UK due to Scotland’s more generous housing regime.
Local politicians privately suspect that many refugees go to Glasgow on the back of under-the-counter advice from other local authorities, desperate to offload them.
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We’re all fae (from) somewhere. But for rising numbers of migrants hoping to build new lives in a Britain boiling with “foreigner” angst, they’re all fae Glasgow now.
This week, the city trudged on as normal. On Tuesday, it rained four times before lunch. Workers buzzed around the centre. Passersby smiled at the morning’s evidence of the beloved Scottish late-night tradition of crowning statues with traffic cones: this time it was the Duke of Wellington outside the Gallery of Modern Art wearing a new plastic hat.
But despite the veneer of normality and the city’s best intentions on migration, it is struggling to cope. The faster the UK government slashes its asylum backlog, the bigger the problem for Glasgow, as refugees who win the right to stay go north seeking a home.
“The UK asylum system has become a machine for creating homeless refugees,” says SNP leader of Glasgow City Council Susan Aitken. The council has warned that its migrant influx is threatening “social cohesion”.
The issue of homeless refugees has blown a £40 million (€46 million) black hole in the city council’s finances for next year. And the council has pleaded for financial help from the authorities in Westminster.
Meanwhile, a large network of volunteer groups such as “Refuweegee”, the migrant charity that coined the catchy “fae somewhere” slogan, and Maslow’s, which provides services to migrants and others in the old shipbuilding hub of Govan, toil to fill the gaps.
“It all gets boiled down to simple slogans like ‘stop the boats’,” says Ruby Kelly, who helps to run Maslow’s community hub, where migrants and others in Govan can attend classes and make connections.
“But it is incredibly complex. People are told the issue can be simplified, but it can’t.”
Over its 850-year history, Glasgow has absorbed waves of migrants, including from Ireland. But for the last 25 years – since it became the only Scottish city to enter the dispersal programme – it has been a hub for asylum seekers.
Recent home office figures show Glasgow houses 4,100 asylum seekers with ongoing claims, roughly twice as many as the bigger English city of Manchester. Glasgow also houses almost twice as many as the UK average outside London. Glasgow City Council says it may “pause” new dispersal arrivals.
Despite the pressures, and perhaps mindful of their city’s past experiences managing sectarianism, many Glaswegians still have a positive attitude towards migrants.
In a high-profile incident in 2021, deportation vans were blocked in by a crowd of angry locals in the neighbourhood of Pollokshields, adjacent to Govan. The authorities felt forced to release two men they had detained in the vans in advance of their deportation, after the crowd demanded they leave their neighbours alone.
While this summer’s anti-migrant demonstrations in the UK, organised by right-wing elements, reached Scotland, including Falkirk and Aberdeenshire, there have been few protests in Glasgow, despite its higher concentration of migrants.
But the Govan Community Project, another migrant charity, acknowledges the situation in Glasgow is becoming more “tense”.
Many asylum seekers are put up in flats in close-knit but disadvantaged areas like Govan. Just down the road from its old Fairfield Engineering shipworks, where Alex Ferguson’s father worked, you find Mama Africa butchers and a clutch of halaal shops.
The British government and its asylum contractor, Mears, shoulder much of the cost of housing asylum seekers. For the entirely separate issue of homeless refugees who have leave to remain, however, the cost falls on Glasgow City Council – £66 million next year.
A 2012 change in Scottish law exacerbated the issue. Homeless people in the rest of Britain get housed on the basis of “priority need”, favouring families with children and, for example, domestic abuse victims.
Thirteen years ago, the SNP devolved government abolished priority need in Scotland. Now, anybody, including single refugee men, can present as homeless in Scotland – usually in Glasgow – and get accommodation.
Once an asylum seeker successfully becomes a refugee, they typically get just 28 days to leave their state accommodation, leaving many homeless.
Official statistics show that last year, the number of homeless refugee households who travelled to Glasgow from elsewhere to claim housing spiked 50 per cent. About 40 per cent of homeless applications in the city are now from refugees. The number in temporary accommodation is up sixfold.
The Irish Times witnessed the evidence of this after dark this week in Glasgow city centre, where many single refugee men are housed in hotels along with other homeless people. Men from Eritrea, Sudan and other African countries congregated outside several homeless hotels near Central Station. None would speak in more detail.
Back in Govan, Ms Kelly at Maslow’s hub was assisted on Tuesday by Sir Michael, or Mickey, the charity’s resident dog. He is a migrant himself, said one of the other staff – the dog was adopted from Romania.
“You can choose to be from Govan, and if you do, you should be welcomed,” says Ms Kelly. “There is a lot of misinformation out there, making some people afraid. But, and I know this sounds corny, we are so much stronger together.”
