Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System

by Colin Yeo;

  The data at the time seemed to support May’s claim that students were overstaying their visas: statistics from the Office for National Statistics suggested that on average around 100,000 international students were remaining in the UK beyond the end of their visa every year.15 However, these estimates were based on the notoriously inaccurate International Passenger Survey, the unreliability of which we considered back in Chapter 2. When in 2017 the Home Office used hard data from exit checks to assess what was really happening to students, it found that only around 4,000 remained in the UK at the end of their visas, meaning 97.4 per cent of international students left before their visa expired.16 As a result, the Office for National Statistics had to dramatically revise its previous figures; it looked as if the entire crusade against foreign students had been founded on a massive misconception.

  Either to settle the question once and for all or to kick it into the political long grass, the Migration Advisory Committee was commissioned to report on the impact of international students. Published in 2018, the report reviewed all the available evidence and confirmed the reasons Tony Blair had launched the drive to recruit foreign students in the first place. Evidence from Universities UK suggested that international students were worth £10.8 billion in export value and supported over 200,000 jobs in towns and cities across the UK. As much as 23 per cent of teaching income and 13 per cent of all university income came from international student fees.17 The experts recommended that no cap on numbers should be imposed, that no tightening of visa rules was needed and that it ‘would be better to loosen visa requirements and regulations as much as possible’. Although it was not feasible to remove students from the net migration figures because of the internationally accepted definition of ‘migrant’, the committee found that, if there was a problem with including students in those figures, ‘we think it more likely comes from the existence of the target itself than the inclusion of students in that target’. Theresa May’s reforms had created ‘an image problem’ that was harming the UK’s reputation and the country’s ability to recruit genuine students.18

  Cameron and May were driven by more than merely a technocratic measure of numbers in and out; they wanted to reduce the speed at which the ethnicity of the population was changing. There were plenty of other policies aimed at breaking the link between migration and settlement in other areas of immigration policy: ending automatic grants of settlement to refugees after five years, tightening the family rules as we saw in Chapter 5, extending the probationary period for spouses from two to five years and the obstacles erected to naturalisation as a British citizen, which we will look at in Chapter 12, were all intended to achieve the same purpose: preventing migrants from settling permanently in the United Kingdom. Whereas previous governments had seen students as a natural resource to be exploited, the Cameron and May governments perceived them as a cultural and ethnic threat to be contained.

  NOTES

  1 R (on the application of Joshi & Anor) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2016] EWHC 216 (Admin).

  2 Bhandari v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWCA Civ 129.

  3 ‘Peer pressure, perks, or pounds: what makes overseas students violate visa laws?’, Asian Image, 2 January 2020.

  4 See discussion of the loss of London Metropolitan University’s licence in Chapter 3.

  5 ‘Tier 4 of the Points-Based System: Guidance for Sponsors Document 2: Sponsorship Duties Version 04/2016’, Home Office.

  6 ‘Bogus Colleges, Eleventh Report of Session 2008–09’, Home Affairs Committee, 14 July 2009.

  7 Theresa May, Hansard, House of Commons debate, 22 March 2011, vol. 525, col. 855.

  8 David Cameron, speech on immigration, 14 April 2011, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/apr/14/david-cameron-immigration-speech-full-text

  9 Data from Higher Education Statistics Agency.

  10 ‘International students in the UK’, Migration Advisory Committee, 11 September 2018.

  11 ‘Investigation into the response to cheating in English language tests’, National Audit Office, 24 May 2019.

  12 ‘English language tests for overseas students: One Hundred and Sixteenth Report of Session 2017–19’, Public Accounts Committee, 9 September 2019.

  13 Theresa May, speech to Conservative Party conference 2015, 6 October 2015, available at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-s-speech-to-the-conservative-party-conference-in-full-a6681901.html

  14 See Cameron’s 14 April 2011 speech above and Theresa May, ‘A borderless EU harms everyone but the gangs that sell false dreams’, Sunday Times, 29 August 2015.

  15 ‘International student migration research update: August 2017’, Office for National Statistics.

  16 ‘Second report on statistics being collected under the exit checks programme’, Home Office, August 2017.

  17 ‘International students in the UK’, Submission of Universities UK to Migration Advisory Committee, 11 September 2018.

  18 ‘International students in the UK’, Migration Advisory Committee, 11 September 2018.

  CHAPTER 9

  FREE MOVEMENT: AUF WIEDERSEHEN, PET

  Free movement is generally something British citizens foist on other countries. In the imperial era, for instance, the British went where they liked whether the inhabitants of that country liked it or not. After the Second World War, we continued to move abroad in droves. Net migration to the United Kingdom, calculated by taking the number of immigrants and subtracting the number of emigrants, was actually negative until the 1990s. Britain was losing population through migration, not gaining it. Destinations of choice included Australia and New Zealand, but also other European countries, and that became a whole lot easier once the United Kingdom joined what was then the European Economic Community in 1973. The idea that citizens should be allowed to move between member countries was one of the founding principles of what eventually became the European Union. The British embraced the opportunity. From 1983 onwards, television audiences delighted in watching the international antics of previously out-of-work labourers in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, first in Germany and later in Spain. By the time of the Brexit referendum there were around 1.3 million Brits living in other European Union countries.1

  It is one thing for Brits to move abroad, but it is quite another for citizens of other countries to move here. British citizens living overseas are routinely referred to in the UK press as ‘expats’, invoking images of imperial dominance, tea on the veranda, and gin and tonic on ice. In comparison, anyone migrating into the UK is invariably referred to as an ‘immigrant’. This word provokes quite a different reaction, and immigration was to be the decisive issue in the referendum vote for the UK to leave the EU in 2016. But it is only in the past twenty-five years that Europeans have really come to be seen as immigrants in UK public discourse at all.

