Don Flynn says Home Secretary Mahmood’s “moral mission” is intent on overturning the rights of migrants
Shabana Mahmood has set out a claim to a “moral mission” to mend divisions over immigration in Britain. She shares the anguish of citizens perturbed by the fact that refugees live in their local communities and wants it to be known that she is on their side.
This is a mission that ambitious politicians who are still on the up career-wise love to take on. Tackling a so-called immigration crisis is the sort of thing that speaks to the public in plain, commonsense terms and generates targets which can be used to show feasible progress towards a definite end. Net migration below a hundred thousand; more annual deportations than fresh arrivals; clear the backlog of applications; stop the boats.
All that is required is the steely determination to do the thing public opinion is clamouring for, which a succession of indecisive predecessors have failed to accomplish, but which you will not shirk from. In contrast to the task of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose job involves hopeless abstractions about GDP growth, fiscal and monetary policies, and appeasing the bond markets (whatever they are), a Home Secretary works with issues that everyone understands – law-and-order and keeping pesky foreigners in check. Just the place for a “moral mission” to be rolled out.
Foreign labour
The problem for Mahmood is that it’s not quite as simple as it first seems. Solving immigration issues first requires defining what the “problem” is. She has a range of options on that score, roughly divided into two parts. The first of these is that the UK has developed over the course of the last half-dozen decades as an economic entity which has a structural need for access to foreign labour. The bulk of this takes the form of outsourcing parts of manufacturing and servicing to low-cost regions of the world but there is a sizeable residue of demand which cannot be met by these means.
Sectors of the economy which need to locate their workers at the point where the goods and services they produce are consumed are dependent on migration rather than outsourcing to meet their needs. That is the reason why the largest segments of migrant workers are found in sectors like health and social care, fresh food production, construction and hospitality. This part of the immigration conundrum requires a system which works efficiently to identity and process the hundreds of thousands of foreign workers who can be productively placed in sectors which will contribute to economic growth.
The other species of immigration problem emerges from the fact that immigrants have been hyped up as various kinds of threats to the general public. For the protesters outside an asylum hotel, they are a threat because they are “strangers”, carrying the mark of their strangeness in their dark skins and ways of deporting themselves. For the right-wing populist agitator, it is because they are in the queue for faltering public services and jobs that should go to “our people”. For the emerging band of Blue Labour/Red Tory ideologues who have foisted Mahmood into the position of spokesperson, it is because they threaten the ideal of organic social cohesion, which is needed to support the ideal of “common good”.
So, there are two components to the divisions over immigration in British society: the problem of the economic need for migrants and the problem of entrenched cultural hostility to living alongside migrant people. This is the reason why the ostensibly simple matter of uncontroversial management of migration has been beyond the capacity of generations of politicians, from the 1960s through to the present day. Is there any reason to think Shabana Mahmood has solved a problem which has been beyond so many others?
Moral mission?
What does her “moral mission” consist of? At its simplest level, it challenges the conception that migrant people have rights which they can rely on to support their integration into life in Britain. As Mahmood recently proclaimed in Parliament, “To settle in this country forever is not a right, but a privilege, and it must be earned”. This is a corrective to the idea that a migrant who enters on a visa and then adheres to the terms of admission for the standard period of five years can reasonably expect to be granted the right to settle, which is currently set out in the immigration rules.
People admitted to modestly waged occupations experience the conditions attached to their initial, limited leave to remain as onerous. Health and care workers, hotel and restaurant staff, operatives in food processing industries, work in sectors where there is an acknowledged risk of abuse and exploitation, but whose immigration status gives them little opportunity to complain against the employer who acts as their sponsor. Conditions attached to their leave also mean they are confined to the private rented sector for accommodation and are forced into paying excessively high rents. A “no recourse to public funds” condition also means the absence of support for children in their families that comes in the form of the child benefit component of universal credit. Many migrants on the current five-year route to settlement emerge at the end of this period stressed out by hard work and low wages, poor housing and children who have struggled through school years because of a lack of access to the internet and quiet places to do homework.
Mahmood tells us that enduring this for just five years is not enough: it should be extended to a full ten years before the possibility of settlement is offered to the migrant. True, there is the possibility of shortening this if the applicant is able to demonstrate an exceptional contribution over and above doing the job they were admitted to do and generally having kept straight with the authorities. This part of the new policies has been criticised for its potential for class discrimination – offering opportunities for earlier settlement to migrants working in well-paid middle-class occupations but denying it to healthcare and other occupations with less prestige.
This adds up to a possible solution to the economic part of the migration problem , which is responsible for the high rate of net inward migration. It will reduce the attractiveness of work in the UK to people who have options for migration opportunities in other countries, so we can probably expect to see fewer Australians and Canadians looking for work as nurses or teachers. But those with less leverage when it comes to migration opportunities – and we must know we are talking about Africans, Asians and Caribbean people in this category – even less propitious employment conditions will be difficult to refuse if that is all that is on offer.
