Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System

by Colin Yeo;

3 ‘System “not fit for purpose”, says Reid’, The Guardian, 23 May 2006.

  4 Maya Goodfellow, Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats (London: Verso, 2019), pp. 162–7.

  5 For those interested in a very readable and more comprehensive treatment of the history of immigration to the United Kingdom, I would highly recommend Robert Winder’s excellent Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain (London: Abacus, 2013).

  CHAPTER 1

  WELCOME TO BRITAIN

  Imagine Paddington Bear managed to smuggle himself into today’s modern Britain. His experience would be rather different to that portrayed by beloved children’s author Michael Bond and recently reprised in two hit films. Stowing away from Darkest Peru and skipping passport control on arrival, Paddington commits the criminal offence of illegal entry. He faces up to six months in prison. Should he manage to avoid detection, he would be classed as an illegal entrant. That is where his problems would really begin. The hostile environment designed and built by Theresa May as Home Secretary, then, briefly, as Prime Minister, is intended to make life in Great Britain intolerable for latter-day Paddingtons. The very purpose of the hostile environment is to dissuade migrants from coming here at all, and to encourage those already here to ‘self-deport’ themselves, as politicians in the United States call the process, and leave.

  Yet our traditional self-image as Britons is that we are a tolerant and welcoming nation. For time immemorial, the standard line trotted out by Home Office spokespeople in response to the exposure of wrongdoing by immigration officials – just check almost any newspaper article on the topic in the past twenty years – is that ‘the UK has a proud history of granting asylum to those who need our protection’. The subtext to these fine words is that the proud history in question is historical; it is finished. Nevertheless, they cleverly evoke a collective memory of welcoming Huguenot refugees fleeing religious persecution in the seventeenth century; of French aristocrats fleeing revolution in the eighteenth century; of dissidents fleeing tyrants across Europe in the nineteenth century; and of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler in the twentieth century. The waves of Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Norsemen, Normans and Irishmen might come to mind as might more recent successors from the Commonwealth. The warm reception that Paddington Bear enjoys from the Brown family in the 1950s fits right into that now outdated self-portrait.

  The reality was always rather more mixed.

  THE MIXED HISTORY OF BRITISH WELCOMES

  Migration and migrants themselves are often regarded with relative benevolence when hypothetical or historical, but heaven forbid that a migrant should actually try to migrate in the here and now. The Protestant Huguenots who fled Catholic France in the sixteenth century are celebrated today, but they were reviled in their own time. So too were the Irish who fled famine and the Jews who ran from pogroms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Long-settled European dissidents were interned during the First World War, race riots and even lynchings broke out in Barry, Cardiff, Glasgow, Hull, Liverpool, London, Newport, Salford and South Shields after the war. The ‘British Schindler’, Nicholas Winton, had to forge British immigration papers to smuggle in Jewish children fleeing the Nazis before the outbreak of the Second World War.1 The post-war wave of arrivals from Jamaica and other Commonwealth countries were greeted with public and political hostility at the time.2 The first national Windrush Day was celebrated in 2019 and thus it is only now, decades later, that a belated welcome is being retrospectively imagined for that generation.

  Still, there are some examples of the British government and public offering willing welcomes in the past. An estimated 250,000 Belgian refugees were extended shelter during the First World War, although most were forced to leave once it was over. There was also a major resettlement programme for Polish nationals who were unable or unwilling to return to Soviet-controlled Poland after the Second World War and the Polish Resettlement Act 1947 offered British nationality to 200,000 Poles living in the United Kingdom. Polish resettlement ran alongside the post-war European ‘Voluntary’ Worker Scheme (in fact it entailed significant compulsion), which was aimed at displaced workers across Europe and recruited around 180,000 workers.3 Britain, in common with many other countries around the world, also offered refuge to Hungarians fleeing the Soviet crackdown in 1956. An estimated 20,000 found new homes in Great Britain. These resettlement exercises welcomed tens of thousands of migrants in a very short space of time and the fact they are now largely forgotten suggests that hostility at the time was limited and integration successful. Notably, these exercises involved white Europeans.

  In contrast, the movement of black and Asian British subjects from the New Commonwealth to the United Kingdom was severely restricted from 1962 onwards. Notably, no equivalent controls were introduced for Irish citizens, who were mainly white. An urgent humanitarian resettlement programme in the 1970s involved resettling around 28,000 British subjects to the United Kingdom over several years. They were the Ugandan Asians, persecuted and ultimately expelled by Idi Amin. Some had retained their British status when Uganda became independent in 1962, but even many of those who had acquired Ugandan citizenship had that status stripped from them by Amin. Their arrival has not been forgotten because, to put it bluntly, their skin colour was not white, and they were ruthlessly exploited at the time by controversial ‘rivers of blood’ politician Enoch Powell and the National Front. In 1979, Cabinet papers show that newly elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resisted an informal UN request that Britain resettle 10,000 Vietnamese refugees ‘on the grounds that there would be riots in the streets if they were given council housing ahead of “white citizens”. She made clear to her Cabinet colleagues that she had “less objection to refugees such as Rhodesians, Poles and Hungarians, since they could more easily be assimilated into British society”.’4

