We’re walking along the last woody stretch of Callendar Park when my colleague Angus* slows down. “Here we are,” he says, pointing in one direction. “Can you hear it?” I can. He is referring to the protest for which I have come to Falkirk on a quiet October weekend.
Like in the rest of Scotland, a nip is filling the autumn air. We make our way to our destination: the Cladhan Hotel, which houses asylum seekers from around the world. The anti-immigrant protests here have become emblematic of what is ailing Scotland today.
As we draw closer to the hotel on Kemper Avenue, loud chanting and music pierce the afternoon’s silence. A few steps later, the protesters edge into sight. Instead of pushing toward them, Angus suggests we climb up a small hillock in the park to get a proper look at the place.
From that vantage point, it is not hard to spot the Cladhan just beyond the Lidl supermarket. The long, horizontal white block, interspersed with shades of gray, is familiar by now from the photos and videos that circulated all summer on traditional and social media. For the powder keg it has become, the hotel does not stand out in any way, shape, or form.
The protests in Falkirk have, over the past few months, marked a pivotal shift in the socio-political landscape of Scotland. Until a year ago, Scotland (or Scottish politicians) wouldn’t have touched with a bargepole the toxic debates on multiculturalism ripping through other parts of the United Kingdom. Now, they have arrived at its doorstep.
A small but significant number of anti-immigration voices have begun to challenge the accepted view that Scotland is a more welcoming and progressive place than its southern neighbor, England. Clouds of nativism and xenophobia are looming on the horizon.
I moved to Edinburgh with my husband for his job in 2020. Edinburgh stole my heart in an instant. It wasn’t the most diverse city I had lived in, and I didn’t often see fellow people of color, but I never felt like I did not belong. As an Indian legatee of the British Empire, I felt a certain kinship with Scotland which also seemed to regard England with a degree of coolness and suspicion. I was told again and again that Scotland was not like England. That it was far more progressive, and that immigration wasn’t even a political issue here. We decided to make it our home.
For years, I agreed with and repeated the sentiment that Scotland had wide, welcoming arms. Last year, when race riots broke out across England and Northern Ireland following the Southport murders, Scotland remained untouched. A wave of smug relief washed over me for having had the chance to put down our roots here.
Today, things are markedly different. On the surface, little seems to have changed. But swirling underneath is a vortex of suspicion toward “outsiders,” pointing to a truth that may have been hiding in plain sight all along: Scottish exceptionalism is nothing but a chimera.
Migration has shaped Scotland. In modern times, large numbers of Irish people arrived in Scotland through the 19th and early 20th centuries in the aftermath of the potato famine. Then came the Italians, followed by waves of people from eastern and central Europe, especially Poland and Lithuania. During the British empire and after its collapse in South Asia, people from India and Pakistan moved to parts of the UK, including Scotland.
In 1999, Scotland reasserted itself within the UK and set up its own parliament in Edinburgh, following a referendum. One of the big post-devolution strategies of the new Scottish government was “One Scotland, Many Cultures.”
“The Scottish population was decreasing to below five million and for economic growth, we needed immigrants. In 2000, there were less than 2% people of color,” said Danny Phillips, who works for Scottish trade unions and was a former special advisor to the first minister. “There was so much faith at the time. One of the very first movements after devolution was to bring in migrants and refugees,” he added. As of 2022, 12.9% of people living in Scotland had a minority ethnic background.
Currently, decision-making on immigration policy lies in the hands of the UK government. Scotland does not have the powers needed to deliver tailored immigration policies, something many nationalists and devolutionists have long clamored for.
This has not stopped Scotland from touting itself as a nation open to migrants and taking pains to set itself apart from the hardliner migration policies of the central government. As early as October 2023, then First Minister Humza Yousaf was among the first heads of state worldwide to say the country would “offer safety and sanctuary” to Palestinians.
The Scottish government has consistently shown a willingness to make changes happen; it has, for instance, an integration framework for new refugees who enter Scotland. The thinktank and charity work in the sector is also robust.
Until recently, the dominant lines of Scotland’s migration story were that more people left to build a life elsewhere than came to the country. This trend started changing from the turn of the century with international immigration increasing. Last year, Scotland’s population was pegged at 5.5 million, a 0.7% increase from the previous year, with 76,100 people from overseas coming in. An aging population is a growing concern in Scotland, which is also why immigration is welcomed here.
It is perhaps easy to be seen as welcoming without being put to the test. Scotland’s history and geography are very different from, say, England. There are no towns in Scotland with disproportionately high immigrant populations like the English towns of Burnley and Bradford that have seen real and sustained tension over the years. If push came to shove, how would Scots react?
