The research aims to explore the effects of the U.K.’s proposed changes to the Asylum system on international human rights, the movement of people, and the policing of non-white bodies in the white spaces

Research Objectives

1. To determine the effects of the U.K.’s proposed changes to the asylum system on international human rights
2. To determine how the U.K.’s proposed changes to the asylum system affect the policing of the non-white bodies in the white spaces
3. To find out how the U.K.’s proposed changes to the asylum system affect people’s movement in and out of the U.K.

Research question

What are the effects of the U.K.’s proposed changes to the Asylum system on international human rights, the movement of people, and the policing of non-white bodies in the white spaces?

Significance of the study

I chose this research topic due to three critical reasons. First, I am a refugee with contextual information on immigration and asylum issues. Besides, I have a background in volunteering and organizing campaign groups for refugees, enabling me to establish relevant connections within the charity sector on immigration and asylum. Thus, it would be easy for me to collect data and effectively explore the research topic. Second, changes in immigration and refugee legislation are an ongoing process in the U.K. Thus, the findings from this research will inform the critical stakeholders in immigration and asylum sectors on the effects of such changes on international human rights, movement of people, and policing of the non-white bodies in the white spaces.

As a result, the stakeholders will be able to make informed decisions while making the policy changes to comply with existing human rights and ensure fair treatment to refugees and immigrants. Besides, organizations that advocate for the refugees’ and immigrants’ rights will gain from this research by learning the impacts of the proposed asylum changes, thereby guiding them on how to drive their campaigns to safeguard the rights of the refugees and immigrants. Lastly, this research will offer applicable, appropriate and human rights-based recommendations to the U.K.’s policymakers on enhancing the social well-being of refugees and immigrants.

In the U.K., the secretary for the Home Department and the Home office are responsible for handling immigration-related issues, including asylum, nationality, and border management regulations. Since 1892, the U.K. has enacted immigration laws restricting aliens’ entry into their country (Library of Congress, 2020). However, immigration laws are subject to frequent change through the issuance of a statement of changes to the laws in the parliament. If the changes receive no objections, the changes become laws within forty days (Immigration Act, 1971). Thus, according to the U.K’s immigration rules, one must obtain a leave to enter the country’s immigration office upon arrival (Immigration Act, 1971).

In 2002, there was an upsurge in the number of people seeking asylum in the U.K, which was about 84,132 (House of Commons Library Briefing, 2015). This increment was after the U.K. embraced the Human Rights Act 1998 in October 2000. U.K.’s acceptance of this Act meant that all the public authorities, including the immigration services, and any bodies performing government roles, would ensure all operations and decisions adhere to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Although the UK had been an ECHR signatory for more than fifty years, it had neither accepted nor implemented the Convention’s human rights. Thus, the full adoption of the ECHR changed even the U.K.’s court decisions to base on human rights compliance (Library of Congress, 2020).

The convention laws protect the refugees from deportation to nations they dread persecution for specific reasons (Owers, 2003). Thus, since the year 2000, the U.K. courts have actively fulfilled this refugee protection regulation by protecting refugees from being returned to nations where they would be persecuted or otherwise deported to unsafe states. Besides, article 3 of the ECHR protects refugees and asylum seekers from torture and any inhumane treatment. The article prohibits returning refugees and asylum seekers to nations that might subject them to such treatments (Library of Congress, 2020).

Moreover, Article 3 eliminates the need to prove the reason for facing mistreatment but will only have to confirm the risk of being subjected to the prohibited treatment. As a result, people from nations experiencing civil wars and face real threats of mistreatment are unreturnable. ECHR Article 8, which focuses on private, and family life, has helped the U.K to reunite immigrants with their family; however, it is unsafe for one to return to countries where the rest of the family members live. Besides, Article 8 requires that asylum seekers live everyday life and be free from health and safety threats. Another critical article is article 14, which prohibits discriminatory treatment of asylum seekers on varied grounds, including ethnicity and race.

