The Labour government is floating another vicious programme of sweeping cuts to disabled people’s welfare.
However, the public could be forgiven for not knowing about these because nowhere in the media or wider sociopolitical disability discourse is anyone talking about them like this is what they are.
Notably, while the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has meted out devastating cuts to Universal Credit’s health element, and gears up to once again target personal independence payments (PIP), it has also been colluding with the Home Office to strip hundreds of thousands of migrants of access to welfare. This includes those very same disability benefits.
The lack of recognition that these hostile environment plans represent welfare cuts exposes a glaring gap in discussions around disabled people’s rights. Crucially, it brings into focus the gaping hole in disability justice communities’ acknowledgment that migrants’ rights are disability rights — and that these are inextricable.
Disability is attacked under immigration reforms
It was mid-July when Times home affairs editor, Matt Dathan, broke his ‘exclusive’, setting the stage for Labour’s callous immigration reforms.
Under disgraceful plans Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood published for consultation in November, and which closed in February, the Labour government wanted to increase the time migrants spend in immigration limbo before being eligible to apply for permanent residence.
Government mouthpiece Dathan, who was blatantly spoon-fed the scoop directly from a Home Office source, laid out the prospective ‘compromise’ option.
Specifically, the report detailed how the Labour government is weighing up exemptions to its plans for certain groups of migrants. In particular, people who arrived in the UK post-2021 would be exempt from its manoeuvres to double the time it takes to qualify for indefinite leave to remain (ILR).
The proposal sits amid a wider programme of anti-immigration reforms.
As the Times reported, over 80 Labour MPs have called on Burnham to scrap Mahmood’s shameful policies. The ‘compromise’ option would therefore be one way that the newly-minted prime minister could persuade prospective rebel MPs to back the broader catalogue of reforms.
But if Labour follow through on any version of these vile plans, they will represent nothing short of catastrophic welfare cuts.
Where was the disability rights community?
The story went viral enough that X made it one of the day’s news explainers. It lingered about the site for the next couple of days.
However, since then, the news seems to have prompted zero fanfare from disability rights groups. Among the most prominent disability rights charities, and Deaf and disabled people’s organisations (DDPOs), there was tumbleweed.
On X, it appears not one even reposted Green Party leader Zack Polanski’s rebuttal of Labour’s callous proposals. This is despite it garnering over 600 reposts and more than 2.3 million views (at the time of writing).
Yet, it’s abundantly clear that these immigration policies will hit disabled migrants the hardest. So where has the disability rights community been on these de facto sweeping benefit cuts?
Who does the disability rights movement represent?
DDPOs and disability rights charities have run longstanding campaigns against cuts to PIP, Universal Credit, Access to Work, and Motability. Explore any of their social media accounts and you’ll see a consistent stream of opposition to Labour’s shameless welfare policies.
Disability and benefits-focused outlets have run countless stories on these too.
The simple fact of the matter is, migrants, siloed by the state immigration system into different categories of citizenship ‘deservingness’, are members of the disabled community. That seems like an obvious thing to say but when it comes to conversations around what constitutes immediate disability justice battlegrounds, the fight against the hostile immigration system isn’t usually among the first disability rights groups put forward.
There are some likely reasons for this and it largely revolves around who the disability rights movement includes, and more to the point, who it excludes.
Black disability justice activist Dara Baldwin’s seminal novel To Be a Problem: A Black Woman’s Survival in the Racist Disability Rights Movement maps the racism inside the disability rights movement in the US. In this, Baldwin underscores how the predominantly white make-up of disability non-profits, especially where leadership was concerned, has meant that groups have failed to incorporate issues that impact multi-marginalised disabled people.
Of course, the PIP cuts will likely impact multi-marginalised — in particular, disabled people — the hardest. But there’s no moving away from the fact that, because it affects what will invariably be the largely white membership of these groups, they have prioritised this issue.
In other words, the PIP cuts are enough of a white disabled people’s problem that they get attention and focus.
When disability and migrant rights groups collaborate
None of this is to say that DDPOs and disability rights non-profits have entirely ignored migrants in their advocacy and activism. They haven’t.
Groups like Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and Direct Action Network for Disabled People (DAN) have long stood in solidarity with migrant members of the disabled community.
In the UK today, DDPOs and even some disability charities have been engaging in coalition building with migrants’ rights groups. For instance, multiple DDPOs like DPAC, WinVisible, and non-profits such as Disability Rights UK and Inclusion London, among others, are members of the Disability and Migration Network (DAMN).
The coalition includes migrants’ rights groups like Migrants’ Rights Network, Migrants Organise, and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI).
Through DAMN, these groups have come together to fight both the hostile welfare and immigration systems.
In 2025, they hosted a Disability and Migration Justice conference. This unpacked the similarities of experiences of marginalisation for disabled people and migrants in the UK today.
Then, in March 2026, Praxis, a migrants’ rights charity and member of DAMN, organised a mass lobby against the government’s earned settlement plans. Multiple disability rights groups attended.
Acts of solidarity vs intersectional disability rights issue
DAMN also published a statement against the government’s immigration plans and have encouraged the public to contact their MPs. Doing this acknowledges that the disabled community needs to step up on migrants’ rights.
However, there’s still a sense that migrants’ rights issues are separate from disability rights concerns rather than overlapping.
Compared to the energy and resources these groups have directed towards other attacks on disabled people’s rights, they still treat the hostile environment as a peripheral, solidarity-based issue.
These welfare cuts are a constant talking point across their social media and websites. The same cannot be said of these immigration-reforms-come-welfare cuts.
Silent on the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act
Of course, Labour’s latest hostile environment plans are an expansion on the shameful immigration policies that already exist. It’s not the first time the disability rights community has failed to centre the migrant disabled community.
DAMN founder and academic Rebecca Yeo, and sociologist Robel Abay Afeworki, have highlighted how disability charities and DDPOs were silent when Tony Blair’s New Labour government waved through the racist 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act. The Act codified in law that some migrants would have ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’, which is as it sounds.
It bars certain migrants (including asylum seekers) from accessing certain benefits and denies them access to local authority housing.
Not only did this mean that disabled migrants would have no access to the welfare safety net, but removing that support is in itself, a disabling act. It left disabled migrants without vital resources to navigate a structurally ableist and disablist society.
In withdrawing those resources, it prevents migrants (both disabled and non-disabled) meeting even their basic essential needs. It pushes them into poverty, homelessness, and deteriorating health. The result, on top of all this, was physical and mental disablement for many migrants navigating an abusive system.
Migrants’ rights are disabled people’s rights
Disability rights groups haven’t stayed silent this time. However, the government’s latest attack on migrants requires more than solidarity. This moment demands recognition that the immigration system itself is a key disability rights front.
Labour’s current proposals — from racist, ableist welfare cuts to ramping up the disabling hostile environment — will now be the community’s biggest test of its commitment to collective liberation.
Featured image via the Meteor
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