Anti-migrant tensions across the UK have been boiling over in recent days, spurring sickening racist attacks on healthcare workers and forcing many asylum seekers to hide in their homes.
In Nuneaton, the situation has become so intolerable that one asylum seeker who has been in England for 20 years is hoping to leave the town for his safety.
Asylum seeker Yusuf had lived in the UK for two decades, but recently had his right to work stripped after a ‘serious’ assault, Sky News reported.
He said: ‘This country is not safe, but my country (Somalia) is now safe. I want to go back.’
Somalia was in the midst of ongoing internal fighting and civil wars when Yusuf initially left. Though conflict is still ongoing in Somalia, Yusuf was clear that he believed he’d be safer there instead of Nuneaton.
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During the interview on camera in Nuneaton, a group of women drinking pints walked up and began hurling verbal abuse at one asylum seeker, who was quietly speaking to journalists.
‘That’s the issue, having you in our country,’ one woman spat. ‘You’re raping our kids… this is our country, how about we come to your country?’
The woman was speaking to Javed, a former master craftsman from Iran who now lives with seven other men in Nuneaton after claiming asylum.
‘I wouldn’t leave Iran if I didn’t have to,’ he stressed.
After the women came up and began hurling abuse at him, he remained calm, even saying he was ‘used’ to the attacks in Nuneaton.
The town used to have a handful of asylum seekers, but that number has increased in recent years.
Anti-migrant sentiment in the town increased after two men, believed to be Afghan asylum seekers, were charged with the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl.
Ahmad Mulakhil, 23, was charged with rape, and Mohammad Kabir, 23, was charged with kidnap, strangulation and aiding and abetting rape of a girl under 13.
But the crimes of the few asylum seekers in the UK are affecting the many law-abiding ones, who have faced sickening abuse.
Last month, large crowds gathered outside the Bell Hotel in Epping to protest the housing of migrants there, after a resident of the hotel was charged with multiple crimes a week after arriving in the UK.
In the chaos, two hotel workers who had just got off the bus to begin their shift at the Essex hotel were ‘set upon by a group of men’, mistaking them for guests at the hotel.
In a shocking case last week, an NHS nurse who has worked for 15 years in the UK was racially abused while out walking with her family in a park.
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