How great expectations in Westminster are dashed in Pollokshields: implementation, practice, and the complexity of UK asylum support policy

In summer 2024, the UK witnessed a wave of riots across England, targeting asylum seeker accommodation and organisations supporting refugees (Manning and Moench, 2024). Broken glass, balaclavas, and chants materialised deeper, often discursive currents of xenophobia, scapegoating, and politicisation of immigration rippling through British politics. The riots also highlighted significant discrepancies; Scottish cities faced little violence, despite bearing identical (formal) asylum rules, since immigration is a matter reserved to Westminster. Scottish neighbourhoods have, in fact, more often presented pro-immigration protests, such as the famous blocking of immigration evictions in Glasgow’s Pollokshields during Eid al-Fitr in May 2021 (Brooks 2021). The 2024 riots pose puzzles: why and how are asylum seekers accommodated by private companies in hotels, with restricted freedoms and unable to work, when this is clearly costly, and unpopular amongst local authorities, British residents, and asylum seekers alike? What constitutes asylum support policy, and why do its outcomes vary so widely in different regions? Migration is undeniably complex, requiring complex solutions and approaches (Scholten 2022). The purpose of this paper is to highlight the complexity within migration policy itself. Far from responding constructively to the complexity of migration as a phenomenon (“mainstreaming complexity” (ibid)), policy is often complex in ways that diffuse accountability, obscure rights and responsibilities, or compound the confusion faced by migrants and service providers. The paper’s title, an ode to Pressman and Wildavsky’s (1984) book on the study of implementation, highlights the complexity produced when policies are reshaped and reinterpreted at different levels of governance and by public, private, and third sector actors and service providers. This paper highlights three forms of complexity in migration policy. First, the network of actors involved is complex: asylum policy is targeted at and practised by migrants, voters, NGO practitioners, hotel staff, and more. Second, we cannot ascribe interests based on actors’ social and political positions or assume rationality (Bevir and Rhodes, 2003). Actors’ beliefs and problem understandings are complex and multiplicitous. Rather than policies “failing” because they focus solely on migration (as argued by Castles, 2003), I argue asylum policies are complex and contradictory because they serve non-migration-related aims, like scapegoating, or appeasing communities “left behind” by deindustrialisation (Stiglitz, 2017, Goodfellow, 2019). Third, arguments that migration policy processes are “elite-dominated” (Statham and Geddes, 2006) are outdated. Instead, policies are translated, reinterpreted, and renegotiated at every level of implementation, including by “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky 1980). The paper thus takes a “social constructionist” or interpretivist approach to policy, which centres “social processes of sense-making” (Yanow, 1996, Scholten 2022, p. 148), departing from positivist research which identifies complexity based on policies’ textual properties (structure, language) or links to other policies (Senninger, 2023, Haag et al, 2024). Recognising this form of policy complexity is a necessary precursor to generating solutions which embrace complexity more fruitfully – “bringing (back) in quality.” Alongside calls for policymakers to veer from oversimplification, academic research must not oversimplify the policy already present. The paper illustrates its approach through UK asylum support policy’s implementation and transformation in Scottish cities.