The Home Secretary’s new asylum proposals disguise harm as compassion. Capped routes. Rights narrowed.
This is the State creating the appearance of more safe routes while deferring responsibility to institutions. And still deciding who gets to be picked, and who gets ruled out.
First, the “safe and legal” route is an invented concept that makes all other journeys seem “illegal” by default. It is governments and borders that create the unsafe route and put people at risk.
Second, Mahmood’s language of “genuine refugees”, “loopholes” and “abuse” repeats a long‑running political tactic: cast suspicion on people seeking safety to distract from government failures.
As our Words Matter work shows, the label “genuine” undermines a person’s legitimacy before their claim is even heard.
We’ve unpacked the Hostile Office’s latest “safe and legal” PR exercise in this explainer: what it really means, and why that matters.
More opaque gatekeeping, more confusion through state-managed filters, and less safety.
🔴 We’re calling on you to write to your MP to oppose these asylum proposals.
✊ MPs need to demand a stop to these policies and the narratives that underpin them. Human rights are for all of us. We all deserve safety.
We’ve written a ready-to-use MP letter template with the points we’ve covered above. You can use it as is, or tailor with the points that matter to you/ examples local to you.
We refuse to allow the state to keep asylum a moving target.
Migrants’ Rights Network – migrantsrights.org.uk