Asylum routes
With economic routes squeezed but not closed down, Mahmood’s attention switches to asylum routes. Here, we need to be clear that, contrary to statements that still come from Labour MPs, Britain does not always guarantee support for those with a genuine need for safe refuge. The way they came into the country is decisive. A Sudanese refugee arriving on a small boat in Dover will not be welcomed in the same manner as a Ukrainian or British Kong Konger who has availed themselves on one of the established safe routes. Mahmood has dangled the carrot of more schemes that look like the Homes for Ukraine plan, though hinting that total numbers will be in the hundreds rather than the tens of thousands. But war will continue to be waged against people who arrive at UK borders outside the provisions of these schemes, with refusal to even be admitted for consideration for asylum being mandatory.
Current messages about stopping the boats and one-in-one-out have failed to placate public anxiety about refugees, and it is doubtful that a vague promise about safer routes will add support to Mahmood’s “moral mission”. The big idea then is the twenty-year route to settlement, which will apply to all refugees (and not just so-called illegal entrants as the hapless immigration minister, Mike Tapp, misinformed the public at one point). At regular intervals of 30 months throughout this 20-year period, the refugee will have their case re-examined to see whether circumstances in their home country have returned to a point where they can be safely sent back.
Ending family reunion
Earlier announcements on refugee policy set out the intention to eliminate the right to family reunion for people granted asylum. The act of fleeing from persecution frequently involves the separation of family members and scattering across two or more countries. The need to address these situations has been recognised in international conventions, which require governments to act positively to permit the reunion of the family unit. To this end, the normal requirements of immigration regulation, that the sponsoring family member demonstrate the capacity to support dependents from their own resources, and for adults to be able to speak the native language, have been suspended in most liberal jurisdictions. Labour intends to dishonour this commitment. Reunification of families will be postponed indefinitely – perhaps permanently, until the member in the UK can establish themselves in well-paid employment, adequate housing, and the other adult seeking entry can demonstrate a high level of capability in the English language. There are a number of elements in the immigration plan which compete for the title of being most cruel – this refusal to acknowledge the particular needs of people recovering from the trauma of refugee flight is high among them.
Mahmood’s proposals constitute harsh change all round, and critics have asked how they differ from the hostile environment regime that was the foundation of the Conservative government’s approach to immigration management. But it also contains many of the flaws and weaknesses that led to the Windrush scandal and other exposures of injustice. There is certainly a lot of stuff being branded as an innovation in the Mahmood plan which are already in place. For example, the principle of reconsidering the grant of refugee status at regular intervals already applies in Home Office procedures. Two-and-a-half years after the initial award of asylum, the refugee’s position is supposed to be reconsidered and, if it is felt appropriate, the person can be required to return home.
In practice, many people do return voluntarily after a few years of residence in the UK when they feel it is safe to do so. It is hard to find examples where the authorities have compelled someone to leave when officials have insisted on their version of what constitutes a safe return. Nevertheless, Mahmood seems to think it useful to proclaim her exceptional readiness to enforce returns, even on people who have resided for 10, 15, right up to 20 years. For good measure, she tells us that not even the presence of children in the refugee family unit will get her to desist – and we are talking about young people who will have been born in the UK and who might be as young as infants or as old as teenagers, compelled to board planes for a journey to countries they have never been to alongside their distraught parents. Backbench Labour MPs claim to admire her steely determination to get on and do things nobody thought possible before, but at some point, they will have to face the fact that so much of this is performative cruelty and not much else.
Basic human rights
The proposal for a 20-year qualifying period for refugees and all that follows from it will appal Labour voters who assume that some standard of basic human rights will always be maintained. It will damage the legitimate expectations of refugees to fair treatment in so many ways, including the prospect of pursuing professional careers for those in areas where employers would be making an investment in their training and advancement that will pay out across years in the future. Many may be reluctant to hire someone possibly required to leave in a few years due to their current leave status. The same issue applies to financial matters, with very little prospect of mortgages or loans to establish a business for someone who appears to be vulnerable to a direction to leave the country.
Deeper inquiry into Mahmood’s “moral mission” leads to the inevitable conclusion that it is a cynical and amoral gambit on the part of a politician keen to get her head above the crowd to advance her position in government. There’s some irony in the fact that right-wing populists keep the issue high in the list of public concern, lending greater traction to her claim that decisive action is needed to sort the mess out. But if support for Farage and his counterparts in the Conservative party was to collapse for reasons not related to immigration controversies – perhaps because of exposure of dubious relations with Russian oligarchs or MAGA billionaires, or just through their economic policies being shown as irredeemable bullshit – then Mahmood’s mission would lose all sense of urgency and she would vanish back into the swamp of cynical second-rate politicos.
Or maybe it won’t work out that way at all. Maybe she spends the next four years driving a wedge even deeper into the divisions in British society, producing a polarisation that has the far right on one side and liberal progressives on the other. Could the Labour Party even survive if it were placed in a situation where its blue-collar immigration anxious voters swung further to the right, and those with a different moral compass were driven to new political formations? Strange alliances are already being forged on the right wing of the Labour Party, with Blue Labour guru Maurice Glasman pointing the way with his recent acclaim for Nigel Farage as the people’s tribune, not to mention dalliances with the atrocious JD Vance and Steve Bannon and others of that ilk.