A new report demonstrated decisively how the UK’s immigration legislation is racist by design – just as the new Labour Party government seeks to amend it. In particular, it explored the reality that UK policies mainly target racialised people from Britain’s former colonies in raids, detention, deportation, and deprivation of citizenship.
The recent ‘illegal’ Migration Bill 2023 and Nationality and Borders Act 2022 are part of a long history of targeting and excluding ‘unwelcome’ and ‘undesirable’ groups of migrants. Crucially, the report illustrated how these bills base this rhetoric on colonial ideas of race and deservingness. In other words: who can be economically ‘useful’ to Britain.
Labour government’s racist immigration legislation
The Migrants’ Rights Network released the fresh report following the announcement of the new Border Security Bill in the King’s Speech. Notably, this set out how the new Labour government would introduce a new piece of immigration legislation to:
modernise the asylum and immigration system, establishing a new Border Security Command and delivering enhanced counter terror powers to tackle organised immigration crime [Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill]
As the Canary has previously reported, these punitive, aggressive policies will do little to actually end perilous boat crossings. To do that, the Labour government would instead need to expand safe routes to asylum. However, so far it appears wedded to the rightwing hardline borderisation approach.
Given this, the Migrant Rights Network report sought to put this alarming continuation in the context of its long-term hostile environment history. It examined how racism and colonialism play a central role in immigration policies.
Significantly, the report traced the historic colonial origins of the Home Office. Alongside this, it looked at the role of the 1948 British Nationality Act. Both of these shaped the notion of the “good immigrant” along racial lines.
Since then, governments have deliberately designed immigration legislation to keep non-White, racialised communities from Britain’s former colonies out of the UK. For instance, this included ‘The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962’, and ‘The 1981 British Nationality Act’.
Racism and colonialism has shaped UK immigration policies
Specifically, the report explored the function of racism and colonialism in shaping legislation around citizenship, and visa schemes. Deprivation of citizenship legislation and its amendments have legalised racism in Britain. That is, these have continually deprived racialised people of citizenship.
Of those deprived of citizenship and their nationalities between 2002 and 2022:
- 85% had or were deemed to have nationalities of countries in Africa, and South or West Asia (the Middle East)
- What’s more, 83% were from former British colonies. Of this, 41% were South Asian, all being Pakistani or Bangladeshi.
Of course, the latter findings sit alongside new prime minister Keir Starmer’s recent racist dogwhistle attack on Bangladeshi people living in the UK.
Furthermore, the report unpacked how the “good character” test involved in applications for British citizenship, invokes racist ideals of ‘civility’. In doing so, the analysis identified that these application processes associated racialised migrants with criminality and, for Muslim migrants, extremism.
UK’s long-term ‘racist commodification’
The report also traced the historical continuity between today’s points-based immigration system and the work vouchers of the 1960s. Most notably, it found that governments have based visa schemes, including sponsored worker schemes, on ‘racial commodification’.
In short: the commodification of racialised people and/or people from the Global South for the purposes of economic extraction and exploitation by the Global North.
This has created an increasingly large and insecure class of migrant workers. In particular, the government has turned people into objects for their labour. As such, the report concluded that immigration legislation limits the ability of racialised people to come to the UK. Invariably, this has controlled migrants’ freedom to live their lives.
CEO of the Migrants’ Rights Network Fizza Qureshi said:
For People of Colour and other marginalised groups, this system simply wasn’t designed for us. That is why we are calling for the Hostile Office and immigration system to be dismantled. With a new Government in power, we hope it works with us to dismantle these cruel structures that have made the lives of migrants, and migratised people, a misery and joins us in taking a bold and transformative stance with migrant justice at the heart of policy.
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