They did it last time by detaining the Windrush Generation and cancelling international students. Don Flynn explains why a return to deportation on that scale will mean a ramping up of immigration injustice.
The Home Secretary seems to be unaware of the irony of choosing the deportation levels achieved in 2018 as the benchmark for the scale of removals she wants to see under her stewardship of the immigration system. Hmm, wasn’t 2018 the year of the Windrush scandal and the harm that was being done by “hostile environment” policies? Anyone remember those?
A total of just under 30,000 people were removed from the UK in that fateful year – 9,500 being people considered unlawfully resident in the country and a further 19,000 refused entry at the border. This was at a point in time when stocks of people “available” for deportation were being built up for such reasons as their failure to produce evidence of lawful entry at dates in the late 1960s and early 70s, when they were children being brought in by adults. Over 5,000 people, mostly elderly Jamaicans and other Caribbean islanders who had lived in Britain for 40 or 50 years had their lives turned upside down during that period.
They weren’t the only ones experiencing the injustice of the British immigration control system. Around the same time the Home Office was revoking the visas of 35,000 international students on the basis of dubious claims that they had faked the results of English language tests. Raids on workplaces and homes during this time were scooping up people who had been caught up in a deeply flawed asylum determination process and put on chartered flights out the country.
Though these multiple scandals had been known by immigration defence lawyers and human rights activists for years, 2018 was the year in which news about the unfairness of the Home Office’s ways of working came to shock wider layers of the public. They elicited a reaction which immediately checked the most callous aspects of the department’s work and brought to a crashing end the career of the immigration minister, Amber Rudd, once so well thought of as one of the brighter stars in the Tory firmament.
2018 also counts as a year in which the learning curve of British citizens on what immigration meant for the country, leading many to revise their opinions about it being a burden which stretched the scarce resources of the welfare state. Just two years later, as the Covid-19 pandemic forced the shutdown of all but the most essential services, people were standing on their doorsteps applauding the work of migrant care workers and NHS staff, transport workers, people involved in food supply activities, and the bus drivers who had to continue through the lockdowns to stop the economy completely crashing.
Not too surprising maybe that a return to the levels of deportation achieved in 2018 has been indefinitely postponed whilst Conservative ministers floundered around with unworkable schemes like the Rwanda plan in the hope that large-scale removals could be got underway again.
If all this had been reflected upon by millions of well-informed citizens and voters who were now prepared to contemplate a different approach to these issues, this change of mood has not really registered with the new Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, and her team. She was prepared to go along with the probability that a large strand of public opinion shared her view that gimmicky policies aimed at “stopping small boats” were an expensive waste of time, and acted on this to ditch the plan to put hundreds of people on expensive flights to the small republic in East Africa. Let’s give her and her government colleagues credit for that.
But Labour has never really trusted the view that sympathy, not to mention outright solidarity, with migrant people was really putting down deep roots among any section of the British people. On the contrary, the deep conservativism of the parliamentary party has continued to presume that its most marginally progressive approach on immigration will only stand up if balanced with a more dominant voice proclaiming that, after all, the drive to get the movement of people across borders back under control will be tackled with ruthless determination. So it was always part of a package: ditch inept Tory policies and instead push forward with bright shiny Labourite competence.
The announcement recently of the hiring of 100 “security experts” to bolster action against people traffickers was expected. Labour’s problem is that the activities of the gangs has become deeply entrenched over the years in which the closure of legal routes to migrants has advanced, creating the lucrative business opportunities now associated with the trade. People smuggling is now a problem with no short or even medium term solutions and the government can’t realistically expect to be flaunting many quick wins to show it is doing its job.
Hence the switch of attention to ramping up deportations again. The Guardian reported Cooper as saying that, “she plans to achieve the highest rate of deportations since 2018 for refused asylum seekers, and said the Home Office will launch a new intelligence-driven illegal working programme to target employers who hire people with no right to be in the UK.”
The 2023 figure for the return of people abroad was 25,646, including people without leave who left of their own accord. That means Cooper has only to find just over 4.400 people currently eking out a living in the usual places that are hit in immigration raids, giving her grounds to crow about the success of her new policies.
What will the public make of this? Was it just a couple of weeks ago so many were turning out in large numbers to counter racist anti-immigrant demos, rally behind the slogan that “refugees are welcome here”? How likely will it be that these folk will be ready to applaud heavy handed immigration enforcement raids on the restaurants, the car washes, nursing homes and nail bars in their local communities as they scrabble to fill their deportation quotas? Might it be that “refugees (and migrant workers) are welcome here” will turn into a more determined effort to oppose unjust deportations than Yvette Cooper and her colleagues could have imagined.