Читать книгу Hostile Environment - Maya Goodfellow - Страница 7

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 misled’ members of Parliament. The Guardian received a leaked letter she had written to Theresa May which included a reference to a target for removing undocumented migrants – this was after Rudd had told Parliament no such target existed. Rudd’s replacement, Sajid Javid, promised a ‘more compassionate immigration system’. The son of a Pakistani migrant, Abdul, who came to the UK with just a pound in his pocket, Javid drew on his family history to reassure the country that the Windrush scandal was personal for him, as if this would guarantee that any immigration policies introduced on his watch would make the system more humane.⁴ He did this even though his parliamentary record showed he had invariably voted for stricter immigration and asylum laws, including those that made up the hostile environment.

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, voted for Brexit after they were told it would mean more immigration from commonwealth countries, and it’s not as though everyone who voted to Remain was enthusiastic about immigration. But the fallout suggested not every politician grasped that some of the problems thrown up by the referendum went far deeper than this one vote.

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.