A brief history of managed migration (and why it isn’t an easy alternative to free movement)

immigration people

‘Managed migration’ has been the official goal of government policy since the late 1990s. It has gone down a confused, stumbling road, requiring constant revision and return to legislation in order to resolve its innumerable internal tensions and conflicts.

The central idea is that migration is linked to strategies for economic growth, with the numbers of people being admitted linked to perceptions about what the jobs market needs at any point in time. It is possible to see ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ versions coming into play over the years. The period 2001-05 – associated with David Blunkett’s time at the Home Office – provides the example of soft managed migration, led by the assumption that the strong economic growth of the period would absorb all newcomers into the labour market in a virtuous cycle promoting higher levels of prosperity for all.

But whilst Blunkett believed that numbers didn’t matter, as long migration was contributing to economic growth, he was pessimistic that working class voters would accept this relative openness. Alongside a reformed work permit scheme (later to be refined and marketed as the Points-Based Scheme), he also worked to increase the capacity of the immigration control authorities to impose their own order on the rising number of arriving migrants. He laid out plans for biometric identity cards, ramped up fines on employers not properly checking the paperwork of their workers, and increased the size of the immigration detention estate – all measures intended to show that he would be ‘as tough as old boots’ with regard to any migrant who failed to pass muster.

Out of control

The soft approach, such as it was, became the object of a virulent campaign in the tabloid media which alleged massive abuse of the immigration system combined with a large negative impact on the living standards of native workers. Blunkett failed to demonstrate that his department had the level of oversight and control that he claimed his policies had achieved. His prime minister, Tony Blair, came down on the side of the negative media coverage of the issue and pivoted to the harder approach, firstly during the brief period of Charles Clarke in the Home Office, and then John Reid. Reid famously declared the Home Office as being ‘not fit for purpose’ when it came to managing immigration, and set course for policies that more strictly tied non-EU migration to the conditions imposed by the Points-Based Scheme and a range of actions with challenged elements of free movement rights for EU nationals.

The hard approach ultimately provided no more assurances to voters that migration was ‘under control’ than had been provided by the softer scheme. Arguably, simply by investing even more strongly in the narrative that ‘something had to be done’ about immigration simply reaffirmed the widely-held view that Labour had screwed up from day one and now couldn’t be trusted to get anything right. As the government stumbled headlong into the crises and recessions of the period 2007-10 the spike in unemployment levels and arrest in wage growth, properly attributed to the credit and sovereign debt shocks, came to be blamed even more strongly on immigration.

Even harder

Labour’s eviction from office in 2010 was not the end of managed migration. The scheme was taken over wholesale by the Cons-Lib Dem coalition with two significant tweaks. The first, and best known, was the pledge to reduce net migration’ to the ‘tens of thousands’ over the lifetime of Parliament. The second was to reinforce the state’s capacity to police migration through the adoption of the ‘hostile environment’ strategy. Both of these innovations were fully consistent with the claim that migration was being sensibly managed in ways that supported economic growth and prosperity.

In truth, managed migration, in terms of its stated aims, has failed just as badly under the coalition and subsequent Tory government as ever it did under Labour. Net migration increased to levels around two and a half times higher under these governments from that inherited from Labour. The hostile environment has been shown to be a catastrophic error, both in terms of the harm it has done to long-settled migrants and also the to reputation of the Home Office for basic competence. As things stand, the record of managed migration in all its forms across the past 20-plus years is abysmal. Even more depressing is the fact that there is so little evidence of essential lessons being learnt by senior politicians of either of the two large Parliamentary parties.

Roots of the Windrush scandal: The contempt the system has for black, working class people

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights uses some pretty blunt language in its recently published report to express its disapproval of the performance of the Home Office in what has come to be known as the Windrush Generation scandal.

