How UK Asylum Governance Turns Emergency into Routine
Published: 1 June 2026
Commentary
Why is asylum so often governed as though it is a permanent emergency? That is the question at the heart of research undertaken by Professor Nasar Meer (University of Glasgow) and Dr Emma Hill (University of Strathclyde).
We are all familiar with the language of ‘small boats’, ‘asylum hotels’, ‘illegal migration’ and ‘public concern’ in the discussion of asylum, something which focuses our attention on backlogs, delays, accommodation failures and serious administrative problems. Each of these are visible symptoms, but each also obscures the ordinary systems that produce them: procurement decisions, outsourced accommodation contracts, administrative delay, poor communication, restricted rights and the cumulative burdens placed on people seeking asylum.
In our article, we examine public and institutional accounts of asylum accommodation, especially the controversy around ‘asylum hotels’, alongside interviews with people living through the system and with stakeholders in local government, advocacy and the third sector. We also situate these accounts in relation to Home Office materials, National Audit Office reporting, judicial review decisions and recent policing guidance. This allows us to show that crisis is not only a way of talking about asylum, it also a way of governing through contracts, delays, evidentiary routines, fragmented accountability and everyday administrative burdens, something we can understand as ‘crisis ordinariness’.
To analyse this, we draw on Teun van Dijk’s idea of the ‘ideological square’: the tendency to emphasise ‘our’ good qualities and ‘their’ bad qualities, while downplaying ‘our’ responsibility and ‘their’ humanity or legitimacy. In asylum governance, this helps illuminate a recurring pattern, where the state’s actions are often presented as reluctant, necessary and protective, while asylum seekers are represented through suspicion, cost, disorder or risk.
What falls out of view are the mundane institutional choices that make life difficult for people already living in uncertainty.
The controversy around ‘asylum hotels’ offers a clear example. Hotels have been presented as evidence of system failure and public burden. Yet the story is not only about accommodation. It is also about the administrative and contractual conditions that made hotels central to asylum dispersal: shortages of appropriate housing, outsourcing arrangements, delayed decision-making and limited accountability. For residents, these arrangements shape daily life: where people live, what they can eat, whether they can travel, how they are seen locally, and how exposed they are to hostility.
Our article also considers how crisis framing travels into wider public institutions and communication practices. Once asylum is treated primarily as a problem of public order, institutional responses can become increasingly organised around suspicion and reassurance, rather than evidence, rights and care. This matters because policy communication is part of governance. It helps decide whose experiences count, which risks are foregrounded, and what forms of harm remain administratively invisible.
The article therefore argues for better ‘governance of evidence’. This means asking how evidence is selected, framed and used; whose testimony is heard; how costs are calculated; and whether administrative burdens are being audited from the perspective of those who carry them. In asylum policy, the burden is too often measured as a burden on the state, the taxpayer or the locality, and too rarely as a burden imposed on people seeking protection.
Our hope is that the article contributes to a shift in how asylum governance is discussed from whether the system is in ‘crisis’, to what crisis-talk permits, conceals, and who is made to live with its consequences?
At stake, is a better politics of responsibility for the ordinary systems that produce extraordinary harm.
‘How crisis discourse shapes UK asylum governance: from framing to administrative practice’ was published in the journal Policy and Politics.
First published: 1 June 2026