Attitudes toward immigration are already hardening. For the first time ever, it has become a salient concern for voters in the upcoming 2026 Scottish parliamentary election. Anti-immigration and anti-refugee protests have flared up in different parts of the country and police have recorded a rise in race-related hate crimes. The mainstreaming of the language of hate has turned what was once murmured in quiet undertones into a blaring chorus at full crescendo.
Poll after poll has shown that the far-right, anti-immigration party Reform UK is gaining traction in a country that has hitherto been left-of-center. This is a radical shift from 2013, when Reform UK founder Nigel Farage, then the leader of UKIP, was heckled out of an Edinburgh pub as protesters threw words like “racist” and “scum” at him. Farage is now set to speak at a major Reform event in Falkirk on Dec 6.
About halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow, Falkirk sits in the Forth Valley in the historic county of Stirlingshire. I didn’t know much about this small town in the central belt other than basic pub quiz-like trivia: Falkirk has the Falkirk Wheel, the Kelpies, and a starring role in Braveheart — where Mel Gibson and Patrick McGoohan fought bravely for several Oscars. What unfolded in reality centuries before the onset of cinema was the veritable Battle of Falkirk in the late 13th century between the army of King Edward I of England and the Scottish resistance forces led by William Wallace.
Walking in Falkirk does feel like you have stepped into the past, even if only in your imagination. The ruins of the Antonine Wall built by the Romans nearly 2,000 years ago as the northernmost frontier of the Roman Empire, cut through the city. We cannot see them on the path we take; instead, there are mounds of earth on a section that was once the wall.
“I have never shown anyone around Falkirk,” Angus says as we walk around a residential neighborhood where narrow roads are flanked by houses and their front gardens. It is quiet for a Saturday. A passing car honks and Angus’s phone rings. His mother who is driving by has called to tell him to be careful near the protest site.
Kemper Avenue, the protest site, is barely 20 meters (about 21 yards) wide. The street is shut for traffic. On either side of it are two camps. Opposite the hotel are the anti-immigration protesters, rallying under the umbrella of Save Our Future and Our Kids Futures, carrying banners that read things like “the people behind you despise you.” Just outside the hotel are the counter-protesters, gathered as though forming a fortress for the inhabitants inside; they are united under the banner of Falkirk for All. A posse of police officers has fanned out on the street. In the distance, we see Saltire flags hanging in the windows of tall buildings.
The Cladhan Hotel is a significant part of Falkirk’s collective memory. “Everyone in this town knows it,” Angus explains. “We have all attended parties, receptions, family events here. There was always something happening that would bring us to the hotel, like my great great uncle’s funeral reception.”
All that changed in August 2022, when the Cladhan became a hotel for asylum seekers, in line with the UK’s asylum accommodation policy. Traditionally, the state housed asylum seekers in long-term, private rental accommodations; but from 2020, the government has relied heavily on hotels due to the large backlog of asylum applications and a shortage of long-term housing options. This policy has become a flashpoint in British politics, fueling resentment in local communities.
The most recent figures from the Home Office show that as of June, 5,883 people were seeking asylum in Scotland; that is, 10.7 people per 10,000 people. Of these, 1,573 were housed in hotels. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, Glasgow was the only city to house asylum seekers. Now hotels are being used in Aberdeen, Perth, Lanarkshire, and Falkirk, and the disgruntlement across various communities is palpable.
This June, a court convicted a 29-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan of raping a minor in the Falkirk town center. The conviction became the tipping point in Scotland, with protests erupting outside asylum hotels, some of which have turned violent.
Judith Sijstermans, a lecturer in politics at the University of Aberdeen, traces far-right digital networks to see how often they engage in on-the-ground activism. She has seen a notable increase from July 2024, with activity peaking early this year with Reform UK getting active in by-elections in Scotland. There was another peak following the rape conviction of the asylum seeker from Afghanistan.
“The language of deportation and deportation camps would have been unthinkable for Scotland until a year ago, but now it has become mainstreamed,” Sijstermans told me over Zoom. A rupture in Scottish politics, she said, has made space for such a narrative to slip through.
But you cannot understand this rupture without understanding an important part of Scotland’s history: the struggle for independence. For the left-of-center Scottish National Party, campaigning on the plank of independence from the UK became a tour de force that catapulted it to prominence outside the periphery of Scotland. It held an independence referendum in 2014 asking if Scotland should be an independent country and 55.3% of people voted no.
