by Colin Yeo;
By omitting to qualify Marr’s question about an overall cap on immigration, and by moving the discussion on to net migration, Cameron had accidentally implied a new policy of setting an overall cap on net migration. According to Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, it was not intended to be a deliberate, hard-edged net migration target at the time.10 Nevertheless, the interview was covered in the Daily Telegraph the next day with a headline reading ‘David Cameron: net immigration will be capped at tens of thousands’. The article was more nuanced when read in its entirety, but the write-up still suggested a commitment that under a Conservative government, ‘net immigration would be kept in the “tens of thousands”, rather than the current rate of “hundreds of thousands”’.11 It is probably not going too far to suggest that the Telegraph headline ended up driving a fundamental transformation of British immigration policy.
There was quite some history to the Conservative Party policy of a cap on immigration, as Andrew Marr will have known very well when he decided to press Cameron on the point during the interview. The concept of an unspecified ‘overall annual limit on the numbers coming to Britain’ had featured in the party’s manifesto for the 2005 election, along with a related pledge to withdraw from the Refugee Convention.12 It was perhaps a response to David Blunkett’s politically unwise statement as Home Secretary in 2003 that he saw ‘no obvious limit’ to the number of skilled migrants who might enter the country, nor did he believe there was a maximum population that could be accommodated.13 The Conservative Party commitment in 2005 was a hard cap applying to EU, economic, family and humanitarian immigration. No actual number for the proposed cap was announced in the manifesto, but the policy attracted accusations of racism and xenophobia.
When David Cameron took over as Conservative Party leader following that election, he set about re-positioning his party as more modern and liberal. He attempted to move on from having a crude absolute limit on all immigration and in 2007 gave a speech on the subject of population growth. Cameron suggested it was not immigration as such, but high net migration that was the problem, because it was pushing up the total population to ‘unsustainable’ levels. As a solution, he proposed ‘explicit annual limits on non-EU economic migration, set at a level substantially lower than the current rate’.14 No specific numbers were proposed. The policy was more refined and more realistic than the previous party position, as it did not require withdrawal from the Refugee Convention and it did not suggest that EU migration either could or should be limited.
However, it transpired that Cameron had been a little too successful in moving the discussion from immigration to net migration. In solving the short-term problem of the political positioning of the Conservative Party, he had created a new long-term problem for governing. The headache that was to haunt both Cameron and his Home Secretary Theresa May, who would be responsible for implementing the impossible pledge, was that such a limit would have no impact on EU migration nor on emigration, which would prove to be significant contributors to overall net migration in the coming years. If the problem was net migration, then a limit on non-EU migration could never be the solution. As the economy improved, more EU citizens arrived and less UK residents departed; or, in other words, net migration rose.
The hamstrung approach set out by Cameron in 2007, of vaguely aspiring to reduce overall net migration by means of setting an immigration cap on non-EU migration, eventually featured in the Conservative Party manifesto for the 2010 election: ‘We will take steps to take net migration back to the levels of the 1990s – tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands.’15 The means of achieving this policy remained the same as that proposed in 2007: ‘Setting an annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants admitted into the UK to live and work.’ There was no specific, unambiguous net migration target here, only a commitment to ‘take steps’ to reduce net migration to somewhere in the ‘tens of thousands’.
Cameron was to return to the immigration issue in another major speech in 2011. This time he could not have been clearer: ‘No ifs. No buts. That’s a promise we made to the British people. And it’s a promise we are keeping.’16 By late 2011 the BBC was reporting that the government had ‘pledged to cut net migration to tens of thousands by 2015’, and that the promise was being spectacularly missed. ‘Tens of thousands’ proved to be too wordy for journalists and headline writers, though. By early 2014, the figure of 100,000 seems to have emerged as received wisdom in the media.17
A further hardening of words found its way into the Conservative Party manifesto in 2015, which declared, ‘We will keep our ambition of delivering annual net migration in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands.’18 Far from ‘taking steps’, this was arguably the strongest, clearest expression so far that the party not only had a target for net migration but fully intended to stick to it. Indeed, there was nothing really to be lost by this stage; everyone already thought that there was such a target anyway, no matter whether one had actually been set or not. Nevertheless, in 2017 the Conservative Party manifesto reverted once more to the ambiguous language previously used, returning to the hamstrung approach of mentioning net migration but suggesting it could be achieved with a limit on non-EU immigration: ‘It is our objective to reduce immigration to sustainable levels, by which we mean annual net migration in the tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands we have seen over the past two decades. We will, therefore, continue to bear down on immigration from outside the European Union.’19
The accidental net migration target became central to Theresa May’s identity as Home Secretary then Prime Minister. Meanwhile, the actual policy of limiting non-EU migration was basically forgotten from 2010 onwards, no matter what the manifestos said. A cap on skilled workers was imposed but no similar caps were introduced for family or humanitarian immigration. As we will see in Chapter 6, David Cameron even agreed, under huge pressure, to a refugee resettlement scheme that increased the numbers of refugees arriving in the UK by 20,000 over a five-year period. Had the government been serious about meeting the net migration target, this increase in humanitarian migration would need to have been balanced out with a reduced quota for other types of migration.
