The hostile environment was rebranded the ‘compliant environment’ and some of the associated policies were suspended. But most of them remained in place; ministers repeated they were necessary to deal with ‘illegal immigrants’. Months after Windrush made headlines, the government still didn’t know how many people had been deported thanks to their policies, and many of those who had been affected were still living in homelessness hostels, unable to work.5 A year later, a compensation scheme was set up for the people who had been caught up in the whole affair.
The government was at pains to emphasise that the Windrush generation were here legally, and that the aim of their hostile environment policies was to tackle ‘illegal’ immigration. But the tag ‘illegal’ obscures more than it tells us. It carries with it an assumption of inherent criminality and immorality; if you are ‘illegal’, you are bad. You deserve, then, what you get, whether that be detention, deportation or having your access to housing and healthcare blocked.
But this fails to recognise that people can become undocumented for all kinds of reasons. Some, for instance, come here legally only to become ‘illegal’: the rules might change under their feet in our labyrinthine immigration system, leaving them without status but unaware that’s the case; they might not be able to afford exorbitant fees to renew their documentation or they might simply lose their papers and be too scared to come forward in a country where politicians openly advertise the fact that they are working to create a hostile environment for undocumented migrants. Reliant on precarious work and having spent so much money to get here, some people will do what they can to continue sending money back home or to keep paying off the debt they accrued to be able to move in the first place. The Windrush affair – the visible tip of a nightmarish iceberg – was made possible by the system and by prevailing attitudes within the country at large, whereby it was deemed acceptable to treat people not as human beings but as problems.
Exemplifying this inhumane system is the government’s immigration target. During the 2010 election, David Cameron pledged to reduce net migration (the difference between how many people come into the country and how many leave in a year)6 to below the ‘tens of thousands’. As well as the hostile environment, the obsession with numbers resulted in Operation Vaken, which involved Theresa May’s Home Office sending vans reading ‘Go Home’ around diverse parts of the country and boasting about immigration raids on social media. At around the same time, the government issued over 100,000 visas for migrants from outside of the European Union (EU), suggesting that even as they talked and acted tough about reducing immigration they knew they needed people to fill labour shortages.7
And what of the Opposition? As the policies that went on to make up the hostile environment were being turned into law through Parliament, the Labour Party put up the most minimal resistance. Then Labour leader Ed Miliband attacked the government for failing to meet their net migration target, the party abstained on the 2014 Immigration Bill, effectively waiving it through; and they went into the 2015 Election selling Labour Party mugs that promised they would put ‘Controls on Immigration’.
But there was some Parliamentary resistance. Sixteen MPs voted against the 2014 bill, six of them from Labour, including three of the people who would go on to lead the party a year later: Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell. When an inter-ministerial ‘Hostile Environment Group’ was set up so government departments could coordinate their efforts to make migrants’ lives more difficult, then Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather, together with some of her colleagues, tried to make its existence and its name public knowledge through a Freedom of Information request. Years after they were introduced, former Head of the Civil Service, Bob Kerslake, said some saw the government’s policies as ‘almost reminiscent of Nazi Germany’.8 Despite this, the hostile environment went ahead.
It’s tempting to focus all the blame on the person or the party that cooked up and then rolled out this package of draconian policies. But Theresa May didn’t create them all on her own, and intensely aggressive though it is, the Coalition government didn’t introduce hostility into the immigration system. It’s not some preordained destiny that brought the UK to the point where people can’t get bank accounts or homes because of their immigration status, but it’s not a wild deviation from the norm either. Instead, it is decades of exclusionary politics that have made it acceptable to treat migrants this way.
If there has been one point of consensus among the majority of politicians since 2010 it has been that we need to talk about immigration more, and more honestly. Labour MP and former shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper has claimed the UK has ‘never properly had’ a debate about immigration, former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage has said politicians ‘betrayed’ people on migration, and when he was prime minister David Cameron proclaimed that there needed to be a new approach to immigration – ‘one which opens up debate, not closes it down’.9 They have a point. But the candid discussion I’d like us to have isn’t quite the same as the one these three had in mind. Though they’d be loath to admit it, when they talked about honesty, the subtext was that we needed to listen to people complain about immigration in whatever way they like, with an advance assurance that – regardless of what they say – they won’t be accused of prejudice or racism.
Far from being a debate closed down, litres of ink, reams of TV footage and hours of debate have been dedicated to discussing all the reasons people want to reduce immigration. When I ask Diane Abbott, Shadow Home Secretary, whether politicians have shied away from talking about immigration, she baulks at the idea. After reeling off immigration acts introduced through the decades, she says, there has been ‘a series of legislative measures, which were ill thought out … and that was all about pandering to anti-immigrant feeling … contrary to what everyone says [that has] always been very much close to the centre of political debate.’ So it’s not that we don’t talk about immigration enough or that there’s some kind of covert plan to shut down members of the public from airing their grievances about immigrants. The problem is that the ‘debate’ has run on mistruths, hysteria and racism for decades, if not centuries.
Garvan Walshe confirmed as much in February 2017. An adviser to the Tories during the 2005 election campaign, he tweeted that the party ‘worked assiduously to ramp up anti-immigrant feeling’ and few politicians – certainly not Gordon Brown, who would soon become prime minister – ‘challenged the lies that immigrants took jobs, were here on benefits’.10 The disinclination to confront myths, and indeed the eagerness to reinforce them, cultivated anti-immigration politics in the UK and would ultimately help produce the Brexit vote.
This book doesn’t ignore the UK’s vote to leave the EU, but it’s not about it, and I wasn’t motivated to write it as a consequence of the 2016 referendum. This might seem strange, not least because the winning side capitalised heavily on anti-immigration politics and in the process emboldened racists and xenophobes. But the immigration ‘debate’ was toxic long before David Cameron committed his party to holding a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU in the 2015 Conservative manifesto in a desperate attempt to keep together a Tory Party deeply divided over Europe. As one of the country’s most ardent remainers, he had spent the years before the vote dismissing migrants as a ‘swarm’, blaming immigration for crumbling public services and implementing aggressively exclusionary immigration policies.11 But despite having helped lay the groundwork for one of the central messages of the Leave campaign, Cameron seemed surprised by the result.
People who voted to Leave were more likely to dislike immigration than those who voted Remain,12 but that doesn’t mean it was the only reason they voted the way they did. Some South Asians, for instance,