This week, the UK High Court granted the local authority in Epping, a leafy suburb east of the capital London, an injunction to remove asylum seekers housed in a hotel in the town centre.
Some 140 asylum seekers, many of whom had crossed the English Channel in small boats, had been set up in the 80-room Bell Hotel. The move by the Home Office then led to days of demonstrations by locals who protested that the new residents of The Bell posed a public safety risk.
The people of Epping have a number of homemade signs at their protest outside the Bell Hotel, including a request to President @realDonaldTrump and VP @JDVance to “please help the UK,” along with demands for fresh elections, and a call for SUTR to “go home” pic.twitter.com/jjZ6NNiqXz
— Jack Hadfield 🇬🇧 (@JackHadders) August 24, 2025
The anger was fanned by far-right agitators who painted the asylum seekers and refugees as a ‘Muslim invasion’ and ‘criminals’.
The likes of Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing Reform UK party, jumped on the bandwagon, exploiting wider concerns about immigration among the public.
Protests Across The UK
Similar protests broke out at other hotels housing asylum seekers in towns across the country. The issue has become a touchstone, dominating the news headlines, parliamentary debates and has the potential to reshape Britain’s centuries-old two-party system; polls show that Reform UK has surged in public favourability.
But ultimately, it’s a smoke screen that masks a wide range of failures by both Conservative and now Labour governments.
How Many ‘Legal’ Migrants?
In 2024, just under 40,000 people crossed the Channel in small boats.
In contrast, the number of legal migrants to the UK stood at twenty times that number, at around 780,000. The previous year, nearly 30,000 people came over in small boats.
The figure for ‘legal’ migration? More than 1.1 million, a record figure. Several factors contributed to this, prominent among which was the war in Ukraine, which led to the UK welcoming tens of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing the conflict; then there was Beijing’s anti-democracy crackdown in Hong Kong which led to residents of the former British territory being classified as ‘British Overseas Residents’, leading to nearly 300,000 Hong Kongers moving to the UK.
And Then, There Are The Indians
Following Britain’s ignominious, and as yet economically unfulfilled, departure from the European Union, the world’s largest and most prosperous trading bloc, the Conservative governments in power post-2016 have struggled to fill a myriad array of sectors in the British economy as disillusioned Italians and Greeks and Spaniards and Eastern Europeans fled in their droves from a country that deemed them rather unwelcome.
Most critically hit by this exodus was the Social Care sector — the hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers who look after an ageing, overwhelmingly white segment of British society in care homes, hospices, hospitals and homes up and down the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland.
In 2023, the then-Conservative government granted more than 350,000 health and care worker visas to workers in a bid to bridge the gap in the shortfall of greater European labour.
In a desperate bid to incentivise these workers, the care worker visas allowed applicants to bring along their spouses and children to the UK.
An overwhelming majority of these visas were granted to Indian nationals: care workers, nurses, medical orderlies, even those in industries unrelated to the care sector, who saw an opportunity to build a new life with their families in the West.
However, as with the Covid pandemic, when the more entrepreneurial amongst us saw an opportunity to profit from a global pandemic, so too did those who made the most of the government’s Care Worker Scheme.
Unsuspecting Victims
Unscrupulous “Visa Agents” working between the UK and India lured tens of thousands of people to apply for these visas at extraordinarily exorbitant costs.
While the average cost of officially applying for a Care Worker visa ranged between £2,000 and £3,000, many were charged up to ten times that amount with promises of work and a new life in Britain.
In comparison, the average ‘fee’ paid to a human trafficker for someone to cross the Channel to Britain is £2,500.
‘Kavya’ (real name withheld to protect her identity) was among them.
She is from a small town in Haryana and used to work as a teacher at a government school. At the time she arrived in the UK, her two children were aged 13 and 5. One day in 2022, she came across a ‘Visa Agent’ who told her that she could live and work in the UK and give her kids a better future with a Care Worker visa.
She promptly coughed up Rs 40 Lakh (roughly £40,000) for the privilege, a staggering amount.
Alas, it was only for her and her husband, as adding her children to the visa application would have meant the ‘agents’ would charge her more. As a result, she was forced to leave them in India with her family.
Promised regular employment once she came to the UK, no or little work transpired. She was forced to find work to do ‘cash in hand’, as per the instructions of the agents who organised her visa.
Since then, she has been left destitute and depressed, a victim of human trafficking. Having obtained the initial funds for the visa from extortionate loan sharks in Haryana, ‘Kavya’ and her husband are unable to return to India in fear for their lives until the money is paid back. In the meantime, they are unable to find shelter for the longer term in the UK as ‘asylum seekers’ because the former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak declared India a ‘safe country’.
As such, as a small minority of immigrants in the UK — asylum seekers and refugees from Syria, the Congo, Afghanistan and elsewhere — are targeted for being put up in hotels by the government and become the focus of daily headlines, tens of thousands of migrant Indians remain in limbo unable to find gainful employment, unable to find gainful employment and unable to return to India, for fear of debt-related reprisals, in the UK.
