Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Sabon by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
To Rambhaben Vallabhdas Tanna,
Vallabhdas Gordhandas Tanna,
Hedy Goodfellow and my parents
Contents
Introduction: An Honest Conversation
1. The Cost of It All
2. ‘Keeping’ the Country White
3. New Labour: Things Can Only Get Better?
4. Legitimate Concerns
5. ‘It’s Not Racist. It’s Common Sense’
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
For Nazek Ramadan, the 2010 General Election brings back bad memories. She remembers how worried, unwanted and out of place people felt. To her and many others, it was as if immigration was everywhere you looked in the campaign, and so were the politicians who appeared to be competing with each other to be the toughest on immigrants. ‘Things became very toxic,’ she says.
Nazek is director of Migrant Voice, an organisation which works to encourage more migrants to speak for themselves in the media. When I meet her and fellow employee Anne Stoltenberg in their offices in London, she recounts tales of people she knew who were attacked and insulted by strangers on the street during the campaign. ‘How can they hate us so much’, she vividly recalls one person asking her, ‘when they don’t even know us?’
The answer is disappointingly simple: it was because they were immigrants.
The word ‘immigrant’ carries all kinds of ideas in its three syllables. It’s weighed down by all the meanings it’s been given. You know the kinds of things I’m talking about: ‘low-skilled’, ‘high-skilled’, ‘contributor’, ‘drain’, ‘cockroach’ or just, plainly put, simply ‘a concern’. Not all of these terms are necessarily negative, but each of them is impersonal, clinical and cold.
As Nazek’s experiences suggest, we live in a world where it is necessary to remind people that immigrants are not things, not a burden and not the enemy. That they’re human beings. Insufficient doesn’t even begin to cover how inadequate and clumsy this statement is when people’s lives are devastated by the UK’s immigration politics.
Almost every single person I interviewed for this book who had to move through the UK’s immigration and asylum system could recount the exact dates their lives were uprooted or finally given security – when they were detained or deported, when they arrived and when they were given status. From anti-immigration politics come all kinds of policies: ones that ruin lives, leave people to drown at borders, treat them as subhuman or make their lives more difficult in a myriad of quiet and subtle ways. This book sets out to explain why this is not an inevitability; it will show how decades of restrictive policy and demonising rhetoric have created this system. And it will argue that it doesn’t have to be this way. But to get to a different world, we have to understand how we got here.
The name ‘hostile environment’ is surprisingly appropriate for the raft of policies it refers to. It stands out from the dreary, opaque names governments give to those they’d rather stay under the radar. When the Conservatives changed the rules on social housing so that people living in properties deemed as having a ‘spare room’ had their benefits cut, they called it the ‘spare room subsidy’. Campaigners renamed it the more appropriate ‘bedroom tax’.
But when Theresa May unveiled her flagship immigration package as home secretary, she didn’t even attempt to hide its cruelty. She flaunted it. The aim was to create a ‘really hostile environment for illegal immigrants,’ she boasted.1 The plan was to make their lives unbearable.
And, so, the government began to create this hostile environment, stitching immigration checks into every element of people’s lives. Through measures brought in by the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts, a whole host of professionals – from landlords and letting agents to doctors and nurses – were turned into border guards.2 Regardless of how removed their profession was from the world of immigration policy, the threat of being fined or sentenced to jail time loomed over them if they failed to carry out checks to ensure people they encountered through their work were in the country legally. But they had it easy in comparison to migrants without the right documents, who could lose access to housing, bank accounts, healthcare and even be deported if they couldn’t provide the ‘right’ evidence to show that they were ‘allowed’ to be in the country. ‘I gave a presentation to a respiratory department,’ Jessica Potter, a doctor and campaigner against immigration controls in the NHS recalls, ‘and one colleague said they had a gentleman who had an early stage of lung cancer, potentially curable.’ He didn’t have the right documentation so ‘he was shipped off to a detention centre for months and later came back into care. Now he has incurable lung cancer.’
Six years after May proudly announced her plans, and when I was in the middle of writing this book, some of the disturbing results of the hostile environment became national news. For weeks, the headlines were dominated by stories of black Britons who had every right to be in the UK suddenly being refused essential medical care or state support, losing jobs and homes and being left destitute. Some who had lived here nearly all their lives were deported and died before their deportation was revealed to be a mistake. What became known as the ‘Windrush scandal’ was an almost inevitable consequence of the impossible system the government had constructed to create the hostile environment.
The people whose experiences were plastered all over our newspaper front pages and who were being interviewed on the nightly news had arrived from colonies and former colonies decades ago, and they had come as citizens. By successive governments’ own standards, they had come to and settled in the UK legally. Having first set foot in this country as small children or teenagers, many of them had never really known anywhere else; they had lived, worked and loved here for almost their whole lives.
The problem was that the hostile environment demanded they prove they had the right to be here, and for these people who had come as citizens under the Empire, the government had no record of their status or arrival. Landing cards, the only proof of when they arrived in the UK, were destroyed by the Home Office in 2010. This made it near impossible for them to show they were in this country legally.
Years before the story broke, the government had been repeatedly warned that these people were being caught up in the hostile environment’s dangerous web. Caribbean foreign ministers raised the issue with the then foreign secretary Philip Hammond in 2016. And a high commissioner to one of the countries involved said the Foreign Office was told at least six times, since 2013, that there was a problem. But the government ignored these warnings and carried on regardless.3 And so in spring 2018, for the briefest of moments, the issue of how the UK treats and talks about immigrants and people who are thought to be immigrants was a topic of national interest. Politicians earnestly committed themselves to humanising the ‘debate’ on immigration, pundits were aghast as to how this had happened and people in power promised tangible change.
Then the PR operation kicked into action. Home Secretary Amber Rudd resigned after saying she ‘inadvertently