EMPLOYMENT
Refugees are twice as likely to be unemployed. A new scheme in Coventry might have answers
In the week it was revealed that the cost of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda would cost £169,000 per person, the indisputable economic benefit of migrants coming to the UK has been put in the spotlight again. Take Tsehaye for example. He left his home in Eritrea 13 years ago. Since then, he has journeyed across the Sahara, been imprisoned by a militia in Libya, spent seven years in Germany, and tried for four months to cross the English channel in a lorry. He is a refugee, and he wants to work. “It’s a very bad journey,” he says. “Terrible, dangerous journey.”
Now living in Coventry, all he wants from life in the UK is to be a “free person. I need only a small job.”
Contrary to popular opinion, migrants, refugees and anyone else coming to the UK without a settled immigration status can’t claim the vast majority of state benefits. Once granted refugee status, those coming to the UK are able to work without restrictions. Yet refugees are four times more likely to be unemployed than people born in the UK,