Not enough was in place, it tells us, to “minimise the likelihood of such mistakes being made.” “Such mistakes”, it spells out, being the lack of awareness of the rights of the individuals concerned; ignoring evidence provided by family members, lawyers and MPs and letters from Government bodies like HMRC; wrongly placing the entire burden of proof on the people under suspicion when critical information could have been obtained from another department by Home Office officials; failure on the part of the officials to adequately satisfy themselves that they had a power to detain (and deport) individuals even when evidence on the case files strongly suggested that there was no lawful power to detain these individuals; and so on and so on.

All this amounts to ‘systems failure’ rather than a bundle of errors made by a bunch of inept Home Office officials. The question it brings to mind is exactly what system is judged to have failed in this instance. Is it the one that requires civil servants to check and double-check that their decisions comply in all respects with the requirements of the law? Or is it the bigger system, which sets out the grounds in which a group of people will be considered good immigrants, and therefore worthy of due process; or another type all together whose status as undesirables is so obvious they can be shunted off into the fast tracks that allow for detention and deportation?

Latest chapters

The Windrush migrants have had plenty of experience of the latter category, having been subjected to ‘colour bar’ discrimination in jobs and housing when they arrived in the 1950s and 60s and subsequent treatment that rarely raised their position and that of their children above that of second-class citizens of the UK. Mauled by the education system, winnowed out of the jobs market, and so many hauled up before the courts by criminal justice procedures, the sense of being part of a big family that appreciated them has been poorly developed across all these years.

The two cases featured in the Human Rights Committee report as exemplars of the bad treatment meted out to the Windrush immigrants, that of Paulette Wilson and Anthony Bryan, ought to be read as merely the latest chapters in the history of the racism to which black working class people have been subjected for decades. It is necessary to say black working class people because Ms Wilson and Mr Bryans’ status as, respectively, cook and painter/decorator, are as a significant part of the story as the blackness of their skin.

When it comes to immigration control, two great negatives feature as a fundamental part of the schema. The first is coming from a poor country, conceived as a place where people of colour are predominant among the general population. The second is being a wage-earner looking for work opportunities amongst the middle group of trades, requiring skills learnt on the job rather than the classroom. Being both black and a seeker of a position offering a living wage is part and parcel of any visa official’s basic definition of an undesirable immigrant.

“Turning the tap on and off”

It is important to hold this in mind as the options for immigration policy post-Brexit start appearing on the table. Liberal-types working out of the policy think-tanks encourage themselves with the knowledge that immigration will continue under whatever system is put in place, and if it can be honed down to those who the focus groups tell us are acceptable – skilled professionals and international students – then all might be well. But by accepting this as a defensible position they are acceding to the prejudice that remains entrenched against non-professional, working class migrants.

Labour MP Caroline Flint, apparently ignorant of the fact that she was speaking in the midst of a scandal about the treatment of Windrush immigrants, offered up a vision of what her ideal post-Brexit immigration policy would look like during a debate in the Commons in mid-June. She set out a yearning for an immigration system in which “… we can turn the tap on and off, when we choose.”

Yet when we treat people as a flow of commodities which we can be turned on and off, then we assuredly create the very situation which Flint’s parliamentary colleagues excoriated just weeks previously in a memorable debate in the same Commons. Years spent as members of communities, as workers in pursuit of a decent living, as people raising families and doing their best to fit in, count for little or nothing when it comes to deciding when the tap has to be turned off.

Getting beyond Windrush

The Parliamentary Human Rights Committee was right to point to systems failure rather than a mere cascade of mistakes in its judgment on the Windrush affair. But it is a failure that has its root in the deep contempt that the middle-class Britain made up of people with property-portfolios and assets yielding a stream of rent-income has for those who get by as best they can by selling their labour to whoever will buy it by the week, day or hour.

Getting beyond the Windrush scandal will mean forming an entirely different perspective on those who come from any part of the world looking for the chance to earning a living denied to them in their own countries. It should not be that only the passage of forty or more years of living the life of working class Britain wins grudging admission that you have ‘contributed’ and therefore accumulated at least a few rights. Rights ought to be the basis of immigration policies, available equally to the cooks and painter/decorators of this world as anyone from the more esteemed professions.