Therefore, Convention offers a baseline of human rights for the U.K. and other European Union nations (Owers, 2003) to ensure that governments uphold the human rights protection for the refugees and asylum seekers. U.K.’s compliance with ECHR increased the number of people seeking asylum in the U.K., resulting in public discontent. From 2002, the U.K. began introducing measures to limit aliens’ entry by making it difficult to obtain asylum and reduce asylum’s applicants’ applicants’ benefits in the nation. Thus, in 2014, the number of people seeking asylum in the U.K. dropped significantly (Library of Congress, 2020).

The U.K.’s Proposed changes to the asylum system and their impacts on Refugees and Immigrants human rights

In 2020, the U.K. officially left the European Union (BBC News, 2020), and it has been making amendments to its regulations, including those of the asylum system. The Home Department and Home office secretary proposed several changes to the asylum system to reduce the number of individuals pursuing asylum in the U.K. As per the proposal, refuge seekers who come to the U.K. using illegal routes will not receive privileges given those who use the U.K.’s “legal” ways.

According to the ECHR convention Article 8, host nations should not discriminate persons seeking asylum on any grounds. Thus, when the U.K.’s proposed differential treatment of asylum seekers based on the routes they use to arrive in the U.K., it will result in an automatic denial of human rights to those who fail to receive entitlements.  Also, the proposed changes stipulate that asylum seekers who use illegal routes will have limited access to benefits and family reunion rights. Article 8 of the Convention protects asylum seekers’ private and family life by giving them the human right to reunite with family members. Thus, the U.K.’s proposed changes to deny them the right to reunite with family violate the refugees and asylum seekers under Article 8 of the Convention. Besides, the U.K. government seeks to amend legislation to permit asylum seekers’ deportation while their claims or appeals are pending.

Moreover, the proposed changes aim at reforming the judicial and appeal process to speed up the deportation of asylum seekers with denied claims. Deportation of asylum seekers and refugees is a human right violation under Convention Article 3, which prohibits their return to nations that might subject them to banned treatment. Also, the U.K.’s proposed changes to the asylum system want to make it legal for the secretary of the Home Department to help asylum seekers in their home country. This change seeks to remove the need for people to travel to the U.K. to seek asylum. Additionally, the system will make it harder for asylum seekers to receive refugee status by using rigorous assessment, including using a bone scanner for accurate age detection (Grierson, 2021).

Besides, the U.K. courts advocated for lifting the ECHR ban on deporting people from less developed and unstable nations. According to UNHCR (2021), all individual has a right to pursue refuge in any country. Thus, the U.K.’s restriction of people from seeking asylum in U.K. is a desecration of human rights.  From the literature reviewed, the U.K.’s proposed changes to the asylum system significantly impact the immigrants’ and refugees’ human legislation. However, the literature does not provide any specific effects of the proposed changes to non-whites. Besides, the literature does not offer recommendations to alleviate the suffering of non-white refugees and asylum seekers in the U.K. Therefore. This research seeks to fill the research gap by exploring the effects of the U.K.’s proposed changes to the asylum system on international human rights, people’s movement, and the policing of non-white bodies in the white spaces. Besides, the study will recommend measures that ensure fair and humanly treatment to the non-white refugees and asylum seekers in the U.K.

The investigator will use a non-probability convenience sampling strategy to recruit the respondents. In non-probability convenience sampling, participants are selected based on their convenient accessibility and proximity to the researcher. As a result, this technique will be appropriate for me since it will reduce my financial burden by eliminating the need to travel to distant locations to meet the participants. This technique allows the investigator to use friends and family as part of the sample size. Moreover, the permission to select the participants based on their nearness to the researcher will save time (Taherdoost, 2017)).  Non-probability convenient sampling is suitable for qualitative research intended to explore a real-life phenomenon. Since the study examines a real-life phenomenon in the U.K., “the effects of U.K.’s proposed changes to the asylum system on international human rights, the movement of people and policing of non-white bodies in the white spaces,” I find this sampling technique appropriate for this study. Regardless of the above strengths of non-probability convenience sampling, the procedure has some flaws. Selection bias is a common weakness of this sampling mechanism since the researcher might favour some participants and omit some who might significantly contribute to the study.

