Divisive rhetoric will not improve practices that put migrants' lives at risk
The day after George Osborne announces massive public spending cuts that will impact on the working poor, decimate councils and reduce police numbers, David Cameron plays the populist card with a speech on immigration.
Portrayed as a ‘one nation’ speech, it is a clear attempt to divert attention from the cuts and today’s immigration statistics.
Although details will not be set out until the Immigration Bill is published after next week’s Queen’s Speech, the highlights we have been shown are, at best, meaningless rhetoric. They also reproduce Labour’s mistakes of tough talking and over-promising – and can only act to reduce the public’s trust in the ability of politicians to deliver on immigration policy.
The prime minister’s proposals include:
- New powers for councils to crackdown on unscrupulous landlords and evict illegal workers/migrants more quickly. Councils already have a legal framework to regulate the private rental sector and tackle bad landlords. But housing regulation has been cut and this proposal will be meaningless without funding.
- Creating a new offence of illegal working and enabling the police to seize wages as proceeds of crime. Employers face civil penalties and since 2006 it has been a criminal offence to knowingly employ on irregular migrant. Most irregular migrants work below the radar in a low-waged cash economy and send money home at the soonest opportunity. Giving the police powers to confiscate wages is pure dog-whistling.
- Creating a new labour market enforcement agency to crack down on the worst cases of labour market exploitation. What is wrong with extending the powers of the Gangmasters Licencing Authority and increasing the numbers of National Minimum Wage inspectors?
Worryingly, Cameron’s proposals also included extending the ‘deport first, appeal later’ measures to all immigration appeals and judicial reviews. This already happens in immigration appeals that are not asylum and human rights cases. It seems that the government proposes to remove refused asylum-seekers to their home countries, where they can then appeal.
In the three months to 31 March 2015, 2,242 asylum appeals were handled by judges, of which 29 per cent were upheld in that the appellant was granted asylum or leave to remain in the UK.
Nearly one in three of the Home Office’s initial decisions are wrong, a figure that is higher for Afghan nationals (40 per cent of appeals upheld) and Eritreans (45 per cent of appeals upheld).
Sending someone back home when a wrong judgement has been made puts lives at risk.
Unsurprisingly, the Cameron speech made little reference to today’s migration statistics, which comprise administrative data from the Home Office on asylum and visas, as well as demographic estimates on net migration from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The Home Office statistics show that visas for family and student migration are steady, but a 9 per cent increase in work visas in the year to March 2015, compared with the previous year.
Asylum applications are also steady, with 25,020 applications in the year to March 2015, of which the largest numbers came from Eritrea, Pakistan and Syria.
Work, student, family and student immigration from outside the EU make up under half of immigration to the UK. The ONS migration estimates suggest that in the year to December 2014, 42 per cent of immigration to the UK was from other EU countries.
Continued immigration from the EU has meant that the target to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands has been missed yet again. In the year to December 2014, it is estimated that 318,000 more people came to the UK than left as emigrants. Unsurprisingly, announcements from Downing Street and the Home Office did not mention the missed target.
Overall, there was little positive in today’s announcements. There were no proposals to promote integration which might help us live together better. Rather, today’s proposals are distracting rhetoric which create a vicious circle of ‘tough talk’ that reinforce negative public attitudes.
These, in turn, prompt ever more uncompromising statements. So, no change from the nasty party.
Jill Rutter is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward.
44 Responses to “Tough talk but no real change on immigration shows the Tories are still the nasty party”
ArthurPendragon
What is not being said by the political classes is that all of Europe is in decline, but they still wants to behave like class one nations. It is too unpalatable for politicians to tell their electorates they have failed. Yet they want their perks after leaving office to continue. I heard a news report that wages in Spain have fallen by 40% since the collapse. If the public do not believe things will return to the way they were then the electorate will be asking for cuts at the top – large income differentials etc. Immigration does make the national GNP level grow only because more people are working in lower wage jobs. The GNP per capita is what should be looked at.
