It’s become common sense to think too much immigration of a certain kind is bad for the UK in all kinds of ways – for wages, public services but also ‘integration’ and ‘cohesion’ – and that ‘controls’ are a solution. But look at what they do: force people to leave the country, even if it means being separated from friends and family, or stop them from staying long enough to make local connections if they want to. ‘Controls’ are making people’s lives a misery; they are part of the problem.
To find an example of the inhumanity of migration policy in the UK, look no further than ‘immigration removal centres’. This name works as a sanitiser, obscuring the brutal reality of these ‘centres’. Andy knows this all too well.
Originally from Ghana, his family – made up of his dad and his younger siblings, two brothers and two sisters – moved around before they settled into life in the UK in 1997 when Andy was twelve years old. Andy never knew the specifics of his dad’s job, just that he was often away on business: ‘I remember my dad always travelled, no matter where we lived he always travelled.’ One day, the woman who was looking after Andy and his siblings while his dad was away with work packed up and left: at the age of fifteen, Andy had to become the adult of the household. Without any means to contact their dad, he dropped out of school, got a job in a nearby market and looked after the family. His dad never returned. To this day, Andy still doesn’t know what happened to him.
Before long, the circumstances of their makeshift family were discovered. With Andy still under the age of eighteen and trying to support his siblings single-handedly, his brothers and sisters were taken into care and social services told him he could go into accommodation provided by the council, but that he needed ID.
‘Low and behold I get there and they say – first time in my life – “Where’s your passport or birth certificate, where’s your ID?” What? What’s an ID? I don’t know. They say, “Well unless you’ve got one of these things we can’t help you”. So, I went back to social services and they said go and search the house. I turned the house upside down. Nothing.’
Andy was left homeless. He got protection from, though never joined, a gang. But it was enough that he’d entered the gang’s network. To survive on his own and find a way out, he left London and bought an ID from someone who specialised in identity fraud. Desperate to get a job and without any form of documentation – not so much as a birth certificate – he felt he had no choice.
A hard worker, he did well, but after one of many promotions, he was eventually found out. He went to prison for identity theft. His sentence was supposed to be ten months, then, out of the blue, the day before he was going to be released, he was told he was being put in immigration detention. But even that didn’t happen straight away. ‘I was supposed to be released from prison on 21 May 2010. That was the day. That was my release date. I stayed in prison until 13 June 2011, over a year.’21 No one ever explained why.
After a year in Morton Hall, a detention centre in Lincolnshire, Andy was moved to Brook House, next to Gatwick airport. When he arrived, he realised what was in store for him: he was going to be quietly put on a plane and deported to a country he hadn’t been to since he was a child; a place where he knew no family or friends.
Andy had already been encouraged by a volunteer in Morton Hall to apply for asylum: he is bisexual and could face persecution if he goes back to Ghana. To stop what he believed was a plan to deport him, he pointed out he was waiting on the asylum decision, so they could not deport him until he heard the outcome. This gave him more time. After applying for bail fourteen times, he was finally successful, and in October 2016 he was granted asylum by the courts, but the Home Office decided to appeal the decision. When we meet he’s still in limbo, forced to carry around a biometric ID card – a policy introduced under New Labour – which is his only official piece of identification. He takes it out of his pocket to show me and the first thing I see is the words it has stamped across it in bold black writing: ‘forbidden from taking employment’. Andy ended up being abandoned by the state because he had no ID; now he’s made to carry one that marks him out as different. ‘I’ve been out three years,’ he says. ‘I can’t work, I’m not allowed to work paid or unpaid, I can’t work but they expect me to survive … I don’t get nothing.’
Between 2009 and 2016, 2,500 to 3,500 people were in detention at any given time. Most were held for less than a month, but some much longer. It’s thought the longest someone has been detained for was 1,156 days.22 In 2015, the Chief Inspector of Prisons noted in a report that high numbers of women put in Yarl’s Wood detention centre were released, which, he wrote, ‘raises questions about the validity of their detention in the first place’.23
Until the 1990s, the UK didn’t have any permanent detention centres; people were put in prisons or held in a converted car ferry called the Earl William. Within two years of being in office, New Labour had dramatically increased the number of detention centres, and the country now has one of the biggest immigration detention estates in Europe. Almost as soon as they came into existence, these centres have been sites of hunger strikes and suicide attempts.24 Andy says his experience of detention was worse than prison.
Fenced off from the rest of the world, presumably in the hope that no one would ever discover the mistreatment going on inside, there is one detention centre that has become a symbol of state cruelty. Alongside resistance and protest, report after report has made small holes in the bottle green barrier that surrounds Yarl’s Wood, helping expose fragments of what goes on inside this notorious detention centre. This has been a collective effort. Channel 4 has sent investigation teams there. Women detainees on hunger strike inside have claimed column inches in the Guardian to explain their protest. Periodically, campaigners from all over the country have made the trip out to Bedford, surrounding Yarl’s Wood, making as much noise as possible to show solidarity with people inside and demand its closure. And the Independent and the Telegraph newspapers have reported on the alleged abuse that goes on within its walls.25
But the coverage of what goes on inside Yarl’s Wood can too easily become disconnected from the anti-immigration politics – the kind which presents immigration first and foremost as negative – that makes such an institution a reality, and that is perpetuated by our press and our politicians.
The former Daily Star journalist Richard Peppiatt describes to me the culture at the tabloid newspaper that helps make detention acceptable. When he was at the paper, there was a constant pressure, he says, to find stories that fit in with a particular anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim narrative. The Daily Star was no insignificant player. In December 2011, the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABCs) figures showed that the Daily Star was the third most widely bought newspaper that month, below the Sun and the Daily Mirror and with a circulation figure of 616,498, almost double that of the Financial Times’.26
Peppiatt, who in a widely publicised letter to his boss, media mogul Richard Desmond, quit his job in 2011 after two years at the paper, recalls being sent to pursue a story about a family from Somalia who were seeking asylum in the UK and who had been put up in a luxurious townhouse in Chelsea.27 ‘These stories seemed to pop up every week’, where the message would be ‘asylum seekers are basically getting the absolute run of the pitch and being put up in expensive houses,’ he explains.
When he got there, every other right-wing tabloid newspaper had a journalist camped outside the house. ‘We could tell there was people in there,’ he says. ‘Quite an intimidating situation with photographers and journalists hanging about this house … putting notes through the door … the curtains would twitch occasionally and a photographer would try and flash off a shot to catch a picture of them.’ Unsurprisingly with all these journalists on their doorstep, no one from the family came out of the house. So, despite intense pressure from editors back at the Daily Star, Peppiatt left, along with all the other reporters, as the night was drawing in. The next morning in the newsroom, Peppiatt’s manager stormed over to him. ‘What the fuck is this, I thought you said they didn’t come outside?’ he said pointing at the Sun, which