  No matter what the prevailing public or government response to migrants and refugees, though, there have always been at least a precious few in the United Kingdom willing to offer welcome. Churches, temples and mosques have always provided sanctuary and support to migrants who are not entitled to central or local government help. Some individuals open their homes to separated child refugees, offering fostering care. I have met many such amazing people through my own work representing young Afghans over the years. There are charities both large and small that have been set up to help refugees and others. To give two examples, Refugees at Home (www.refugeesathome.org) exists to offer spare rooms to refugees at different stages of the asylum process and Together Now (togethernow.org.uk) makes practical arrangements for family members of recognised refugees to travel to the United Kingdom. Towns and cities across the UK, as different as Bath and Barnsley and as distant as Aberdeen and Abergavenny, have signed up to the City of Sanctuary movement, which aims to build a society of hospitality and welcome. A growing number of people do what they can, motivated by the belief that there is, in the words of murdered Member of Parliament Jo Cox, more that unites than divides us.

  THE OPEN ERA

  Before the twentieth century there were no legal restrictions on immigration into the United Kingdom. As Robert Winder shows in Bloody Foreigners, immigration has been a feature of British life for centuries, although the numbers were previously relatively small. The nineteenth century saw an influx of European migrants responsible for founding quintessentially ‘British’ brands like Marks & Spencer, Moss Bros, Burton, Schweppes, Triumph cars and motorcycles, the massive ICI chemicals company General Electric, and Harland and Wolff, the engineering firm responsible for the Titanic.5 This era of permissive, albeit sometimes grudging, openness ended with the first real immigration law in the United Kingdom: the Aliens Act 1905. Prompted by a vicious antisemitic campaign in Parliament and the media, it was introduced with the purpose of preventing the entry of Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. Like later immigration legislation, the Act itself was drafted in more neutral, universal language than that, but it c
arefully afforded the new immigration officers sufficient discretion to achieve its intended aim.

  For the next sixty years immigration can be seen as an accidental outcome of citizenship policy, which was itself driven by the foreign policy objective of maintaining British centrality in the rapidly disintegrating empire. British subjects had a right to enter the United Kingdom and there were an estimated 600 million of those across the globe. Before the Second World War, only relatively small numbers exercised this right, and even then, non-legislative steps were taken to restrict the right of entry by making it difficult to prove in practice. Then, although the British Nationality Act 1948 did not directly refer to immigration or a right of entry or residence, it did put citizenship on a legislative footing, thus reinforcing the pre-existing rights of British subjects and in the process making it difficult for later legislators to introduce immigration restrictions. It would look very strange to deny a citizen a right to enter and live in her country of citizenship, after all. Nevertheless, some members of the public and some politicians became increasingly agitated when growing numbers of racialised British subjects and citizens from Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent did just that. These countries were widely known as the New Commonwealth, in contrast to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, the white-dominated countries of the so-called Old Commonwealth.

  The existence of a legal right of entry did not, in reality, stop politicians from trying to undermine it, and various ‘informal controls’, as they have become known, were deployed to try to reduce the number of New Commonwealth citizens moving to the UK. These measures included pressurising colonial and Commonwealth governments into denying passports to their citizens and ratcheting up the proof required for entry.6 As it became clear these informal controls were insufficient to keep out racialised people, legislation became inevitable. The result was the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962.

  THE CLOSED CONSENSUS

  Historian Randall Hansen argues that it was surprising it took politicians so long to legislate given that public pressure to do so was high.7 Hansen’s trawl of government archives shows that as early as the start of the 1950s the political class was searching for concrete ways to restrict immigration from racialised New Commonwealth countries. These efforts foundered on a combination of a categorical refusal by key senior parliamentary figures to countenance the restriction of Irish migration; a widespread reluctance to prevent the entry of mainly ethnically white Old Commonwealth citizens; an unwillingness to introduce an explicit colour bar; difficulties with replacing the citizenship scheme of the British Nationality Act 1948 so soon after its introduction; and the delicate international politics of decolonialisation. Committees were repeatedly appointed and draft legislation was even prepared in 1955 but was discarded. By the early 1960s the desire to restrict New Commonwealth immigration outweighed the attachment to free movement around the Old Commonwealth and the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 was the outcome.

  Replacement of the 1948 citizenship scheme was considered but later abandoned, and instead a bizarre mechanism of control was adopted. Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies would only have the right to enter the UK – their own country of citizenship – if their passport had been issued under the direct authority of the British government. Those whose British passports had been issued by colonial governments would lose their right of entry, meaning that different citizens with the same notional status had very different rights. At the same time, the Irish continued to enjoy unrestricted rights of entry and a voucher scheme for skilled workers was expected to maintain access to the United Kingdom for Old Commonwealth citizens. Britain went from having an extremely open immigration regime to an extremely closed one almost overnight, at least for racialised groups, and has been described as operating a ‘zero immigration’ policy for the next forty years.8

  Inward migration did continue in these decades, but this was almost exclusively by family members joining those already living in the UK, not what might be called primary immigrants. When it transpired that the East African Asians, as they became known, had retained or acquired a right of entry, this was rapidly closed down in the follow-up Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968. The Immigration Act 1971 ended the remnants of preferential treatment for Commonwealth citizens over non-Commonwealth ones and consolidated the power to make new immigration rules in the hands of the Home Secretary, subject only to nominal parliamentary scrutiny. The British Nationality Act 1981 eventually re-wrote the citizenship laws, ending the fiction of universal Commonwealth citizenship, creating the formal status of ‘British citizen’ for the first time and also creating new lesser classes of British nationality that did not carry with them a right to live in Britain.

