In This English Village, Asylum Seekers May Soon Outnumber the Locals

ESSEX‚ England—Wethersfield is a postcard village about 50 miles from London. A row of well-kept houses on a country lane leads to a tiny village green, a little school, and St Mary Magdalene, the 13th-century parish church. In a field just north of the village on a recent afternoon, a young Middle Eastern-looking man sat against a hedge, texting on his cell phone. I walked toward him and said hello. But when he saw me, he seemed frightened. He scrambled to his feet and stumbled diagonally across the muddy furrows, running for the tree line.

The British government is using the old air base at Wethersfield as a camp for asylum seekers. It’s unclear when they came to the UK, as the government does not release information on how long their processing takes. But we do know this: All are adult men. Many crossed the English Channel from France, arriving on small boats and claiming asylum when they hit the beach. They are from countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are allowed to come and go freely from the camp, to the village and beyond.

Currently, 580 of them live on the base. Their number is about to rise to 800. The government won’t say exactly when, but it had initially stated that a total of 1,700 migrants would eventually move here.

Before the migrants arrived, the village of Wethersfield reportedly had a population of 707.

Originally the site of the camp was earmarked for a new prison, a proposal which aroused local opposition. When the government first reopened it as an asylum center, the locals were told it would be temporary, but no one believed that.

“They’re talking about up to 1,800 people, which is more than twice the population,” a woman who moved to Wethersfield from East London told me. We were standing in the high street as rain clouds scudded overhead from the east. She had overstated the total number of migrants that might come to the camp, but her forecast was accurate: The number of adult male asylum seekers may soon outnumber that of the villagers.

People are polite in Wethersfield. It’s the English way. They understand that their new neighbors are a drop in an ocean of migration and suffering that is transforming every society in the West. None of them said anything racist. Even their anger at both Conservative and Labour politicians, and at the bureaucrats of the Home Office, was measured and regretful. But they cannot deny that the asylum seekers have changed life in the village.

I was told that the migrants, as everyone here calls them, trespass on the farmers’ fields and loiter on the paths in groups. Some of the migrants have reportedly defecated in the lane leading to the camp. Although the Home Office instructs the migrants on local customs, some of them, villagers complain, were seen “watching the children’s playground.” Security footage showed someone attempting to break into a house. “One tried to burgle the pub,” a villager told me.

When I asked if the villagers fear a cascade effect from petty crime to violent chaos, they nodded but do not speak. England isn’t a big country. Everyone knew that here, as everywhere in Europe, mass immigration correlates with spikes in serious crime. Everyone knew about the “grooming gangs” scandal, in which men of mostly Pakistani extraction trafficked and raped hundreds, and possibly thousands, of white British girls over decades in towns across the country. And everyone knows what happens to ordinary people who speak out.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer calls anti-immigrant sentiment “far right.” The police will show up on the doorstep of citizens who speak online too bluntly. Since the Orwellian-sounding Online Safety Act became law in October 2023, the government has directed the police to prosecute hundreds of people. When Vice President J.D. Vance berated Europeans in his recent address to the Munich Security Conference, he singled out Britain for its actions against free speech.

Some villagers refused to discuss the camp at all. Those who agreed to speak on the record did so only after I promised not to ask their names or describe their appearance. My photographer kept a respectful distance, but they still asked not to be photographed. Their world has been upended, but they were afraid to speak on their own doorsteps.

One Monday afternoon, a convoy of three buses pulled up at the camp gates. The security guards on the other side of the wire shouted at the migrants as the bus doors slid open, ordering them to disembark, waving them into line with their clipboards, then ticking them off their lists.

A migrant ambled up to the gates, his shoulders hunched, his face mostly hidden by a hooded sweatshirt. It was the young man I had seen in the field. He looked defeated. I tried to speak to him again, before his supervisor shouted: “That one needs processing.” And the gate clanged shut.

The residents live in a strange and complex limbo. They haven’t broken the law in the government’s eyes, yet they’re treated like convicts at the camp. But when they leave it, they walk around as freely as anyone else. I tried to talk to many of them in the village and hear their stories, but none of them replied.

By the back gate of the base, I found a large house with views over the countryside. A sports car with personalized plates was parked outside. And yet the owner said she couldn’t sell her home, because no one wanted to live next door to an asylum center. As we talked, we heard an eerie sound of voices in the wind: noise from the gym on the base.

She said the villagers hear “helicopters and ambulances and sirens” at all hours. The asylum seekers were “fighting amongst each other in their cells,” she told me.

I asked if she felt safe.

“I’ve got my adult son living here. Luckily, my daughter doesn’t anymore, so that’s good. But our neighbors have got younger children.”

Would she let her daughter walk around alone?

“No, probably not.”

She does not need to say why. Everyone fears that the longer the camp is open and the larger the number of young men in the village, the greater the chance of serious crime. I asked if she walked on her own.

“I do, but I’ve got two dogs.”

I visited the Fox on the Green pub in nearby Finchingfield, where the barmaids have been told not to talk about local attitudes toward the camp. But Sam, who was working on a midafternoon pint, helped me: “You want to speak to Greg Meat.”

“Greg Meat” was not his real name. “Sam calls me that because I sell him meat,” Greg laughed. A fifth-generation farmer, he reared pigs, lambs, and chickens on his smallholding and sold his produce in the villages. “You can call me Greg the Egg.”

