Immigration has been a fixture of Britain’s political discourse for therefore lengthy, it now feels, like Voltaire’s god, that if the problem didn’t exist, we must invent it. What would our politics seem like, what would the broad majority of Britain’s media do with themselves, with out immigration? It has develop into such a function of the nation’s political tradition, it quantities to a type of historic exhibit: “rivers of blood”, the “hostile environment”, “go home” vans, “controls on immigration” crockery, the Brexit “breaking point” poster, the Windrush scandal, “stop the boats”, “island of strangers”. And now, summer time riots.
What conjoins all of those is one factor: misinformation. I’ve banged on for years on this column concerning the disconnect between immigration discourse and the truth of how laborious and costly it’s to enter the UK and keep there. A ballot from final week demonstrates that gulf with placing simplicity. The conclusion to be drawn from the survey is that assist for hardline immigration insurance policies is linked to ignorance about migration figures. Half of all respondents thought that there have been extra migrants dwelling within the UK illegally than legally. Based on YouGov, these perceptions are “wide of the mark”, with these within the nation legally vastly outnumbering those that usually are not, even on the most beneficiant estimates of irregular migration.
However there’s a new improvement associated to that ignorance. Over the previous 20 years or so, immigration calls for have shifted from variations of “controlling our borders” and decreasing numbers of recent migrants, to demanding that zero migrants be allowed to enter, and “requiring large numbers of migrants who came to the UK in recent years to leave”. That is an “extraordinary” improvement, in response to YouGov. Certainly, the final time a member of a political social gathering even hinted at any type of deportation coverage was within the late 00s, when British Nationwide social gathering chief Nick Griffin (one other set up within the immigration exhibit) said that he would “encourage” voluntary repatriation of authorized migrants and “those of foreign descent to return to their lands of ethnic origin”. On Saturday, far-right protesters clashed with police whereas holding indicators saying “Remigration NOW”.
This newest mutation of migration discourse to incorporate mass deportation is right down to, as ever, media and politics. Rightwing media not solely continually cowl immigration negatively, however undergo totally different seasons of doing so, relying on the political local weather. The 2010s was about Muslims, the run-up to Brexit about sure east European nationalities and the way their presence had a deleterious impact on British society, and the most recent part is about “numbers”. Particularly, numbers of irregular arrivals. The small boats fixation right here is central, as they evoke a way of dropping management of the borders, sadly not as simple to tug off after Brexit.
That fixation has been mirrored in political discourse. The final authorities’s contribution to this was the Rwanda scheme and Rishi Sunak’s “stop the boats” marketing campaign – one among his 5 guarantees, which was given equal weight to such macro challenges as bringing down inflation and chopping NHS ready lists. And this authorities has continued in the identical vein.
Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech, which referred to an period of rising migration as a “squalid chapter” within the nation’s historical past, was the rhetorical opening salvo in an anti-immigration marketing campaign that in its tone and relentlessness reinforces the problem as a disaster. Starmer’s X account continually posts highlights of crackdowns in opposition to those that strive “to cheat the system” and even Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)-like movies of deportations. Up to now week alone, Starmer has posted 14 occasions on X; 10 of these posts had been about immigration, significantly irregular arrivals and people arriving on small boats. This can be a wildly disproportionate emphasis, contemplating this cohort makes up a minuscule share of general immigration to the UK.
The result’s a framing of all of immigration by means of the lens of irregular arrivals, and due to this fact cultivating a way of disaster and overwhelm. A research by the College of Birmingham that surveyed 1000’s of media texts and political paperwork earlier this yr discovered that that disproportionate give attention to small boats shapes public attitudes in the direction of migration, fuelling “a sense of crisis and emergency”.
There’s one thing compulsive about all of this, virtually addictive. Posturing on immigration is an affordable hit, a low-cost (to politicians – the price may be very excessive for migrants) solution to gesture at some type of govt motion, for a authorities in any other case within the mire. The irony is that this fixation produces ignorance about all immigration, which implies there’s much less and fewer the federal government can do to deal with the very myths it has seeded. If you happen to create the impression that small boats, “illegality” and dishonest are the defining function of the UK’s immigration, then how are you going to anticipate the general public to make distinctions that their very authorities doesn’t?
And so in a grim spiral, Labour continues to gasoline the sense of disaster, then chase it, by no means catching up, and at all times setting the stage for these additional proper to make ever larger guarantees of crackdown and deranged claims about housing and crime. The galling idiocy of all of it is that posting hectically about immigration and rolling out hardline measures is self-defeating. It doesn’t even work to instil confidence in Labour as the one credible social gathering on immigration. The extra Labour presses the problem, the extra it reinforces the validity of anti-immigration rhetoric, empowering Reform because the specialised automobile of crackdown. To voters mobilised by this, Labour can by no means be higher than the actual factor.
And so it may solely be a spiral. To be able to preserve immigration as that simply activated problem central to a political system that has few solutions to any of the structural issues which are most salient to folks’s on a regular basis lives, from the price of dwelling to lack of housing, we should at all times be at some type of breaking level. That poisonous power has to go someplace. It’s not the type of factor that may be only a informal a part of discourse and keep in a holding sample. The stakes are continually increased, extra horrifying, extra defining of why issues are unhealthy. And on and down it goes.
We should wean the UK off its “immigration dependency”, Starmer mentioned in 2022. However the issue is his – and your entire political institution’s – dependency on immigration as a difficulty to be exploited, somewhat than to be dealt with with honesty, responsibility of care to immigrants who are actually terrorised within the streets, and to the entire nation’s social cohesion.
