Immigration

As the teeming mass of mostly male, partly criminal, humanity stews about on Mexican side of our Southern border, entertaining itself by throwing rocks at US border officials, emoting for CNN cameras, and periodically rushing the fence in an effort to break through to America, it is worth stepping back to ask a few large questions. But first, let’s step out of the rancid pool of sentimentality with which the media, in its anti-Trump frenzy, has surrounded this episode.

Donald Trump has been on full offense in the run up to next week’s midterms. The latest front he’s opened with Democrats is over ‘birthright citizenship,’ the practice of awarding citizenship to almost anyone who happens to the born in US territory, regardless of the parents’ allegiance. Liberals insist that the 14th Amendment guarantees this method of making citizens; conservatives take a more restrictive view of the amendment’s language, which recognizes the citizenship of ‘All persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof…’ Are children born to illegal immigrants, for example, subject to US ‘jurisdiction’ in the every sense?

You can feel the excitement in Fox News’s reports that a DHS spokesman, backing the claims that Trump has now walked back, has confirmed that the migrant caravan that has just entered Mexico includes ‘gang members’ and people with ‘significant criminal histories’, as well as people from the Middle East. How hot and uncomfortable they must be, walking all that way in an explosive vest. You can feel the disappointment in CNN’s report that by November 6, the migrant caravan ‘could still be somewhere in the middle of Mexico’, and well short of what CNN recommends as the ‘safest route’, to San Diego via Tijuana.

There have been many efforts to explain the rise of global populism, most of which posit it as a blowback against globalisation and the unequal economic effects that it has had on developed-country populations. The liberal international order has exacerbated income inequality, with middle classes rising in places like China and India at the expense of working classes in North America and Western Europe. But there has been a competing explanation for the shift that is rooted in cultural identity rather than economics. Or rather, identity becomes the way that voters interpret economic decline.

Last week, a 22-year old Swede called Elin Ersson made headlines around the world for her ‘citizen-activism’. Learning that a failed asylum seeker from Afghanistan was to be deported from her country, she bought a seat on the plane that was due to take him part of the way back home (as far as Turkey). Once she was on board the plane Ersson refused to sit down. Filming the whole thing on her mobile phone (natch) Ms Ersson insisted that to send the failed asylum-seeker to his home country would be consigning him to ‘death’ because Afghanistan is ‘hell’. After about 15 minutes of this Ms Ersson got her way. The Afghan migrant was taken off the flight. Some passengers applauded. Ms Ersson cried.

When Sajid Javid became Home Secretary, he did so on the basis that he would be able to undo some of the political damage done by the 'hostile environment policy'. Last night, he rather quietly announced that a key element of this policy would be paused, something Labour's David Lammy immediately seized upon, hauling Javid's junior Caroline Nokes to the Commons for an urgent question. Noakes insisted that this pause was 'temporary', adding that she would not give consent to the data sharing between government departments and other organisations until she was confident 'that we will not be impacting on further members of the Windrush generation'.

In the dark, foggy night that is the Brexit debate, immigration is the dog that has not yet barked. The Chequers agreement contains a promise to formally end free movement, but also to replace it with a “mobility agreement” that could well mean EU migration continues at more or less its current level. Would that provoke a furious public backlash? There are growing signs that some voters are more relaxed about immigration than at the time of the referendum, and more aware of its economic usefulness. Could Theresa May ask the British people to accept a fairly liberal European immigration regime?

The government has finally climbed down on visa restrictions for foreign doctors and nurses, scrapping the cap on numbers who can be employed using the tier 2 visa route. This was costing NHS trusts shocking amounts of money in processing applications from overseas medical professionals which were in large part turned down by the Home Office. It is striking that the government decided this week to relax these restrictions, given they are part of the tough immigration policy introduced by Theresa May. Time was when the then Home Secretary would repeatedly upbraid David Cameron for handing her a net migration target to deliver which her Cabinet colleagues were frequently trying to flout.

What I remember about preparing to leave for my husband’s appointment with the Home Office in Croydon in 2007 is hysteria. A tizzy was not unprecedented; in our household, it’s always the man who’s in a dither, seeing to last-minute primping and chronically unable to get out the door on time. But on this occasion I, too, was rattled, snapping impatiently as I double-checked an enormous bag of documents. A fair bit was at stake. An American, I had acquired my own Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) — a grand designation for ‘residency’ that only the British would coin — during a looser era of the Writers and Artists Visa, long ago eliminated. So the hoop-jumping that the Home Office had come to require for gaining the same status was new to me.