It was raining heavily by the time Greg the Egg showed me round his farm. He’d been a lifelong Tory but said he admired Nigel Farage, the right-winger whose Reform UK party, launched in 2018, is the latest vehicle of a lifelong campaign to restore British sovereignty. He said he had been to three Reform UK meetings. “So far, I’ve liked what I’ve heard.”

We could not have been in a more timeless English setting, but our conversation was identical to those I’ve had on other frontiers of the global migration crisis: on the coasts of Italy and France, and in Amsterdam, Paris, and Phoenix, Arizona. All over the West, anti-immigration parties have been surging, and closing the borders when they win elections. All over the West, from the white cliffs of Dover to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I’ve seen migrants jammed into hotels while governments struggle to contain the influx. All over the West, liberal and center-right voters have turned to the new groupings and leaders of the nationalist right for protection from mass immigration and its effects.

British law requires proof that applicants seeking asylum are being persecuted in their country of origin for their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or “anything else that puts you at risk,” such as “your gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation.” In 2022, 72 percent of British asylum applications on the grounds of being lesbian, gay, or bisexual were successful. In 2023, Britain’s then-home secretary, Suella Braverman, claimed that there were “many instances” of fake claims.

Meanwhile, hundreds of asylum seekers have obtained British residency in recent years by claiming to be Christian. In the northwest of England, so many asylum seekers from Iran and neighboring countries have come to Liverpool Cathedral in search of the good news and a visa that in 2014 the cathedral set up a Persian congregation. By 2017, it had baptized 330 such converts; almost as many professing Christians as there are in Wethersfield.

The threshold of evidence for being a Christian is baptism and proving Christian habits and knowledge. The judge in a 2017 asylum appeal for one of the Iranian converts who had attended Liverpool Cathedral concluded that the number of Iranians there was “improbably large” and that there was a “serious possibility” of fraud.

Meanwhile, the former dean of Liverpool Cathedral could not recall having baptized a Muslim who was already a British citizen. In February 2024, Braverman alleged that “churches around the country” were “facilitating industrial-scale bogus asylum claims.”

But asylum seekers who are successful under any of the grounds set by British law make up a small fraction of the UK’s overall immigrants; in 2023, they comprised 11 percent. More often, migrants are moving westward for economic reasons. For the asylum seekers in Wethersfield, the center is either the last stop on a long, dangerous, and costly journey that leads to residency in a rich and free society—or the end of the road before deportation.

Before 2020, less than 50,000 people claimed asylum in Britain each year. In 2022, the total annual number topped 100,000. In 2024, 97,000 annual applications for asylum were reported, with 28,050 asylum seekers arriving by small boat.

In 2020, the government ramped up its practice of housing asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in hotels, also turning to army barracks while it tried to clear an ever-growing backlog. In 2023, it reopened Wethersfield, a former Royal Air Force airfield, as an asylum processing center. These centers are not intended to accelerate the resolution of asylum cases. They are intended to expedite the entry of new cases into the system, and to keep tabs on applicants while their cases and appeals are processed. The first batch, of 50, arrived at Wethersfield in July 2023.

These asylum seekers did not enter Britain illegally. They surrendered to the authorities upon arrival and exercised their legal right to claim asylum. They receive a regular welfare payment from the Home Office of about $9 a day while they wait to be processed.

Many of the migrants are carried westward by the same criminal networks that deal in drugs and human trafficking. This situation isn’t helped by charities and activist groups that deny the validity of borders and claim that all asylum seekers are “refugees.” One such group is Care4Calais, which operates on both sides of the English Channel and delivers aid to the gates of Wethersfield. This movement of people forces governments to become unofficial partners in organized crime, with European taxpayers funding the last stage of the journey.

Channel crossers, on advice from the smugglers, often destroy their passports before disembarking in England. Migrants have also been known to falsely claim to be unaccompanied minors because that makes deportation less likely. A few days before I visited Wethersfield, an immigration tribunal overturned the Home Office’s judgment that a Sudanese asylum seeker who had “thick facial hair” and a “receding hairline” was not, as he claimed, 16 years old, but around 23 to 25.

Two elderly women were chatting in Wethersfield’s main street under a blue sky. One of them said she had gone to the village church to prepare for a family event and found a group of asylum seekers from the camp there.

“It was them, being baptized, because they’re from Iran, and you can’t practice as a Christian in Iran. They’ve been taken under the wing of a local reverend, and she’s got them ready to be baptized.” (You can, in fact, practice Christianity in Iran. But the mullahs do suppress Christianity and abuse Christians.)

Almost no one I spoke with in Wethersfield believed that the Iranians are genuine converts to Christianity. When I asked if they had heard the reports of fraudulent asylum claims, they nodded and smiled but wouldn’t confirm it outright. And Reverend Alex Shannon of St Mary Magdalene had little to say about it.

“As a church, we aim to try and serve all the people of the community,” he told me on the phone. “It’s a political issue. We’re not involving ourselves in any public comment.”

Reverend Shannon believes that St. Mary Magdalene is on the side of the angels. But from what I heard during my day in Wethersfield, it is not on the side of the villagers.

“At the moment,” a woman in the village told me, “if people are still coming across the channel, it seems to me that either they open up more of these places, or they jam more people into the ones they’ve already got, right?”

“So, you know,” she added, “ ‘What’s too many?’ is the question.” She fell silent, as if she knew it’s already too late, however nicely she asked.

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