In This English Village, Asylum Seekers May Soon Outnumber the Locals

Wethersfield is a postcard village about 50 miles from London. {snip}

The British government is using the old air base at Wethersfield as a camp for asylum seekers. It’s unclear when they came to the UK, as the government does not release information on how long their processing takes. But we do know this: All are adult men. Many crossed the English Channel from France, arriving on small boats and claiming asylum when they hit the beach. They are from countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are allowed to come and go freely from the camp, to the village and beyond.

Currently, 580 of them live on the base. Their number is about to rise to 800. The government won’t say exactly when, but it had initially stated that a total of 1,700 migrants would eventually move here.

Before the migrants arrived, the village of Wethersfield reportedly had a population of 707.

Originally the site of the camp was earmarked for a new prison, a proposal which aroused local opposition. When the government first reopened it as an asylum center, the locals were told it would be temporary, but no one believed that.

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People are polite in Wethersfield. It’s the English way. They understand that their new neighbors are a drop in an ocean of migration and suffering that is transforming every society in the West. None of them said anything racist. Even their anger at both Conservative and Labour politicians, and at the bureaucrats of the Home Office, was measured and regretful. But they cannot deny that the asylum seekers have changed life in the village.

I was told that the migrants, as everyone here calls them, trespass on the farmers’ fields and loiter on the paths in groups. Some of the migrants have reportedly defecated in the lane leading to the camp. Although the Home Office instructs the migrants on local customs, some of them, villagers complain, were seen “watching the children’s playground.” Security footage showed someone attempting to break into a house. “One tried to burgle the pub,” a villager told me.

When I asked if the villagers fear a cascade effect from petty crime to violent chaos, they nodded but do not speak. {snip}

Prime Minister Keir Starmer calls anti-immigrant sentiment “far right.” The police will show up on the doorstep of citizens who speak online too bluntly. Since the Orwellian-sounding Online Safety Act became law in October 2023, the government has directed the police to prosecute hundreds of people. {snip}

Some villagers refused to discuss the camp at all. Those who agreed to speak on the record did so only after I promised not to ask their names or describe their appearance. My photographer kept a respectful distance, but they still asked not to be photographed. Their world has been upended, but they were afraid to speak on their own doorsteps.

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By the back gate of the base, I found a large house with views over the countryside. A sports car with personalized plates was parked outside. And yet the owner said she couldn’t sell her home, because no one wanted to live next door to an asylum center. As we talked, we heard an eerie sound of voices in the wind: noise from the gym on the base.

She said the villagers hear “helicopters and ambulances and sirens” at all hours. The asylum seekers were “fighting amongst each other in their cells,” she told me.

I asked if she felt safe.

“I’ve got my adult son living here. Luckily, my daughter doesn’t anymore, so that’s good. But our neighbors have got younger children.”

Would she let her daughter walk around alone?

“No, probably not.”

She does not need to say why. Everyone fears that the longer the camp is open and the larger the number of young men in the village, the greater the chance of serious crime. I asked if she walked on her own.

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British law requires proof that applicants seeking asylum are being persecuted in their country of origin for their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or “anything else that puts you at risk,” such as “your gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation.” In 2022, 72 percent of British asylum applications on the grounds of being lesbian, gay, or bisexual were successful. In 2023, Britain’s then-home secretary, Suella Braverman, claimed that there were “many instances” of fake claims.

Meanwhile, hundreds of asylum seekers have obtained British residency in recent years by claiming to be Christian. In the northwest of England, so many asylum seekers from Iran and neighboring countries have come to Liverpool Cathedral in search of the good news and a visa that in 2014 the cathedral set up a Persian congregation. By 2017, it had baptized 330 such converts; almost as many professing Christians as there are in Wethersfield.

The threshold of evidence for being a Christian is baptism and proving Christian habits and knowledge. The judge in a 2017 asylum appeal for one of the Iranian converts who had attended Liverpool Cathedral concluded that the number of Iranians there was “improbably large” and that there was a “serious possibility” of fraud.

Meanwhile, the former dean of Liverpool Cathedral could not recall having baptized a Muslim who was already a British citizen. In February 2024, Braverman alleged that “churches around the country” were “facilitating industrial-scale bogus asylum claims.”

But asylum seekers who are successful under any of the grounds set by British law make up a small fraction of the UK’s overall immigrants; in 2023, they comprised 11 percent. More often, migrants are moving westward for economic reasons. For the asylum seekers in Wethersfield, the center is either the last stop on a long, dangerous, and costly journey that leads to residency in a rich and free society—or the end of the road before deportation.

Before 2020, less than 50,000 people claimed asylum in Britain each year. In 2022, the total annual number topped 100,000. In 2024, 97,000 annual applications for asylum were reported, with 28,050 asylum seekers arriving by small boat.

In 2020, the government ramped up its practice of housing asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in hotels, also turning to army barracks while it tried to clear an ever-growing backlog. In 2023, it reopened Wethersfield, a former Royal Air Force airfield, as an asylum processing center. These centers are not intended to accelerate the resolution of asylum cases. They are intended to expedite the entry of new cases into the system, and to keep tabs on applicants while their cases and appeals are processed. The first batch, of 50, arrived at Wethersfield in July 2023.

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