This was never seriously on the cards. The accidental net migration target could only ever be met through chance, if at all, because the government, for the very good reasons we have examined here, was not willing to impose a strict quota on families, students, refugees or other categories of migrant. Rather than resile from the impossible policy, however, May and Cameron felt it was better to at least look like they were trying. The result was an all-out assault on immigration in which not just migrants but lawfully resident and even British citizen ethnic minorities became collateral damage: the hostile environment.
NOTES
1 Bridget Anderson, Us and Them: The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 51.
2 ‘International Passenger Survey: quality information in relation to migration flows’, Office for National Statistics (accessed 9 February 2020).
3 Dr Carlos Vargas-Silva and Robert McNeil, ‘The Net Migration Target and the 2017 Election’, Migration Observatory, 4 May 2017.
4 ‘Statement from the ONS on the reclassification of international migration statistics’, Office for National Statistics, 21 August 2019.
5 Hansen, ‘The Decline of an Ideal: Conservatives and Immigration, 1958–1960’, in Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain, pp. 80–99.
6 Ibid., pp. 119, 150.
7 Its formal title is the ‘1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol’.
8 ‘“I fear for my grandchildren” says former Archbishop of Canterbury, as he calls for Christian values to be defended’, Daily Mail, 7 January 2010.
9 Available at: https://youtu.be/ADJ4BLqN6V0
10 ‘How Cameron’s jobs miracle ate his immigration target’, The Spectator, 26 February 2015.
11 ‘David C
ameron: net immigration will be capped at tens of thousands’, Daily Telegraph, 10 January 2010.
12 Conservative Party election manifesto, 2005, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/11_04_05_conservative_manifesto.pdf
13 ‘No obvious limit to immigration, says Blunkett’, Daily Telegraph, 14 November 2003.
14 David Cameron speech, 29 October 2007, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7067500.stm
15 The Conservative Manifesto 2010, available at: https://www.conservatives.com/~/media/Files/Manifesto2010
16 David Cameron speech, 14 April 2011, available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-13083781
17 ‘A shortcut to hitting net migration target?’, BBC News, 3 June 2014.
18 The Conservative Party Manifesto 2015, available at: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/ukmanifestos2015/localpdf/Conservatives.pdf
19 The Conservative and Unionist Party Manifesto 2017, available at: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/conservative-party-manifestos/Forward+Together+-+Our+Plan+for+a+Stronger+Britain+and+a+More+Prosperous....pdf
CHAPTER 3
HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT: PAPERS, PLEASE
Towards the end of The Great Escape, the famous film of 1963 depicting a mass escape by British prisoners of war, we watch with a sense of dread as a young Gestapo officer works his way down a train carriage inspecting the documents of the passengers as he goes. ‘Ihre Pässe, bitte,’ he casually demands of two key British characters, Bartlett and MacDonald. ‘Your passports, please.’
As a young immigration lawyer at the turn of the millennium I was taught that this was not the British way. Unlike other European countries, we have sea borders and check immigration paperwork on entry. We did not need or want continental-style identity cards or any bureaucratic checking that papers are in order, I learned. Identity cards had been introduced in the United Kingdom during both world wars but were scrapped again afterwards. Clement Attlee’s Labour government initially tried to retain identity cards after the Second World War, arguing they were needed for access to state services such as rationing, the NHS and welfare benefits. But following the very public conviction of Liberal Party member and former councillor Harry Willcock for refusal to produce his identity card to the police, the system was scrapped in 1952 by a Conservative government. History appeared to repeat itself when a Labour government introduced a new system of identity cards with legislation in 2006, which was then scrapped by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2010. Or so it seemed at the time, anyway.
One of the key elements of the hostile environment has been introducing citizen-on-citizen ‘papers, please’ checks into ordinary life, for employment, accommodation, banking, driving, healthcare, marriage and more. If you think this sounds a lot like a system of identity cards, you would not be far wrong. It is a lot like a system of identity cards, except that it is also far more complex; there is no single document available to use as convenient proof and some people are more likely to be challenged than others because the system is tied to immigration status rather than identity. The policy has increased discrimination against ethnic minorities, members of the Windrush generation have been turfed out of jobs, homes and hospitals, while young Britons have had to apply for passports, not to go on holiday but to live in their own country. After Brexit, the tens or even hundreds of thousands of EU citizens who miss the application deadline will feel the effects.
