Show caption ‘May announced as early as 2013 her intention to create, in her own words, ‘a really hostile environment’, sending her now infamous ‘go home’ vans to six London boroughs.’ Photograph: Home Office/PA Opinion Theresa May’s thuggish stance on migrants caused the Windrush scandal Satbir Singh The Home Office’s absurd obsession with cheap politics over sensible policy made this shameful fiasco inevitable



• Satbir Singh is CEO of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants Wed 18 Apr 2018 15.57 BST Share on Facebook

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“If you lay down with dogs, you will get fleas!” warned an impassioned David Lammy MP earlier this week, in one of the most moving performances I have ever seen from the backbenches. And, let’s face it – he’s right. The government may talk the talk on fake news, extremism and integration, but the current crop of Tories have done more than any other party in recent history to normalise the discourse of the far right. Embracing the art of fear-mongering and the mantra of shutting or kicking out immigrants “at any costs”, the prime minister has carried a toxic politics previously limited to the fringes all the way to Downing Street. She now bears direct responsibility for the growing crisis in the Home Office she left behind.

The plight of the children of Windrush has rightly caught the public eye. The fact that people who came here as subjects of the crown are being routinely harassed, detained or possibly even removed without due process is outrageous. But anybody who has ever worked with or tried to navigate the UK’s immigration system will know that this crisis was no accident. This was the inevitable consequence of the thuggish, fundamentalist approach to immigrants that Theresa May baked into every layer of the Home Office bureaucracy during her six years running it.

Britain can create a sustainable, fair immigration system that works for everyone: a system that’s built on evidence, the rule of law and realistic objectives. Or it can tattoo the words “down to the tens of thousands” on the foreheads of every minister and official at the Home Office. It cannot do both. Immigration is no different from any other aspect of economic or social policy – it requires nuance, patience and at least some degree of compassion. As the government’s failure to quickly respond to the Windrush crisis shows us, these qualities appear to be in short supply unless politically expedient.

'National day of shame': David Lammy criticises treatment of Windrush generation – video

It’s this obsession with the cheapest politics over sensible policy that has led us to where we are today. Despite all the talk about shaking off the Tories’ reputation as the “nasty party” (we changed our logo to a tree, so we’re definitely not racist any more), the advice of strategists such as Lynton Crosby (essentially Steve Bannon with better hair) was clear: blame immigrants where possible to defend your right flank from Ukip. So May announced as early as 2013 her intention to create, in her own words, “a really hostile environment”, sending her now infamous “go home” vans to six London boroughs, and outsourcing immigration enforcement to doctors, nurses and teachers. Targets were increased for Home Office staff, creating strong incentives to avoid thinking of applicants as people and to turn down applications to enter the country for as little as a typo. And upon this rock they built their church, David Cameron and May committing the government to bringing net migration down to below 100,000 a year, a target that the government has never met.

Q&A What is the Windrush deportation crisis? Who are the Windrush generation? They are people who arrived in the UK after the second world war from Caribbean countries at the invitation of the British government. The first group arrived on the ship MV Empire Windrush in June 1948. What happened to them? An estimated 50,000 people faced the risk of deportation if they had never formalised their residency status and did not have the required documentation to prove it. Why now? It stems from a policy, set out by Theresa May when she was home secretary, to make the UK 'a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants'. It requires employers, NHS staff, private landlords and other bodies to demand evidence of people’s citizenship or immigration status. Why do they not have the correct paperwork and status? Some children, often travelling on their parents’ passports, were never formally naturalised and many moved to the UK before the countries in which they were born became independent, so they assumed they were British. In some cases, they did not apply for passports. The Home Office did not keep a record of people entering the country and granted leave to remain, which was conferred on anyone living continuously in the country since before 1 January 1973. What did the government try and do to resolve the problem? A Home Office team was set up to ensure Commonwealth-born long-term UK residents would no longer find themselves classified as being in the UK illegally. But a month after one minister promised the cases would be resolved within two weeks, many remained destitute. In November 2018 home secretary Sajid Javid revealed that at least 11 Britons who had been wrongly deported had died. In April 2019 the government agreed to pay up to £200m in compensation. Photograph: Douglas Miller/Hulton Archive Show Hide

Where did that number come from? You can ask pretty much any expert on this issue and they’ll give you the same answer: thin air. There’s no industry expert, thinktank, lobby group, trade union and certainly no branch of the NHS that decided that a singular obsession with this suspiciously round number would guide us towards greater social cohesion or undo the consequences of the financial crisis, the recession or austerity. Imagine the absurdity of an agricultural policy that was based on a fixed target for the number of tractors.

Suspiciously, unlike almost every other metric for government performance, the target has never been moved and the methodology has never been amended (to remove, for example, students or grandmothers) to help make the Home Office look better. One suspects that the Tories are aware that if they were, heaven forbid, to get immigration “under control” it would be awfully difficult to blame immigrants for everything. One fears that it may not simply be about the politics; perhaps Enoch Powell won after all and we now have a Conservative government that genuinely believes what it says. It’s somewhat odd to hope that it is just being manipulative.

Either way, we now live in a country in which immigration is something to be “controlled”, “brought down”, “mitigated”. Immigration – and by extension immigrants – are a problem. There is a firm ceiling on the number of people who can come here and contribute, regardless of what industry says; on the number of us who can have a wife or a grandmother living in the same country. We live in a country in which victims reporting crimes to the police are handed over to immigration enforcement officials if their papers aren’t in order. In which people die in detention centres or languish in them for years. In which half of all appeals find that the Home Office has made the wrong decision, while the Home Office makes an 800% profit on its mistakes.

And we live in a country in which black, British citizens of Caribbean origin are called “illegal”, are detained, denied healthcare and exiled. The government can tell us that this was an accident. But for those who have been watching for more than a week, this was anything but. That’s why we are calling for an independent commission into the behaviour of the Home Office. It is the only way that the rights of the Windrush migrants, and everyone else who may unwittingly be caught up in Theresa May’s hostile environment, can be protected.