A ‘hard Brexit’, Labour’s Andy Burnham warned months later, would ‘turn Britain into a place it has never been: divided, hostile, narrow-minded’.13 You have to wonder how much he knows about this country’s migration histories. By that I don’t just mean the many reasons people like my mum and grandparents migrated to the UK from India. Rarely discussed is the poisonous public discourse and suffocating racist legislation that met them when they arrived. Because of its vehemence in recent years, widespread anti-immigration politics seems a new addition to the national landscape. But it has old roots. In the UK’s imperial history and present, there has too rarely been a prominent politician on the national stage who didn’t engage in some form of anti-immigration politics.
If the vote to leave the EU reminded us just how overlooked these histories are, the aftermath showed how embedded anti-immigration politics is. Faced with the violent result of divisive anti-immigration politics in the form of a rise in the reported number of hate crimes, politicians continued to blame immigrants for the UK’s problems as then Labour MP Chuka Umunna advocated for a ‘muscular approach’ to immigration.14
I wanted to write this book so I could not only question these ideas but also understand how they became commonplace; how it is so easy to talk about people as if they’re not people at all, just because they were born in another country, and how politicians are able to build illustrious careers around denigrating immigrants and calling for stronger borders.
My aim isn’t to document public opinion, but to take a look under the surface of, and challenge, the arguments made about immigration in politics and the media. Over the coming chapters, I will look at the realities of the immigration system and also pick apart the politics around immigration in the UK’s recent and more distant past; looking at how the left and the right have helped create and sustain anti-migrant norms. And I will argue for an alternative to this politics.
This is a book about the immigration debate in the UK, the way immigration policies have demonised and racialised whole groups of people, and how ideas from the past rattle around the debates of the present, even if in altered forms, as race and class help decide who belongs and who doesn’t. Ultimately, it is about why anti-immigration politics, not immigration itself, is one of this country’s most serious problems.
What decadence this belonging rubbish was, what time the rich must have if they could sit around and weave great worries out of such threadbare things.
Sunjeev Sahota, The Year of the Runaways
An industrial estate on the edge of central Birmingham might not sound like the place to find out about the difficulties of migrating to the UK. But in a building nestled behind a car park and overlooking the network of canals that branch off to the nearby town of Smethwick, a group of around thirty people met up on a cold, rainy October evening to talk about their problems with the immigration system. Overstretched lawyers and immigration specialists were on hand to offer advice. As is typical of a winter’s day in the UK, the darkness of evening descended far too early, and rain bounced off the pavement as we all made our way into the building, but the room was warm and buzzing with activity when I arrived. People were introducing themselves and getting to know each other while tucking into complimentary homemade samosas taken from a deep bowl that sat next to tea and coffee laid out on one side of the room.
Coming from all over the world, some of the people there that night had struggled alone to navigate disorientating immigration rules while others had to find a way through for their whole family. In the room were children of various ages – from curious babies to bored seven- or eight-year-olds. Some had been born in the country, others had migrated with their parents. But for all of them their future in the UK was uncertain. What united these people was the time, effort and money – often money they didn’t have – they were spending to try to stay in this country. About fifteen minutes after I arrived, people took their seats, forming a circle in the middle of the room. As the meeting began, almost immediately their anger and worry spilled out of them. They shared stories of being fleeced by lawyers, going into courtrooms where the people they’d paid to represent them didn’t even know the most basic details of their case, and explained the desperation they felt when their claims were repeatedly rejected.
For all the focus on the supposed importance of defending our national borders from outsiders and tales of immigration bringing problems to the UK, too few debates are concerned with how difficult it can be to be a migrant in this country.
One of the people I met in Birmingham was Diana.1 She came from Zimbabwe as a visitor and began studying before going on to marry an EU citizen. But her marriage quickly deteriorated: ‘I had to come out of the relationship because of domestic violence.’ She says she left her partner to save her life. She knew nothing about the asylum process, but in 2013 she was told she could apply for refugee status. Diana quickly learned how many people are out there who are ‘ready to mislead you’. One of her lawyers didn’t give her the right information about applying for asylum, which meant that, when she went to court, she didn’t present relevant facts that might have helped her case. Other lawyers she paid barely gave her any time and didn’t go through her case properly. At each appeal, she was refused the right to stay in the country.
Understanding all the intricacies of what happened to Diana, and all the other people I talk to, takes time and requires countless follow-up questions. It’s unclear how anyone manages to make sense of and navigate the disorientating process she describes. But she is still determined to secure refugee status, and she puts her lack of success at least partly down to poor representation. Still, she isn’t giving up. ‘One of the things I’ve found and that has encouraged me to be who I am today is you learn the hard way: ignorance is expensive – and ignorance is not bliss at all.’
Diana isn’t alone. She and Kelly, another person I speak to, live in different cities and have had completely different lives, but their experiences of the immigration regime are remarkably similar. Calling the UK home since she was nine years old, Kelly came here after her dad brought the whole family – Kelly, her sister and her mother – from West Africa on a diplomatic visa. Ten years later, when Kelly was in the middle of her first year of university, he abruptly left the country and she was told she didn’t have the right to stay in the UK. With her mum and sister, Kelly applied for a family visa, but when that was rejected, she decided to apply for the right to stay in the country alone.
‘I went through three lawyers,’ she says. The first one didn’t understand her case and after he submitted her application, the Home Office said there was no cogent argument in the papers, so they had nothing to consider. That cost her over £1,000. ‘At the time I didn’t understand the case, so I was dependent on him to explain,’ Kelly remembers, shaking her head. ‘There was no communication … so … I was chasing him every second and then when the Home Office refused it there was not much done.’
Kelly waited three years for her appeals to be processed. With no right to work and unable to access state support, she had to resort to living between friends’ houses and she nearly became homeless. ‘It’s ridiculous to be honest because you’re not allowed to work, so where do you expect me to get the money from?’ she asks. ‘I think the cost is just to frustrate people to just give up and go back.’ She asked multiple agencies for financial support and legal help. She was a ‘novice’ and had no idea ‘what was going on’. It’s not chance that makes Kelly’s and Diana’s experiences so similar. As well as exorbitant fees for visas and applications, support for immigration and asylum cases is almost non-existent unless you happen to have the money to pay for it, and when you’re not allowed to work, for many people, funding legal representation is an impossible task. Even for those lucky enough to be able to afford it, there’s