Next steps to resolve immigration crisis: a public inquiry and a public discussion about a rights-based approach to policy

Virtually all the early demands for change that issued out of a public shocked to learn what has been going on with the Windrush generation scandal seem to have been met by a panicked Home Office.

An emergency task force to resolve the issue, free application procedures, a promise of compensation, and even full British passports are, we are told, to be made available to a group of people who yesterday were being fired from the jobs, made homeless, refused healthcare, and even detained and threatened with the prospect of deportation.

Immigrant rights groups have received the support of the opposition parties in Parliament for their call for a public inquiry into the way the Home Office has handled this affair. What is needed is a judge-led examination of the entirety of the hostile environment policies which have driven what can only be described as the persecution of this group of Commonwealth citizens.

Independence critical

It is important that any such inquiry should have distance from the Parliamentary arena. Some might feel that the Home Affairs Select Committee has done a good enough job with its recent examination of Home Secretary Amber Rudd, and its series of highly critical reports on immigration policy. The drawback here is that government ministers have one last fall-back position they can use to deflect the most severe criticism: your party tried to do pretty much the same thing when it was in power.

There is no getting away from the truth of this fact. The first ‘hostile environment’ legislation can be traced backed to Tory immigration act in the 1990s, which ended support for asylum seekers through mainstream social security systems and also imposed on employers the duty to check the immigration status of prospective employees. But New Labour was ruthless in following up on these early initiatives by ramping up the level of civil penalties imposed on employers who were inadvertently taking on people with proper papers and increasing the powers of enforcement officials to detain and deport people.

Root-and-branch review needed

It seems clear that the Tories are going to continue back-peddling to cover their mistakes over the Windrush generation and more concessions are there to be squeezed from them on this issue. The long-delayed review of immigration policy, promised over a year ago as the basis of a post-Brexit control system, will probably have to be looked at all over again to make see if car-crashes of the kind we have seen in the past few weeks can be avoided. The issue for advocates of the rights of migrants however has to be more than just pushing for the next concession, and instead look towards what needs to be done to build the assurance of a secure status and the proper standard to social justice into immigration policy.

The idea of a rights-based approach to immigration policy has been a constant subject for discussion among people required to think a little more deeply into the issues than most politicians – and even ministers responsible for administering controls – seem to have time for. Its potential for providing an alternative to current systems, in which power is exercised in so arbitrary a fashion as to be almost exempt from the rule of law – was flagged up in a blog published by Migrants’ Rights Network earlier this year.

Rather than be allowed to pass as a lofty but probably unrealistic ideal for the way immigration policy should operate, we really need to find ways to root its central propositions into the public conversation currently underway.

Principles for a rights-based approach

First and foremost, immigrants need to be acknowledged people with an inalienable right to fairness and justice in all their dealing with national authorities. The New York Declaration for Migrants and Refugees, adopted in 2016, sets out nine ‘guiding principles’ for what it calls a ‘people-centred approach’ which need thorough discussion as to how they can be applied in the UK context, particularly as we move towards Brexit.

The Windrush generation affair has told us that we need policies which rigorously disavow racism of both the direct and ‘unwitting’ institutional kinds. The ‘guilty until proven innocent’ assumptions that allowed people to be stripped of their right to work, to receive social security and healthcare, to have access to rented accommodation, the right to drive a vehicle or run a bank account, has to be ended. The presumption behind all immigration policy should be that the people who are subject to its authority are on a route that leads, in reasonable time, to settlement and full citizenship. At all times they should have the assurance of equality of treatment with citizens in all matters that concern their essential health, welfare and well-being.

There is a limit to the usefulness of the pop-up remedies to the injustices revealed over the past few weeks. It is good that the Windrush generation people have moved to rapidly from fear of deportation to the grant of full citizenship in such a short space of time. But we can only be assured that the system has been fire-proofed from such violations of natural justice if we now start to move in the direction of a consciously thought-out, rights-based approach to immigration policy. Let’s see what we can do to get that conversation started.