Additionally, the selected sample is not representative of the whole population, limiting the generalization findings (Taherdoost, 2017). The researcher will use some sample inclusion criteria factors, including age, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and mental capability of making personal decisions (Hornberger & Rangu, 2020). Qualified participants will have to be 18 years and above with a cognitive aptitude to make personal decisions to save on time and resources needed to seek consent from their guardians and other third parties. Regarding race, gender and ethnicity, the researcher will use a total sample size of twenty adults, ten females and ten males. In each gender category, half will be two will be U.K. white citizens, while eight will be non-white, either immigrants or refugees working in the immigration and asylum sector in the U.K. A sample size of twenty will be appropriate for this study since it will ensure that the researcher gets enough time to interview each participant to get detailed information to satisfy the research question and objectives. Besides, the small sample size will enable the researcher to analyze the responses before making conclusions.

On the other hand, using refugees and immigrants, particularly those working in the immigration and asylum sector as the majority participants, will be appropriate since they have vast knowledge on the research topic. The inclusion of all gender, race and ethnic groups minimizes bias in the research findings (Hornberger & Rangu, 2020). Therefore, the convenience sampling method and the above-highlighted inclusion criteria will enable the researcher to get a suitable sample group that will offer relevant information to answer the research question.

Data Collection

The research will use both primary and secondary data. The investigator will use telephone interviews comprising of both structured and unstructured interviews to collect primary data. A structured interview has predetermined questions prepared by the investigator, while in an unstructured interview, the researcher does not prepare the questions in advance (Surbhi, 2017). Structured interviews will enable the researcher to compare the responses from the participants due to the uniformity of the question. On the other hand, the unstructured interview will allow the researcher to get broad and in-depth information on a given structured question by augmenting them with instant open-ended questions (Adhabi & Anozie, 2017). Thus, the investigator will email the structured interview questions to the respondents two weeks before the actual interview day to allow them to familiarise themselves with the questions. The researcher will record the interviewee’s responses on a safe gadget. A telephone interview will be appropriate because it reduces the research by eliminating the need to travel like face-to-face interviews.

Also, practical interview skills such as engaging the respondents in an interactive session reduce non-response rates (Adhabi & Anozie, 2017). Besides, telephone interviews are safe as it will enable the researcher and participants to observe the restrictive Covid-19 guidelines such as social distancing measures that aims at mitigating the disease spread (Painter & Qiu, 2020). Despite the advantages of online interviews, the data collection method has some limitations. The technique does not allow the researcher to get non-verbal cues such as facial expressions, which might help better interpret the responses. Besides, structured interviews might result in wastage of time and deviation from the research objective (Adhabi & Anozie, 2017). To overcome these weaknesses related to structured interviews, the researcher will strive to remain focused on the research objectives while interrogating the interviewees.

Due to the small sample size, the researcher will augment the primary data using a secondary data collection method which entails using available information to satisfy the research objectives. Thus, the investigator will re-interpret, swot, and re-examine pre-existing data relevant to the study topic in reports, scholarly journals, books, and authentic websites (Hair et al., 2007).

To effectively employ the secondary method, the researcher will apply the four steps of using the secondary research approach. Hence, the researcher will formulate study questions to guide the study process in the initial step then isolate the secondary resources by selecting those relevant to the study topic. Next, the researcher will evaluate the selected sources based on the study objectives. Lastly, the investigator will analyze the resources to determine their contribution to the study topic (Smith et al., 2011). Incorporating secondary data in the study will be vital since the primary data collected through the interviews might not satisfy all the research objectives due to the small sample size.