The media say nothing because they are all on the same public school root to top jobs gravy train. Labour / Tory are all the same. The University growth plan by Blair was another scam on the electorate. University degrees are a sorting system for top jobs – it does not increase the supply and the old university tie system keeps those that benefit benefitting. We earn a lot of money from foreign students – they all want to stay – and they stop social mobility. London is 70% foreign born and it has become a haven for the world’s richest (mainly foreign) to enjoy each other’s company and compete. This gives the impression the Uk is super rich, not very much filters down. However, it allows the Tories to raise campaign funds, be influenced in exchange for keeping the electorate suppressed with lies. In 2015 election I could find no party that was telling the truth or they were so stupid to believe money trees exist. The Uk is a country under occupation where nationalist groups just help divide and rule.
Selohesra
Whether they like it or not they have no choice in the matter – not whilst we remain in EU anyway
stevep
There are no easy answers. Multiculturism happened for a variety of reasons: War, Famine, Empirical roots, aspiration, slavery, invasion etc. What puzzles me is why anyone in a lush, fertile, sunny country in, for example, the Caribbean would want to leave close family roots and emigrate to grey, cold, dismal old Blighty. A partial answer may lie in a documentary about British immigrants from old Empire countries I saw a couple of years ago. In it, a number of elderly “Windrush” era migrants spoke about their impressions of Britain as seen from their schooldays where their countries` place in the Empire was taught in school, a sort of “know your place” history. They were taught Britain was the mother country, the centre of a glorious Empire, the motherlode where mythical pots of gold lay. So It is small wonder that after the war they went to look for a “better” life. When they arrived here they found a different country to what they had been taught to expect. Skilled people found themselves working as bus conductors and doing unskilled work in factories, even though the skilled jobs they applied for were available, due to racist attitudes. They were denied rented accommodation due to racist attitudes and found themselves in, what was back then, the poorer, more dismal parts of towns and cities which over the years became partially ghettoised. This actually happened a decade after Britain had chosen to go to war to fight against racism.
So we can partly lay the blame at our own door, The Smug, often vicious, British attitude of intolerance that comes from a perception of superiority. Echoes of Empire reverberate from SunMail hysterical outbursts about immigration, cleverly designed to divide, rule and divert our attention away from far more important matters.
A recent article by Katie Hopkins in the Sun comparing migrants to cockroaches took a far more dangerous turn, which is to dehumanise them. The Nazis used the same approach with Jews, comparing them to rats. Everyone on the planet knows how that ended.
Furthermore, I wonder if countries within the EU would be panicking as much about their political position if it was rickety boatloads full of, say, white Australians or white Americans wanting help and sanctuary, instead of black Libyans.
Ah, the echoes of jackboots on cobbles carry down the years, the blackshirts and brownshirts, the flaming torches. The intolerance.
Being agnostic, I`m not prone to such utterances, but I thank God that the vast majority of us are welcoming, friendly and tolerant to each other and long may it remain that way.
stevep
Divide and rule has always been and always will be, the number one tactic of the elite. They fear us.
Percy Bysshe Shelly, following the atrocity of the Peterloo massacre, eloquently spoke for the masses in his poem “The Masque of Anarchy”, urging them to throw off their shackles of slavery and embrace collectivety:
“Rise like Lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth like dew, which in sleep had fallen on you: Ye are many – They are few!”
damon
Hmmm Stevep, the first part of your post is spot on. Caribbean migrants to England did indeed talk about learning about the ”Mother Country” and had probably swallowed some of the myths of empire. And so, when invited, jumped at the chance to go and see what it was like for themselves. My own parents did it from Ireland.
The racism the Caribbeans faced was pretty unpleasant. But was a pretty human reaction for the times. Even today much of the world is very parochial. I spent last winter in Sri Lanka, and as a white man, my colour and foreignness was like a beacon shining above me. Every step I took in the country I was noticed as being an ”ausländer”. But at least the Sri Lankans were friendly about it.
They might not have taken to African migrants coming to their country in numbers though. Where in the world is it much different? Only in the western white countries really. That’s why I sometimes think the insistence that whites must accept the kind of change that is not the norm in non-Western countries almost a bit racist.