The remedy Commonwealth citizens need – not ‘amnesty’ but compensation!

The news media has finally come alive to the fact that grave injustices are being done to a group of people who have lived, worked, paid taxes, raised families, etc, etc for the last forty years or so and who now find their status as legally settled persons under challenge from NHS bureaucrats, private sector landlords, employers, bank officials, and the DVLA. Even worse, some of them are being banged up in detention centres and threatened with deportation.

We are, of course, talking about the citizens of Commonwealth countries who were settled in the UK before the all-important 1971 Immigration Act came into force. This piece of legislation granted the status of permanent resident of the UK to these people and with it the assurance they could go about their lives on a basis which approximated to British citizenship with a few exceptions, until the day they die. For more on the legal background to this see Nick Nason’s excellent blog at the Free Movement blogspot.

What we now know is that the people who benefited from this status all these years ago are now in the cross-hairs of the Home Office’s efforts to track down people in an irregular position to ramp up immigration enforcement statistics. To accomplish this task the authorities have rolled out a ‘hostile environment’ programme which requires all sorts of third parties – employers, landlords, hospitals, high street banks, police officers checking driving licenses – to inquire into the immigration status of anyone they come across during the course of their business. This will often mean checking with the Home Office’s Visas and Immigration department to see what information they hold on the person being dealt with.

Victims, victims, victims….

If this happens to you, welcome to a whole world of pain. The Visas and Immigration people have only very incomplete records of people who are legally resident in the country and an inquiry that concerns someone who arrived in 1966 as an infant, often on her mother’s passport, will not show up on any database as showing someone entitled to be here. This triggers a reaction in which the person is refused the service they have applied for on the grounds that they have not established that they are legally present in the country.

Being refused a job you have applied for, or being told by your landlord that you must quit the premises is bad enough, but it is made even worse by the initiation of investigations by Home Office officials about your position which can, and has, led to people being arrested, detained, and even deported.

Some of the victims have received coverage in the press in recent weeks. There is Sarah O’Connor for example, who arrived in the UK with her mother at the age of six. After losing a job she had held for 16 years she applied for Jobs Seekers Allowance and was challenged by the Benefits Agency to prove she was here with a legal immigration status. Documents showing she had been to school in England, had worked and paid taxes all her life, and much else are deemed unsatisfactory. Not only was she refused unemployment benefits she has also been told she cannot work in the UK. Now heavily in debt because of this enforced lay off she now lives in fear, after 51 years residence, of a knock on the door which will signal the start of a deportation process back to a country she hasn’t seen since she was a toddler.

Or Paulette Wilson, a 61 year old grandmother who spent a week in Yarl’s Wood detention centre under threat of deportation for not having documents relating to her entry into the country, way back in 1968, when she was aged 10. Or Renford MacIntyre, a 64-year old living in the UK since 1968, and now made homeless, sleeping on a sofa in an industrial unit, because he doesn’t have the papers the authorities now say they need.

We’ve got just the form for you!

The Home Office has taken a significant step in acknowledging the distress that their hostile environment regulations are now causing people with the legal right of residence but are without the papers they claim are now needed to prove they meet the increasingly exacting standards of the immigration control system. They excuse themselves for the distress being caused to people in this situation by saying the measures are ‘proportionate’ and justified by what they call the need to ensure that immigration is rigorously controlled. They claim that people who do not have the documents needed to prove their legal status can apply for a “no-time-limit” biometric identity card which provide the evidence which employers, landlords, banks, the benefits agency, the NHS, etc, now require from people.

Sounds reasonable, but what is actually involved in applying for a biometric card? The Home Office has set this out in a guidance note for Undocumented Commonwealth citizens resident in the UK which appeared on their website on 13 April.

