A good answer to "how many asylum seekers do you have living with you?"

[SomersetBrie]

I see this quite a lot in a fairly supportive group I belong to.
Lots of people dispelling the myth that asylum seekers are raking it in, taking jobs and benefits, etc.
A positive space and then someone comes in saying "if you are so supportive of asylum seekers, how many fighting age men do you have living with you?"
It really annoys me! It's possible to be supportive of a cause without actually taking people in.
All I can think of is really rude responses, I'd like something measured and decent and not allow them to get away with shutting people down with that.

(and I know I'll get negative responses to this post, but I will be super grateful to anyone who can come up with something I can use)

The charity linked below does, read the testimonies.

Well hooray! About 35000 have been returned since Labour got in. Most went voluntarily once identified, a smaller number had to be forcibly removed. The rate of assessment of asylum is up. Net immigration has halved.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/12/uk-drops-down-list-of-affluent-nations-after-decade-of-stagnation-niesr-finds

Well, I lived with one until I was 26 (apart from uni.)

Dad was a WW2 Displaced Person... He worked as a coalminer until he retired.

I worked as a secondary school teacher for 40 years. I've never given birth, so I suspect that Dad might have put more into the economy than he took out in the end, particularly if you count his war service and post-war service under the British Army.

I really hope that next time someone asks this, I can remember the wording of this post.

My retirement voluntary work is with asylum seekers. Ove the last couple of months I've started getting negative comments from acquaintances about what I do. It's unpleasant. Lots of assumptions made "you'd let them all in then" : No, I wouldn't. I'm not about open borders, I'm about the government providing safe routes and the ability to apply for asylum from other countries, so that the channels crossings aren't necessary, and those whose applications aren't granted do not arrive here. And I'm about those who are here being treated humanely. Which is where I come in.

As a woman living alone, no, I won't be offering a bedroom. But I will be helping people find accommodation and food through other channels.

So much self righteous BS

For people in poorer areas, where there are also high numbers of asylum seekers, the structure and support they pay their taxes for simply aren’t there, though. The people here already (including those already granted asylum) aren’t getting the public services they deserve.

No they aren’t - if only because our benefits aren't that great.
People come here because English is a global language (due to a combination of Empire and The US) and because they perceive Britain to be a fair and non racist country. I’ve read interviews saying this they’re in for a horrible shock.
Many Afghan refugees helped the British forces. It’s utterly churlish to declare them like as not Taliban rapists.

If you tried to argue Catholics had a specific culture of abusing children compared to everyone else, I would be arguing exactly that actually.

And the Catholic church has not "been addressed", problems over. There's more awareness/safeguarding. But lots of the worst abusers are still in the priesthood and comfortably retired. And there are still children being exploited by priests. CSA is never a problem which is permanently fixed. The best you can do is safeguard and stay vigilant.

It's dangerous to have sacred castes. It is dangerous to create "good" in groups and "bad" out groups because that creates sacred castes by default. That's how abuse happens. Its partly why abuse happens in some of the other countries people mention. And in this country.

If you looked at the patterns on mumsnet over the past few years you used to get a large volume of ploppers on every thread about SA/male violence shoehorning in "not all men", "women do it too" "of course rape is bad, but this is an overreaction" etc. Now you have people shoe horning in "the dangerous men are from X group. Men like me/my sons aren't the bad ones". Its the same attempt to hoist a group of men (the ones they identify with) out of suspicion. Because that's mentally comfortable and you get to feel like a good person for 0 actual effort. And this happens in other countries too.

People in power do this. Nigel Farage and the right were praising Andrew Tate, talking about how Me Too had gone to far etc. But also fake outraged at specific groups of men harassing girls. Musk spent 400 million getting a rapist (and someone he believes to be a paedophile) elected to the most powerful position in the world. He tried to promote Conor McGregor and Tate as well. He removed "woke" protections on X against child porn**. He is also, apparently, worried about men from "other cultures" having negative attitudes to women. His own dad got his sister pregnant. But I suspect his own family culture is a sore subject.

** The protections were always surface deep and crap. It's almost as if the "culture" in Silicon Valley is porn drenched and sees some women/children as OK for exploitation...

You think our benefits aren’t great compared to Afghanistan? How much free money do you think we should give people who haven’t paid a penny in tax out of interest?

The people they rehouse are selected for their suitability (as are those providing homes). It wouldn’t work for everyone.

It’s an easy one. For a start we’re posting on mn about various things rather than silenced and no recourse as women.