Still, the fervor continued, and people kept talking about it.
“The prevalent discussion was unionism versus nationalism,” Sijstermans added. “But now, there is the long shadow of Brexit and COVID and that discussion has taken a backseat. There is now a window of opportunity for other things, like immigration, to take salience.” The prevailing nationalism predicated on independence was “progressive,” significantly distinct from the parochial nationalism of England. “Now there is also a competing, exclusionary, anti-immigrant nationalism of Reform UK [in Scotland],” she said.
Sijstermans does not believe Scotland was never anti-immigrant. “It’s a myth. Since devolution, it’s mostly the political elite, even on the right, who have said immigration is good, which is why it’s called ‘elite aspirational pluralism.’”
The realities on the ground for immigrants, though, do not match the political discourse.
In 1919, for instance, rioting broke out in Glasgow between a group of Black sailors from Sierra Leone and Scottish workers who lashed out against foreign labor competing with them for limited jobs. While police detained the Black sailors, none of the white rioters faced arrest.
Roma people in Scotland have historically faced discrimination. Earlier this year, First Minister John Swinney made a formal apology for the Tinker Experiments, an operation that ran in Scotland from the 1940s to 1980s to assimilate the travelers into mainstream Scottish society by threatening to remove their children. Many have called this forceful conversion “cultural genocide.”
Overwhelmingly Roman Catholic in faith, the Irish have faced decades of overt discrimination in largely Protestant Scotland. In recent decades the Irish have become much more assimilated, although deeply held religious prejudices often resurface.
At the heart of the current rise in anti-immigrant nativism, as earlier, is the question of Scottish identity. On a summer day a few months ago, my Scottish friend asked, “Have you noticed? Saltire flags are everywhere.” I hadn’t, but once I started looking, I saw them: on lampposts, on buildings, on flagpoles. It shouldn’t have felt disconcerting — the Saltire flies during sporting and independence-related events — but in recent months, its ubiquity has signaled something sinister is afoot.
The flag display has come close on the heels of a surge in St George’s Crosses and Union Jacks in England, under the banner of “Operation Raise the Colours,” an anti-immigration campaign embraced by the far-right. In Scotland, like elsewhere, public-spirited citizens as well as local authorities have taken the flags down, opening themselves up to censure and criticism.
“The question now is: Who owns the Saltire?” said Phillips, the trade unionist and former advisor. “Before, people assumed the Saltire meant you were just a Scottish nationalist for independence. Now it is about who owns the Scottish identity and who defines it. It is about whiteness.”
National identity in Scotland is a self-determined feeling of attachment to a nation regardless of ethnicity or country of birth. A foreign citizen is free to choose “Scottish” as their national identity. “Get a Scottish accent, support a football team, and there, you’re Scottish,” said Phillips.
The prevailing narrative, particularly in political discourse, is one of inclusive, “civic” nationalism. Research shows that almost all minority ethnic communities in Scotland are more likely to claim a Scottish identity in Scotland than an English identity in England. Many extrapolate this to mean Scotland is not racist.
“This is utter nonsense,” Phillips said. “In my own neighborhood [in Glasgow], people of color wearing their traditional dress get heckled. What we are seeing today is part of the wider story of whiteness, of defense of ‘civilization,’ like in many parts of the world, including the US.”
Hyab Yohannes moved to the UK in 2015 under a now-closed refugee resettlement scheme called the Gateway Protection Programme. An Eritrean, he left his home country in 2011 and lived in Sudan as a refugee before being trafficked to Egypt. “What bothers me all the time is not just the becoming of a refugee but also the unbecoming of what you have become,” he said. Today, Yohannes is a UK citizen and a lecturer in Forced Migration and Decolonial Education at the University of Glasgow.
He says what is happening today doesn’t surprise him, explaining that the UK has never been a safe harbor for asylum seekers and refugees of color. When he arrived in London a decade ago, discussions on Brexit were in full throttle and he felt unsafe to even go to the pub. Scotland, to him, is no different in terms of how it deals with race. “Why would it be?” he asks.
During the Black Lives Movement protests in Glasgow, he said, Black people received letters saying they didn’t want to be seen living in a particular area. COVID unleashed its own variety of discrimination toward people of color and immigrants.
Historically, racism has been well and alive in Scotland. For one, Scotland profited from the slave trade in Africa, with many industries built on it. By the late 1700s, Scots owned about a third of Jamaican plantations.