Moreover, secondary research provides a wide range of readily accessible online and physical libraries, enabling the researcher to collect more information about the subject. Additionally, secondary data will help the investigator elucidate gathered primary data, thus resulting in the formulation of comprehensive and informed deductions from the study.

However, secondary data has some demerits, including the investigator’s lack of control over the data’s quality. Also, secondary data may contain vast information that is inappropriate to the study topic since the original objectives of the author might differ from the research topic, thus necessitating an analysis of many sources, which might be time-consuming. To overcome these demerits, the researcher will check the credibility of the authors of secondary sources to ascertain the quality of the data and focus on sources whose primary objectives and study topic are pertinent to the current research aim (Sindin, 2017).

The investigator will employ a qualitative research technique. Since the study’s focus is to unravel the effects of the U.K.’s proposed changes to the asylum system on international human rights, the movement of people and policing of the blacks on the white spaces, a qualitative approach will be suitable due to its ability to provide a thorough descriptive analysis of the participants’ responses. Also, the qualitative descriptive method will enable the researcher to make sense of the primary data using secondary data for interpretation. Besides, since the research will involve few participants whose responses may not be measurable, not quantifiable, the qualitative result is a suitable method for analyzing the participants’ responses. Also, a qualitative approach will allow the researcher to analyze and describe the research findings without restricting the type of interviewees’ responses (Queirós, 2017).

The researcher will also use interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). IPA is subject-centred and entails analyzing people’s experiences regarding a situation. As for this research, IPA will enable the researcher to explore the respondents’ experiences with the proposed changes to the U.K.’s asylum system. Also, IPA is suitable for analyzing qualitative data collected from a small sample size. Since the research used a small sample size to collect qualitative information, IPA is an appropriate data analysis technique. Although IPA is suitable for this study, it is prone to personal bias. For instance, since the researcher is a refugee, there researcher’s experiences might creep into the investigation since the topic focuses on immigrants and refugees.  Therefore, the researcher will overcome this form of bias by being conscious of self during the analysis to avoid incorporating personal experiences into the study (Kerryn, 2020). Therefore, the researcher will use qualitative descriptive and IPA methods to analyze the collected primary and secondary information.

The exploration will comply with various ethics related to the use of human beings as participants in research. First, the researcher will obtain informed consent from the participants. To achieve this, the researcher will email consent forms to selected respondents requesting them to participate in the research by answering interview questions. The form will permit the respondents to withdraw their consent if they feel like not participating in the study without any repercussions. Besides, the researcher will give the chosen respondents a participants’ information sheet that will enlighten them on research intentions and details of the involved method, including each method’s duration. This sheet will inform respondents of their role, benefits and disadvantages of participating in research.

The researcher will ensure that the content in the consent forms and the participant information sheet are written in simple and understandable language and devoid of technical and complex terms. The forms will contain the researcher’s contact details and written permission to allow the participants to contact the researcher at any time to seek clarification of the contents in the participant information sheet and consent form.

Due to the sensitivity of primary data, the researcher will ensure utmost confidentiality and anonymity are upheld. Thus, the investigator will keep the participants’ names anonymous to ensure that they are protected. The researcher will omit the interviewees’ names and solely use their responses in the research.  Besides, the interviews will focus on the research aim of exploring the effects of the U.K.’s proposed changes to the Asylum system on international human rights, the movement of people, and the policing of non-white bodies in the white spaces, thus avoiding any personal private information that might offer clues of identifying the participants or which might make the participants uncomfortable.

Moreover, the investigator will record interview data on a safe device and protected it from access by unauthorized personnel by securely saving it in the researcher’s institution p-drive account to further protect the participants. Therefore, this research’s two primary ethical considerations will be obtaining informed consent from the participants and safeguarding the participants by upholding confidentiality and anonymity. Compliance with these two research ethical principles will enhance the exploration’s findings’ credibility, validity, and integrity.