Dr Claire Street explains how the UK’s new asylum repayment law could leave refugee women paying twice for survival.

This week the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, introduced the Immigration and Asylum Bill to Parliament. Under the plans, asylum seekers who go on to earn enough will be asked to repay around ten thousand pounds towards the cost of their accommodation and support, before they can settle permanently in the UK. Ministers have compared it to a student loan. “Receiving asylum support is a right, but it is also a responsibility,” Mahmood said. “Once people can contribute and repay the generosity of the British people, we expect them to do so.”

My research looks at how refugee women are steered toward self employment after they arrive in the UK, often described as a route to empowerment and self reliance. The reality I found is less generous. Self employment is rarely the open door it is presented as. It is what is left once every other door has closed, qualifications not recognised, work history erased by years of waiting, no childcare available. Calling that empowerment is misleading. What it really asks of these women is that they prove their worth through what they produce, and we then describe that demand as freedom.

The new repayment scheme adds something else onto that already precarious position: debt. Debt does something to a person beyond the money itself. It leaves someone feeling guilty simply for owing, constantly having to prove they deserve what they have been given. For a woman who has already survived trauma, fleeing violence or persecution, that debt does not sit alongside her trauma. It adds to it, a second obligation stacked on top of a life already shaped by one she did not choose.

This is not a new way of using debt, only a newer place to use it. Debt has long been used by powerful institutions to push the most vulnerable into ever harder work, calling it personal responsibility rather than what it really is, a way of shifting risk away from those institutions and onto the people with the least power to refuse. The same logic now sits inside a domestic bill, with the same effect, debt used to keep the least powerful under constant obligation.

If this Bill is serious about fairness, it cannot keep asking refugee women to be both grateful and indebted at once. The detail still to come, thresholds, exemptions, how this interacts with self employment, will decide whether this scheme is responsibility shared, or obedience demanded from those least able to say no.

Dr Claire Street is a Senior Lecturer in Global Business in the School of Business, Law, and Policing.