ORIGINS OF THE HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT
The term ‘hostile environment’ has a backstory. We have seen that Theresa May used the words while she was Home Secretary in 2012, but they were already in use within the Home Office, security services and police many years before her arrival, and had even been used by previous Labour immigration minister Liam Byrne. Initially the hostile environment was a term that related to terrorism. It was the label used to describe the post-9/11 policy, both indirectly and directly attacking terrorism, and was to be contrasted with the previous ‘soft’ or ‘safe’ environment. The idea was that it was hard to arrest, prosecute and convict actual terrorists themselves, but it might be easier to target them indirectly by cutting off financial and other support from sympathisers and donors. The same principle of indirect influence and the label ‘hostile environment’ were later applied to serious and organised crime. And then, as David Cameron’s government sought means by which the net migration target might be met, to immigrants.
The key moment in the development of the hostile environment for immigrants was the creation in 2012 of a secret inter-ministerial group in government, initially called the Hostile Environment Working Group.1 A wide range of ministers from across government were involved, including those acting for care services, employment, housing, schools, justice, health and transport. The idea was to make life in the UK intolerable for those who were unlawfully resident by cutting them off from the necessities of life and preventing access to public services. This was to be achieved by requiring the production of immigration papers in all walks of life. And here lies the origin of the problems experienced by the Windrush generation: the government wrongly equated absence of papers with absence of permission. While it was true that those unlawfully in the UK would not have immigration paperwork, it does not follow that all those who did have a right to be here would be in possession of their documents. The working group came up with a wide range of new regulations and data-sharing agreements between government departments, so that if a person was deemed to lack evidence of status by one branch of government, like the NHS or the police, that information would be shared with various other branches of government too. The culmination of the group’s efforts were the Immigration Acts 2014 and 2016.
These Acts were not the first pieces of legislation to introduce privatised, outsourced immigration checks, but they did expand them drastically into new areas of everyday life. The first example on the statute book of privatised immigration controls had been the Immigration (Carrier’s Liability) Act 1987, which imposed a fine on airlines and ferry companies if they carried a person without the correct immigration documents. In effect, this forced the companies to carry out their own checks before allowing passengers on board. If the papers turned out to be good-quality forgeries, the penalty would be nevertheless waived if a check had been carried out. This was followed by the introduction of a similar set of rules for employers by the Asylum and Immigration Act 1996, with the key and rather stark difference that the sanction would be a criminal conviction rather than a simple fine. If a company was found to be employing an illegal worker and had not carried out immigration checks, the employer could be prosecuted. Such prosecutions were almost unheard of, though, probably because they were so draconian. The Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act of 2006 introduced a new system of civil penalties that was much more like the original carrier sanctions scheme. Again, the system imposed a fine if the employer was caught employing an illegal worker without having carried out an immigration check. While it was not a legal obligation to carry out such checks, a wise employer who wanted to avoid the risk of a fine would still carry them out diligently. To avoid accusations of discrimination, which would likely be well-founded, an employer would have to carry out such checks on all members of staff irrespective of their race or background.
The level of fines for employers was originally set at a maximum of £2,000 per illegal worker. Over the next few years this was increased to £5,000, then to £10,000 and finally in 2014 to a massive £20,000 per worker. The penalties would have remained hypothetical without ‘boots on the ground’ raids on business premises by immigration officials, though. Operation Mayapple began in 2012 and involved high-profile immigration enforcement action in workplaces in and around Brixton, London, which is famous for being an ethnically diverse area where the Windrush generation had first settled after the Second World War. Images and videos of the raids were posted by the Home Office on various social media channels, including YouTube, Twitter and Flickr. Most have now been delet
ed or lost to the ever-shifting sands of the internet, but some were still available even at the time of writing. In these videos, minority ethnic workers can be seen being dragged from high street shops by uniformed immigration officials in stab vests, while a second cameraman also records events for posterity in the background. At the time, the Home Office claimed that a total of 2,000 Indians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, Chinese, Bangladeshis and Brazilians were rounded up as part of the operation. Although it has been speculated that Australians might be the number one immigration offenders in the United Kingdom, it was notable that none were reported to have been arrested in the operation. The number of these raids soon increased sharply, with the number of penalties recorded almost trebling between 2012 and 2016. Over the same period, the total value of fines handed out multiplied by around five times to almost £50 million.
With all this publicity and substantial financial penalties becoming a real possibility, workplace culture began to shift. Checking the immigration papers for new and existing employees became a routine part of human resources department policies up and down a country that supposedly prides itself on its aversion to identity cards. In contrast to the highly visible workplace raids, there was at first no fuss and no publicity when black employees were quietly given the shove by employers behind the scenes following these checks. Few cases ever reached the courts because it was very hard indeed for a person without immigration papers to challenge their dismissal. Worse still, legal aid was effectively ended for immigration cases in 2013. Victims just had to cope as best they could – if they could. Some ended up reliant on the charity of friends and family, while others had no choice but to become homeless.