We’re skint. This is just about the worst economic doldrums I can recall in my 50+ years. How are we going to house, school, treat and meet all the other needs of these people? And I include legal migrants, too. We can’t support the population already here. We can’t keep adding to it willy nilly. People like you aren’t willing to house, feed & keep them for free. What do we do?

Doesn’t say how far, but that’s Brexit for you.
It also says this The analysis shows how the UK now has some of the least generous welfare across countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), ranking it in the middle of OECD countries for welfare spending (as a proportion of national income) and third lowest for welfare value (calculated as a percentage of average wages).
So thanks for providing the evidence for what I said earlier about our benefits not being a draw.

We can afford it. As I said, it’s 12 pence per day per taxpayer. If we redistributed to every person in the U.K., it’s 6p per day.

Meanwhile, 50 families have more wealth than the poorest 34 million people (around 50%) in the U.K. combined. You could raise tax on those people so minimally they wouldn’t notice any difference in their wealth and easily pay to help those people. But we choose not to and instead insist that two groups of desperate people fight over 6p per day.

I can’t believe I’m having to say this to an adult who presumably pays bills and is responsible for children.

I am someone who asks questions like this and I'll tell you what would raise my respect for you.

Acknowledge that the essence of the question is "are you simply stating this opinion because you aren't going to have to face the costs of it directly yourself?"

If you say that you live next to a lot of asylum seekers in your town (give %ages), your children's school is one of the ones in the news for having men hanging out outside, you are a top-rate taxpayer and personally very happy to fund this with money you've put in and not others', your council is directly taking on costs of housing etc and you don't mind if services are impacted... or anything along those lines...

I'll still not agree with you, but I'll revise my opinion of you from "naive virtue-signalling idealist" to "person who has a different vision of society to me but at least understands the impact".

I agree. But there also seems to be a general feeling that because male asylum seekers are themselves fleeing from harm, they are incapable of inflicting it. A sort of assumption that they are automatically harmless and innocent due to their own travails. It's also worth bearing in mind that a high percentage of them will be economic migrants and not necessarily victims of anything.

Lol! You think that our public services can deal with the massive influx of migrants, legal & illegal? Bless!

That’s not the fault of the migrants, though a certain party would love you to believe that. Can you not just see that they are creating an enemy for you to blame? Bless….

I’d keep it simple with “bit disingenuous” and bat it back into their court

Perhaps if you don't have room for an asylum seeker right now you could campaign for Serco to open some houses of multiple occupation in your street or near your children's schools. Thst would surely convince anyone who doubted your woke credentials?

Right.
If I was arguing we should have the Taliban ruling in this country or that we should have greater government censorship then that would be an important counterargument.

But people arguing that Asylum seekers should be allowed 3 meals a day aren't arguing that we should switch to a Taliban system of oppression? Any more than they think you should house an asylum seeker in their spare house. It's a complete straw man. And no, while I think people needing (or falsely claiming) asylum causes issues that need solving, I don't think it will lead to us being so overrun that suddenly we are outnumbered by Taliban supporters and they take over. That's the only way your point makes sense.

Im not a moral relativist. I do think some government systems are much worse than others, particularly much worse for women. In particular far right governments (this includes the Taliban) always lead to women having less rights and to at least some women being less safe from sexual violence. E.g. some people like to talk about how safe from crime they feel as women in Saudi Arabia/the UAE. But that's because whole groups of women (eg domestic servants) are classed as undeserving of protection. The far right does that here as well. And yes, also the far left (sex positivity for children).
But some of the same wording used by the Taliban about virtue etc is increasingly used by the American "Christian" right. There isn't a magic "culture" that protects you from things getting worse. It's a political danger.

Simultaneously the country is overrun with asylum seekers but no-one that disagrees with you on Mumsnet has ever encountered them or lives near them.

I am so sick of asylum seeker news and posts. Enough already.

Well, that old chestnut ‘the social contract.’ This has long since been binned by previous governments. It started happening in about 1979 when the UK public, or at least a big chunk of it, went mad for ‘me, me, me’ Thatcherism. A lot of our issues today can be traced back to that. So, we can’t afford that social contract as it was, much as I wish we could. We have a much more limited outlook on society, self responsibility, resilience. That contract is very different now and public services can not carry on adding hundreds of thousands of people every single year. Our duty is to the people already here. We can’t take everyone who wants to come. Maybe in future, when times are good, if that ever happens, I don’t see it myself, we can do more again. For now, it has to stop.
‘These people’ are fucking sick of being crippled by other people’s so-called worthy causes.