  EUROMYTHS AND BENEFIT TOURISM

  Immigration was simply not an issue in the debate on UK membership of the European Economic Community, later to become the EU. The most vocal Eurosceptics in the 1960s and ’70s were on the left of the political spectrum, with Hugh Gaitskell suggesting in 1962 that joining the Common Market would end ‘a thousand years of history’ and Tony Benn and Michael Foot leading the campaign to leave in the referendum of 1975. In contrast, Margaret Thatcher, as Leader of the Opposition, was an ardent pro-European campaigner in the 1975 referendum. She was highly sceptical of even the idea of a referendum at all, calling it ‘a device of dictators and demagogues’ and refusing to say whether she would respect a vote to leave if she were to be elected Prime Minister.2

  Thatcher went on to sign the Single European Act in 1986, establishing the new Single Market. But by 1988 she was sounding a more sceptical tone. In a major speech that year in Bruges, she said she had not ‘successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels’. She also railed ag
ainst the abolition of internal borders within Europe, arguing that such borders ‘protect our citizens from crime and stop the movement of drugs, of terrorists and of illegal immigrants’. No mention was made of stopping Europeans crossing borders, though.3 She strongly opposed the idea of a single currency. In fact, it was her stridency on this issue that triggered Geoffrey Howe’s resignation in late 1990 and thereby Thatcher’s own downfall. The so-called ‘Maastricht rebels’, who dogged John Major’s government in the early 1990s by repeatedly voting against the legislation enacting the Maastricht Treaty, followed Thatcher’s Bruges template, making their stand on the issue of loss of sovereignty. All of these elements involved some traces of high principle mixed with copious quantities of xenophobia. The xenophobia was aimed at Germans specifically or at foreign governments and foreign bureaucrats, though not at foreign citizens moving to the United Kingdom. Ultimately, though, these arguments had limited appeal with the public and were one of the reasons the Conservative Party lost the 1997 general election so comprehensively.

  But there were two people in the early 1990s who showed how to build a broader base of anti-European support. Between them, they invented, or at least perfected, what were to become the big guns in the arsenal of the Eurosceptics in time for the most recent referendum.

  The first, Peter Lilley, was one of the founding members of the Thatcherite ‘No Turning Back’ group of Conservative MPs in 1985. His political career began as parliamentary private secretary to Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s then Chancellor. After Nicholas Ridley was forced to resign from Cabinet in 1990, having compared the European Community to Hitler, Lilley was suddenly brought into Cabinet to replace him as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and keep the right of the party happy. He campaigned for John Major in the Conservative leadership battle after Thatcher’s fall and was subsequently kept on by Major in Lilley’s previous job. Nevertheless, he had close links to a group of backbench MPs who rebelled repeatedly against Major’s attempts to pass legislation enacting the Maastricht Treaty in 1993 and was one of the three Cabinet ‘bastards’ of whom Major famously complained. Concerns about Europe were generally expressed in terms of loss of sovereignty at the time; Lilley’s contribution was to make it about immigration as well.

  At the Conservative Party conference in October 1994, Lilley, by then the Secretary of State for Social Security, stood up and launched into an extraordinary xenophobic tirade against a new bogeyman of his own invention:

  People travelling round Europe pretending to look for work … Not so much a Cook’s Tour as a Crook’s Tour … Just imagine the advice you might find in a European phrasebook for Benefit Tourists…

  Wo ist das Hotel? … Where is the Housing Department? Où est le bureau de change? … Where do I cash my benefit cheque? Mio bambino è in Italia … Send child benefit to my family in Italy. Je suis un citoyen de l’Europe … Give me my benefits or I’ll take you to the European Court.

  But next year’s edition will have just one phrase – Où est la société de something for nothing? Sorry, Jacques, Britain’s branch is closed.4

  Lilley was hardly the first politician to claim that immigrants were scroungers. He was the first major politician explicitly to say that Europeans coming to the UK were scroungers, to blame EU law and to apply classic xenophobic tropes to European citizens. He was not to be the last: David Cameron drew heavily on these arguments before and during his doomed attempt to renegotiate the terms of UK membership of the EU, as we shall see.