The guidance links to the application form for the no-time-limit biometric card, which turns out to be 21-pages long and which requires that “documents proving identity” and “evidence of continuous residence in the UK throughout all of the years since initial entry be provided. An experienced legal advisor will have a good idea what that might be – school attendance records, registrations with GPs, national insurance contributions, landlord testimonials, and maybe letters from church ministers to cover any period when the person was in the UK but not actively working, for whatever reason. Bear in mind that this is to cover a period that might be as long as 50 years – may be more – so expect to find that schools attended decades ago might no longer be in existence, GP surgeries closed and doctors deceased.

It is no wonder the Home Office guidance recommends that anyone contemplating the action gets advice from a qualified legal expert. It might have mentioned there is no legal aid for this type of work and lawyers willing to take the work on a private basis are increasingly hard to find. But don’t despair, a solicitor will eventually be found at the right price, though it is likely you, won’t be able to afford it….

The Home Office for the application itself is £229 – more if dependent family members are included. All-in-all I wouldn’t expect to be able to complete the whole application package, obtain the documentary evidence needed, and pay for the help from an advisor for much less than £1,000.

Remember that the people who find themselves have to make this application are likely to be in this position because someone has refused them a vital service, and this will probably have triggered a chain of events which has led to them being dismissed from a job and unable to get one, refused benefits, and heavily in debt through efforts to survive without an income. In these circumstances £1,000 is not just a large sum of money – it is an impossibly large sum of money.

Compassion….?

In the meantime the Caribbean High Commissions and Church of England bishops have issued a call for compassion from the Home Office and a please for special help to get the problems caused to this group of residents sorted out. Expect the Home Office to be slow to grant this. The idea of an expedited application procedure with lower evidential requirements will send shivers down the spines of Home Office honchos who will fear an avalanche of applications coming in from people with claims they will be inclined to see as dubious to say the least.

Commonwealth citizen well-wishers are also on the scene, using on-line petitions to raise a call for an ‘amnesty’ for anyone arriving the UK between 1948 and 1971. Ignore for a moment the fact that the cut-off date for one group is actually 1 January 1973, and also that a large group of people equally the victims of the ‘show-us-your-papers’ culture arrived as minors after this later date, and we have to ask whether this idea of an amnesty is likely to provide a remedy.

Firstly, amnesties are usually requested by people who have committed some sort of wrong in the past and who wish to be forgiven for their transgressions. What have these Commonwealth citizens done wrong? They established a legal right to be here at the time they entered and throughout all the long years of their residence have satisfied anyone who needed satisfaction – including official government departments – that they are lawfully settled. The burden of proof should surely be reversed. Instead of people in these circumstances showing that they are legally resident, and it being assumed that until they do so they are not, it would be simple to require the Home Office to positively state its reasons for believing that a person is not lawfully resident and set out their reasons for holding to this belief. In the absence of this evidence supporting this accusation the person concerned ought to be accepted as a lawful resident.

In place of amnesty, compensation….

Instead of ‘compassion’ and ‘amnesty’ supporters of the rights of tis group of long-settled migrants should be calling the government to account for its grossly disproportionate action in exposing them to them to the callousness of the hostile environment. The fact that so many victims of these measures have the same characteristics – i.e. the children of people from the countries of the Caribbean – then the question of whether the policy is institutionally racist ought to be tested in the courts.

The McPherson ruling on what constitutes institutional racism sets out the real frame of reference by which we judge the Home Office’s actions in these matters. As the judge set in his report on the failings of the Metropolitan Police into the death of Stephen Lawrence:

“The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin […] [which] can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”

The ‘professional service’ that legally-resident Commonwealth citizens require from the Home Office is one that says the evidence of a lifetime of residence, work and compliance with the law in the UK ought to be accepted without the imposition of demands for proofs which are onerous, burdensome, and excessively expensive. When this evidence is callously discounted, causing immense hardship and fear to an individual, then what is needed is not an amnesty, but compensation, and lots of it. Who’s going to start a petition demanding that?