Cut off and uncared for: This is what life is like for asylum seekers in the UK

“I am ashamed of the care given to us.”

This is how Salaii, a young man from Syria, described life in the UK asylum system in a WhatsApp message to me. Over the past three years, I’ve conducted research with refugees and asylum seekers in the North West of England. Through photographs and personal narratives they have shared stories that echo Salaii’s words, laying bare a system that isn’t just broken but profoundly uncaring by design.

This Refugee Week, an international annual arts and culture festival which celebrates refugees and people seeking sanctuary, we have an opportunity to reflect on this year’s theme: Community as a Superpower. Yet for many in the asylum system, community and the care they find within it is not just a ‘superpower’ but a lifeline they are forced to create. It’s time to look more closely at how people in the asylum system practise care and connection – not because the system enables it but because they are left with no other choice.

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Life for asylum seekers in a careless system

For people seeking asylum in the UK, the struggle doesn’t end at the border. It extends into everyday life, shaped by policies that isolate, impoverish and dehumanise. The hope of safety too often gives way to a system that offers minimal support and almost no care. Instead, the asylum system creates conditions where people must look after themselves practically, emotionally, and socially – leaving individuals and communities to fill the gaps left by an uncaring system.

Barred from working and living on around £7 a day (or £1.26 for those in hotel accommodation), many asylum seekers are housed in poor-quality housing in deprived areas far from services or diasporic communities. Forced relocations happen without notice, uprooting people without consultation or choice. This policy of dispersal disrupts relationships that people seeking asylum have built with neighbours, communities, local charities and one another. Participants in my research described the emotional exhaustion of these repeated moves: the loneliness of being sent to unfamiliar towns and the difficulty of starting again in each new place. The result is a system that isolates and fragments, leaving people to rely on their own acts of care and mutual support.

Caring against the odds

And yet, even within this hostile environment, people find ways to cope. These acts of care emerge not because the system supports them but because without them, life would be unliveable.

My research participants showed how they cook for each other, help translate letters and appointments, share information, and offer a listening ear when the system feels too heavy. Community groups, local charities and informal networks, often led by refugees themselves, provide crucial care and support. People contribute to the care and vitality of these shared spaces by preparing meals, acting as informal interpreters, initiating games or dancing, playing football, tending community gardens, sewing decorations and repairing clothes.

Idris told me about his visit to a refugee drop-in centre: “I went there and I met an old woman who came to me and asked about my problems, how life is going. I remember home and I remember my mum who would ask me about my problems. I go to this place whenever I have any bad feelings.”

About a local free community lunch cooked by other refugees, Ndeshi told me that, “if you don’t have food at home, you get food… it’s like a family. Like you were kind of born here.” Later, after sharing more about the relationships she had made through a local refugee charity, she said to me, “care… It’s something I never had and it’s just coming to me like that so it feels good.”

These are the kinds of practices that Refugee Week invites us to celebrate – but we must not lose sight of why they are necessary at all: because the asylum system leaves people to care for themselves.

Community as a superpower – but not as a substitute

The fact that people find creative and impactful ways to care for each other does not excuse an asylum system that forces them to do so in conditions of intense precarity and deprivation. We must care too – and that care requires action to ensure that people are welcomed, supported, and treated with dignity. That means calling for an end to punitive policies like forced dispersal, lifting work restrictions, providing decent housing and support, and valuing the contributions of those seeking asylum.

Refugee Week’s theme, Community as a Superpower, offers an important invitation: to recognise the everyday resourceful and ethical care practices within refugee and asylum-seeking communities. But it is not enough to celebrate ‘superpower’ communities while maintaining policies that isolate and impoverish them. For now, they are forced to do what the asylum system won’t: care for themselves and each other.

Megan Crossley is a a PhD student at the department of sociology at Lancaster University.

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