So, here we go again. The last seven days, as anyone not hermetically sealed in a lead-lined box beneath Ben Nevis can have hardly failed to notice, has been “immigration week”. How does that differ from the first 71 weeks of the Starmer government? You may well ask.
The fun kicked off, as all the best weeks do, with the Home Secretary reassuring the Commons that she would not, in fact, be stripping asylum seekers of their jewellery the second their feet touched the beach at Dover. (Since inquiries are all the rage these days, perhaps she might usefully launch one into who’d been briefing the Sun.) The stuff not backed away from was only marginally less dispiriting: doubling the frequency with which “leave to remain” is reviewed to every 30 months, in case we might be able to get rid of a few; promises to deport families more aggressively, even if they contain children; an end to the public duty to prevent destitution which, oh god.
And this, remember, is targeted at refugees. There’s a promise of “safe and legal routes” too, but you’d need to look hard to spot it, and the numbers will anyway be arbitrarily capped by the Home Secretary. Whether this will act as a deterrent to small boat migrants remains to be seen. As a deterrent to left-liberals voting Labour, it’s surely hard to beat.
After all that, the proposed reforms to the rest of the immigration system seemed almost cuddly. Sure, the wait period for indefinite leave to remain will be extended from five to ten years, including for 2.6 million people already here, and a whole bunch of factors could lengthen that period by up to another decade. Yes, the people on post-Brexit health and social care visas who came here to stop our public services imploding will see their wait times triple.
But at least they’re not changing the rules for those who already have ILR, unlike some parties I could name. It’s a dividing line, guys! Just don’t look too hard at what just happened in Denmark. Everything’s going to be fine.
So much of the debate has focused on this stuff – the politics, the practicalities, the inescapable opinions of Nigel Farage – that there’s been no room to discuss the morality of the situation. The idea there might be something shoddy about expecting people to work for a pittance in our underfunded care homes for 15 years, without ever being sure we’re not going to kick them out, simply doesn’t feature. Little wonder, then, that no one seems to be asking my next question, but nonetheless:
Doesn’t it ever strike you that deciding someone’s legal rights based on a nebulous combination of birthplace and parentage is a bit… weird?
Look, I get why we do it. I’m not going to say everything would be fine if the world had open borders, because I’m not actually sure that’s true. I think it’s an ideal to strive for, yes – but so is a combination of European public services and American tax rates and, funny story, it turns out that actually doesn’t work great either. In the same way, there are obviously practical reasons we can’t simply throw open the doors – not just because most people don’t want to, but because the results are highly likely to end up a mess.
Nonetheless, the current situation means that we grant people different rights based on their genetic heritage and on which scrap of land they happened to be born on: that is a literal description of how we manage the human race. There are those whose fates and life chances were determined because they were born on this side of some made up line rather than on that side of it. That’s mad, isn’t it?
For much of history, after all, we did no such thing: the first restrictions on immigration to the UK weren’t introduced until 1905. You could have uncontrolled borders in the 19th century because, bluntly, it just wasn’t that easy for large numbers of people to move about. Today, though, between air travel and a global lingua franca and social media making the lives of others much easier to see, it’s both simpler and more tempting. Climate change can only accelerate this. There can be no going back.
Even so, while modern states may prove bigger and more durable than the often-fragile polities that preceded them, borders can and do move, and entire countries can sometimes spring from nowhere or suddenly die. That seems a flimsy basis with which to determine the rights of actual people, who exist even when it is not politically convenient for them to do so, and to tell them where they can and can’t live.
I understand why we do it. I don’t think it’s going to change. But I can’t help but think there’s be less poison in this debate if we could somehow acknowledge “nationality” is a contingent and imperfect response to a practical problem – rather than pretend that it’s as an eternal, unalterable quality that somehow determines self-worth.
[Further reading: Tinkering with ECHR definitions will not help the government]
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