Ordinary people outside hotels raging at ordinary people inside them: that's the tragedy of this refugee controversy | Rowan Williams

Using hotels to house vulnerable migrants functions as warehousing, corralling a problematic group in insecure, temporary settings that avoid addressing underlying needs. Legal processes are chaotic and under-resourced, with shocking delays that create maximal insecurity and rootlessness, and at worst foster resentment and criminality. Inadequate safe and legal routes for asylum seekers enable lethal, illegal migration industries and produce unplanned communities for which government cannot plan safety or integration. Placement decisions trigger anger and bewilderment in host localities, especially deprived areas whose voices are often ignored. Long-term planning and properly resourced pathways are necessary to ensure humane treatment and effective integration.

Using hotels for housing vulnerable migrants is the equivalent of what prison reform campaigners have long called warehousing make sure a problematic group is simply corralled somewhere more or less secure, and hope their issues will somehow sort themselves out. The chaos and under-resourcing of the legal processes involved and the shocking levels of delay mean that the conditions are created for maximal insecurity and rootlessness at worst, resentment and criminality.

And we have to face the fact that, so long as safe and legal routes for asylum seekers are inadequate, we are colluding in the flourishing industry of lethal and illegal systems whose effect is to create communities for whose safety and integration government is unable to plan, and who are trapped in a situation both dehumanising for them and challenging for localities where they are placed.

Not a new issue: I have vivid memories of meetings more than 25 years ago in the post-industrial town in south Wales where I then worked, trying to broker discussion between local groups from socially deprived areas and various community and religious organisations, in the wake of what came across as a casual announcement from the government of a new initiative to settle significant numbers of asylum seekers in the town.

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