  Moving on to the second man, as the Telegraph’s European correspondent between 1989 and 1994, Boris Johnson pioneered the so-called Euromyth. His articles lampooned officials and institutions, complaining incessantly of absurd regulations and excessive waste. Johnson drew from the same poisoned well, even then increasingly outmoded and unfashionable, as the explicitly anti-German sentiments of previous years. But his work seemed more acceptable because it was generically anti-European rather than explicitly racist. The stories were based on half-truths, perverse exaggerations and unrecognisable caricatures. One journalist who knew him at that time, Jean Quatremer, later wrote, ‘Johnson was the incarnation of the gutter-press dictum: never let the facts get in the way of a good story.’5 Other correspondents came under pressure from their editors to cook up similar stories, and a growing number obliged. This new form of populist anti-Europeanism made it seem that the foretold loss of sovereignty had come to pass. The cleverly written stories suggested that there was, or at least there was about to be, an annoying impact on real people’s lives. Johnson imagined in one story that prawn cocktail crisps were to be banned and wrote another on a fictitious new standard ‘Euro condom’ size. Other journalists followed suit with tales of ‘Bombay mix’ snacks being renamed ‘Mumbai mix’ to satisfy politically correct ‘EU twits’; of bans on barmaid cleavage; of British biscuits being outlawed and so on.6 A detailed reading of such articles invariably revealed a will-o’-the-wisp, always dancing just out of reach. Fact-checking and myth-busting are like bringing a clipboard to a gun fight, though, and if anything only serve to reinforce the lies. The high principle and low xenophobia of the Eurosceptics were poor ammunition compared to the witty and explosive munitions Johnson and his journalistic heirs were able to provide for the cause.

  Johnson’s Euromyths and Lilley’s benefit tourists were to prove powerful weapons, but they would probably have remained niche xenophobic jokes had it not been for the influx of European citizens from Eastern Europe and the Balkans that followed the expansion of the EU in 2004. This fundamentally changed the context of how the union was perceived and discussed in the UK. Suddenly, European citizens were seen as immigrants too. And there were a lot of them.

  THE POLITICISATION OF EU FREE MOVEMENT

  The United Kingdom had long advocated expansion of the European Union. This was essentially a foreign policy objective, intended to dilute the influence of the integrationist and social democratic French–German alliance within the EU. Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s governments had both been in favour and Tony Blair’s was equally as enthusiastic.7 EU Association Agreement negotiations for a sort of pre-membership status began as early as 1990, and under these treaties self-employed citizens from the Eastern European and Balkan states were allowed access to the EU from 1995. Formal EU membership applications followed in 1996; years of negotiations were finally concluded in late 2002; the Accession Treaties were signed in 2003; and membership finally began on 1 May 2004.

  Expansion of the EU’s borders meant extending free movement rights to millions of new European citizens. In order to ease any social and economic shock, the laws governing EU expansion allowed existing members to limit these rights for up to seven years. There was initially cross-party support to welcome new workers to the United Kingdom, and in 2002, Tony Blair announced that controls would not be imposed. This was uncontroversial at the time. However, as other countries announced they would impose restrictions, it gradually became clear that every other country except Ireland was going to impose controls of some sort. The Conservative Party was increasingly willing to use immigration as a ‘wedge issue’ to distinguish itself from Labour, and under new leader Michael Howard, their position started to harden from 2003 onwards.8 At the last minute, Blair’s government decided to introduce a mandatory monitoring scheme called the Worker Registration Scheme, but not to restrict new arrivals. By the time 1 May 2004 arrived, the official Conservative Party position was that controls should have been imposed.9

  The official Home Office estimate for the number of new EU arrivals on UK shores in that first year was between 5,000 and 13,000.10 The actual number turned out to be more like 300,000. The estimate, made in 2003, had been based on the assumption that other countries would not impose controls, and the researchers behind it tried to predict future behaviour based on past migratory patterns. Most migrants from Eastern Europe and the Balkans had historically headed for Germany, for instance, not the United Kingdom. The failure to predict the
scale of migration from Eastern Europe and the Balkans would come to haunt the Labour government.

  As in previous years, when hypothetical migrants had the temerity to become actual migrants, support quickly waned. The right-wing press went ballistic and the Conservative Party jumped with glee upon an issue that combined favourable political positioning with easy goal-scoring against Labour’s competence. Meanwhile, a series of other unrelated immigration stories, particularly the 2005 deportation scandal discussed in Chapter 10, fed into a wider narrative that Labour was mismanaging migration and letting too many people into the country. When Bulgaria and Romania also joined the EU three years later, on 1 January 2007, controls were imposed on their citizens. And when Gordon Brown took over as Prime Minister later that year, the tone on immigration started to change. Within months, Brown had pledged to create ‘British jobs for British workers’, echoing the long-defunct language of the National Front from the 1970s.

  Despite all this, immigration from the EU was initially of little interest to the incoming Conservative-led coalition government of 2010. Apart from anything, Cameron had said he did not want his party to ‘bang on about Europe’ the whole time. Read Cameron’s early comments on net migration carefully and you will see that he said it was non-EU immigration he wanted to cut.11 Efforts to hit the net migration target focused on asylum, family cases, economic immigration and foreign criminals. But the rise of UKIP changed all that.