We hear a lot from politicians about immigration, and the debate is frankly toxic.
So last week I went to Common Flora, near Diptford, to meet a group of asylum seekers who come here once a month to work on the land, share a communal lunch and sing together.
I met a young man who’d fled war in Southern Sudan and a woman who had been trafficked into slavery in the Gulf States and managed to escape… others from Iraq, Kurdistan and Afghanistan. All of them clearly living with and suffering the effects of trauma – from the experiences they had in their home countries, a perilous journey, and now a life that involves waiting, waiting, waiting years to know whether they can actually start to build a life here, or whether they will be deported.
They have barely any money, no jobs, no ability to go to college, little community around them and the toll on their mental health is huge.
It seems a great pity that the man who had been a lecturer in engineering at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia and had come here to do PhD research is being left in limbo by a broken system that takes years to make a decision and destroys lives in the meantime.
The Home Office has to get a grip on asylum applications – they won’t all be valid, but let’s give these people the decency of a faster decision so they know where they stand. And those who are allowed to stay can actually start to make a life for themselves, like so many generations of immigrants have done before them.
Caroline Voaden is MP for South Devon, a Liberal Democrat chosen as the people’s champion in the South Devon Primary and the first non-Conservative MP in the constituency (formerly Totnes) for 100 years. Ed