  After 1962 both the major parties signed up to the idea that immigration should be severely restricted in order to promote the acceptance, integration or assimilation of those migrants who had already arrived. This is not to say there were not controversies, variations on or discussions concerning immigration issues; rather there was broad mainstream agreement that immigration should be restricted and it was not a significant party-political issue. That party-political consensus started to break down as the numbers of asylum seekers started to rise from the early 1990s onwards. Net migration began to rise rapidly from 1997 (see chart opposite), although this was not initially as a result of any change to immigration policies. From around 2000, though, the New Labour government started to pursue an active economic immigration policy for the first time in decades and then, for reasons of foreign not immigration policy (see Chapter 9), no controls were imposed on citizens of Eastern European and Baltic countries that joined the European Union in 2004. Immigration was re-politicised by the British National Party in the late 1990s, then by the Conservative Party in the run-up to the 2005 election and finally by the UK Independence Party after 2009. By the time the Conservative Party entered government in 2010, immigration had become a major issue of political debate and positioning. Whereas immigration was barely mentioned in party manifestos in 1997, by 2010 it was impossible for a political party not to have both a position and a set of policies on the subject.

  Source: Ipsos MORI data.

  A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT

  When David Cameron accidentally set a net migration target in 2010, discussed in the next chapter, he signalled an intention to return as far as possible to zero immigration. Indeed, Cameron specifically invoked the levels of immigration of the 1990s when discussing net migration. The country and the world had changed since that era and much of the rest of this book documents the ultimately futile attempts to turn back time by Cameron and his Home Secretary, then successor, Theresa May. Standout features of these years included the introduction of a system of citizen-on-citizen immigration checks known as the hostile environment, discussed in Chapter 3; new barriers to acquiring lawful status or citizenship, discussed in Chapters 4 and 12; major reform of family immigration routes, discussed in Chapter 5; the hollowing out of the points-based system, discussed in Chapter 7; and the vilification of international students, discussed in Chapter 8.

  The single biggest immigration policy development during this time was entirely accidental: Brexit. In the past, decisions with profound but unintended implications for immigration policy were taken for unrelated reasons. The British Nationality Act 1948 was a matter of imperial pride, while the decision not to impose transitional controls following EU accession was driven by foreign policy. But Brexit was the reverse, as immigration policy seemed to be remoulding Britain’s entire place in the world. As discussed in Chapter 9, this was the result of setting public expectations that could not possibly be met because the mechanisms chosen to implement them were always going to be ineffectual.

  The new conventional wisdom during the Cameron period was that any credible politician needed to be tough on immigration. In this context, media stories about inconvenience to migrants or hardnosed decisions by officials would help rather than harm a minister’s repu
tation. A trickle and then a flood of outraged news stories about the rejection of applications by EU nationals for permanent residence and citizenship after the Brexit referendum vote in 2016 showed that public attitudes were more nuanced than had been thought.9 Those personally unfamiliar with the immigration system began to ask why their friends and neighbours were being treated so abysmally by immigration officials. The fact that white, middle-class professionals were affected gave the issue more traction in the media and with the general public than would have been the case if the victims had been racialised or poor. Soon, opinion polling showed that concern over immigration as an issue began to plummet.

  There then followed a string of horrifying stories telling of long-term residents who had arrived in Britain from the Caribbean decades previously as children – later dubbed the Windrush generation by campaigner Patrick Vernon – being denied life-saving healthcare, being sacked from their jobs and being evicted. These were people who had lived lawfully in Britain for decades but who did not possess any proof of their status: a decision had been made in the 1970s to automatically grant status, by operation of law but without documentary proof, to those Commonwealth citizens who already lived in the UK. Lawyers call this a ‘declaratory’ approach and the advantage at the time was that everyone eligible was automatically lawful, but it also meant that they did not necessarily have the evidence to prove it. Decades later, with the introduction of the hostile environment, those who still did not have proof – and unless they had travelled abroad, they would never have needed it – found themselves denied housing, benefits, healthcare and threatened with deportation. The Home Office simply refused to believe people who said they had been resident for decades, even where they had years of National Insurance contributions and their children had been born here. It was primarily one journalist, Amelia Gentleman, who researched and wrote these articles, but the space for the stories to be told and heard had been created by the earlier accounts EU citizens and a new narrative that the Home Office was a failing institution. Prior to that, there had been little or no media or public interest.