Words matter. That is perhaps the simplest lesson delivered by the Windrush scandal. When placed next to the terms immigrant and asylum seeker, language such as “floodgates”, “swarm” and “bogus” have a real world impact. In 1995, the then Conservative home secretary, Michael Howard, helpfully talked of Britain as an “attractive destination for bogus asylum seekers and other illegal immigrants”.

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Since then tabloids and broadsheets alike have repeated that sentiment ad infinitum. Howard was himself only repeating ideas by people like Enoch Powell and Winston Churchill before him. In the seminal There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, academic Paul Gilroy wrote that “at the suggestion of Churchill, a Conservative cabinet discussed the possibility of using ‘Keep Britain White’ as an electoral slogan as early as 1955”. We may well recoil at the blatant racism behind the words but they merely serve as a precursor to language and a way of viewing immigrants that sees them as the other against which the nation must be secured.

Twenty years on from Howard’s intervention, David Cameron would describe migrants in Calais as a “swarm of people”, while the Sun complained that European judges had opened the “floodgates to illegal immigrants”. Such language acts as a supporting structure, stoking our basest of emotions – fear and hatred. These are sentiments translated into policy which institutionalises inhumanity. We shouldn’t be surprised, as Mishka from the group Freed Voices puts it, “to see things like the Windrush scandal, or the six deaths in [immigration] detention last year, or Grenfell, when the people at the heart of these tragedies are portrayed as either a threat to society or completely disposable to it”.

The triumph of the Windrush scandal has been in seeing “those” people tell their once ignored and undervalued stories. Hearing about their plight in their own words has generated the power to topple a home secretary and plunge the prime minister into further crisis. Always, though, within that telling is the emphasis on legality. And it is perhaps no surprise that the consequence of that has been to turn the focus on those that are perceived as underserving of our sympathy – illegal immigrants.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An immigration raid in Slough in 2014. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Amber Rudd herself, as she struggled to answer a straightforward question on removal targets, was nevertheless at pains to make a distinction between “Windrush, who are legal migrants” (despite many never having been migrants in the first place) with “people that are here illegally”. Cue David Goodhart opining that Windrush isn’t a “simple tale of goodies and baddies”. It is, in fact, “minorities … who are most likely to be disadvantaged by illegal immigration”. It is only immigrants that are deemed good or bad when it comes to Windrush, not the political policies that precipitated the scandal.

Undocumented migrants are considered criminals first, human beings with a relatable journey last. But they live among us. They may be a high-level academic researcher unaware that they didn’t have the right stamp in their passport to renew their work permit, or the engineer who made a minor amendment to their tax record. Or it could be a neighbour who, like 33-year-old Michael, from the detention action group Freed Voices, “grew up in the East End, loves pie and mash and supports Chelsea”. He arrived in the UK with his father and younger siblings when he was 12. By the time he was 16, his father had abandoned them. Michael was told that because he was over 16, he was “no longer a social services problem”, and was left destitute.

Michael would eventually use someone else’s identity to work in order to provide for himself. His younger siblings have a legal right to remain in the UK. After 21 years living in the UK, Michael is still considered an “illegal” immigrant. He has been caught in the same bureaucratic quagmire typical of cases from the Windrush scandal. What is our moral responsibility to people who are de facto citizens but who are treated as though they belong elsewhere? How can our language and, more broadly, our immigration policy treat them with the dignity they deserve?

On the same day that Rudd finally resigned for misleading the country – or for not being fully aware of the facts (take your pick) – Piers Morgan on ITV’s Good Morning Britain could be seen “grilling” Diane Abbott on Labour’s policy regarding “illegal” immigrants. For Morgan, “It’s not a difficult question”. In reality it seems a simple answer only when the language employed dehumanises thousands, enabling a culture of casual brutality and neglect that we have seen typified in each Windrush story.

In their case, as in that of many more undocumented migrants, becoming “illegal” had nothing to do with criminality but was instead about a bureaucratic process that turns people into targets who must be deported. A “hostile environment” has become a fitting response to “illegal immigrants” because the label embodies criminality and disorder (which, we’re told, we must be protected against) while also obscuring the humans behind the term. Targets can be set to deport and detain because the reality of human suffering that they necessarily cause has been obscured by the word “illegal”.

This is the moment to challenge that noxious discourse. We must use this opportunity, this rare moment when immigrants can be seen as human, to think about all those who come to this country – and consider an amnesty for all.

• Lola Okolosie is an English teacher and columnist focusing on race, politics, education and feminism