In the 18th century, David Hume, one of Scotland’s great philosophers, was also a proponent of philosophical racism, which traces back to a now-infamous footnote in which he wrote: “I am apt to suspect the N—— to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion…”
Scots were at the core of the imperial project, forming an outsize presence in the East India Company and subsequently the Raj, and generally were a common presence in the governance of subjugated countries like India.
More recently, an internal report from the University of Edinburgh explored its own historical links to and its continued legacy of slavery and racism.
For people of color, racism manifests itself in ways big and small. The Edinburgh-based Indian poet Medha Singh recently posted on Facebook “just a few things” she had experienced in “supposedly not-racist Scotland”: “Get back on your dinghy,” and “you’re using him for a visa.” She has also had her accent mimicked to her face by white people.
Prominent politicians are not immune to such attacks either. Former First Minister Humza Yousaf and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, both Muslim leaders of Pakistani heritage, have often spoken about the racial and Islamophobic words flung at them.
“But racism is not the only thing at play in what’s happening today against migrants,” Yohannes said. “There are economic factors, too.”
Portraying the anti-immigrant sentiment as racist alone would mean overlooking the long arc of Scotland’s recent past, marked by the brutal legacy of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
In the final years of the last century, Thatcher’s government significantly accelerated the process of de-industrialization in Scotland through various policies that ended subsidies for heavy industries, leading to devastating job losses and profound socio-political changes. Scotland continues to feel the ripples of these today in former industrial heartlands, like Falkirk, where levels of economic inactivity are high. The cost-of-living crisis following the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed people further toward the trenches of destitution.
History has shown us time and again that a moment of such economic churn is ripe to fan the flames of chauvinism and xenophobia. In Scotland, a boogeyman was there for the taking. Over the past year, politicians in Westminster have saturated the atmosphere with hateful, anti-immigrant rhetoric that successfully traveled north and found politically fertile soil.
Scotland is one of the most Instagrammable countries; endless posts and reels on social media extol its beauty. I myself routinely post the rain-drenched cobbled streets of Edinburgh, the castle standing guard over a massive garden and the city itself, the Victorian buildings that catch the shifting light of the sun, the trees in their full autumnal glory. These photos do not tell of Scotland’s problems. Beautiful captions hide the ever-growing housing crisis and deepening inequalities, as well as the experiences of people of color and immigrants.
In Falkirk, a taxi driver tells me that the protests are not against “legal immigrants like yourself,” but against illegal ones because, in his words, the government does not check their background. He says many of the asylum seekers lodged in the Cladhan are “terrorists from Hamas and Hezbollah.” I do not ask where he learned these untruths, nor how he assumed I was a legal immigrant or an immigrant at all.
“Governments need to tell local people what they are planning so they have an understanding of what’s going on,” says Yohannes. “If you just impose a group of people in a specific place, then propel this rhetoric of hate, what do you expect?”
Deafening sounds fill the air outside the Cladhan Hotel. A blare of sirens comes from the side of anti-immigration protesters; the counter-protesters play music on their speakers to drown it out. Words fly like arrows from both sides. I try to talk to people, but I have to strain to hear the person next to me. I do not feel safe enough to cross over to the other side and talk to the people protesting against asylum seekers.
Muna Ausat has been showing up at the counterprotests in Falkirk every weekend. Wearing a bright turban and watermelon earrings in solidarity with Palestine, she tells me she is half German, half Pakistani, and grew up in London but moved to Falkirk years ago because she wanted to live in a community. “But look what’s happening now,” she says.
She points to the hotel. “These men here, they have escaped horrors in their home country. Why would they disappear into the ether when the government has all their details, including biometrics? They are legally protected under the Geneva Convention. They are doctors, business owners, bakers, farmers in there…”
A drone flies overhead as we speak. “See that? They are filming us,” she says. “It’s not safe to be a person of color here. People have been attacked on the streets.”
Cecile Menard, vice president of the University and College Union Scotland, joins us. She makes the journey from Edinburgh to Falkirk every weekend to participate in the counter-protests because what is going on leaves her “disgusted.” While we chat, a young man approaches Ausat and speaks in her ears. She, in turn, lowers her voice and tells me four Nazis have joined the protest. “How do you know?” I ask. “Everyone knows who’s who in the neighborhood,” she says, then warns me to please not wander around town by myself. For a moment, I am anxious.
Later on, I will meet a brown Muslim man who runs a small business in Falkirk. He will tell me he has never experienced harassment in Falkirk and has always felt at home.
For now, someone calls out to me as I prepare to leave. “Would you like to be dropped somewhere?” she asks. I thank her, say no, and promise to be careful.
*Indicates the use of a pseudonym for privacy.