Don Flynn says Labour is tacking to the right on immigration
What is the difference between President Trump’s war on immigrants in the US and the one being waged by the UK Home Office and our own communities of precarious residents whom the authorities are inviting us to think of as “illegal”?
Not as much as you might care to think. The attribution of small boat crossings almost exclusively to “criminal gangs”, as opposed to the need of a large number of people to flee to places of safety, has much in common with Trumpite rhetoric, which works so strenuously to link America’s irregular migration to narco-racketeers and other bad actors.
There is also the theoretical underpinning to what is regarded as the harm caused by migration, which is reproduced across both American immigration enforcement and the policies advocated in the UK government’s white paper, Restoring Control Over the Immigration System.
Like Trump on the other side of the Atlantic, the white paper set out the view that immigration into the country had been an economic and social mistake, displacing citizens from the jobs market and crowding them out of housing and other public services.
For the US president, immigrants were “bad hombres” and the most draconian action was justified in reducing their numbers. Though we haven’t seen anything like “Alligator Alcatraz” in the UK yet, its performative logic is reproduced in boastful claims by the Home Office of record levels of raids on communities and workplaces and the number of people being removed from the country.
What we no longer hear about from Labour politicians are the patent injustices of the immigration control system. In opposition, they were happy to denounce the “hostile environment” being constructed by the Tories and the dreadful scandal of the Windrush generation, which was its direct consequence.
Human rights and anti-racism campaigners hoped that the election of the new government last year would mean bringing an end to the “hostile environment” which was the legacy of the Tories. But the route being taken seems much closer to that of the right-wing American president.
Labour’s immigration reforms have effectively brought the right to seek asylum in the UK to a crashing end. With small boat crossings firmly opposed, we know that the Home Office is also planning to stop people who entered on visas as students and workers from claiming asylum.
Immigrants have been serenaded by Labour during its opposition years for their role as the hardest of workers, the pillars of community life, and as people forging a multiculturalism which will benefit the UK as it finds its way in the modern world. In government, it is all looking very different. The hostile environment remains firmly in place, to the detriment of both immigrants and of all of the communities in which they live, work, and raise their families.