Immigration and the politics of fear

At the UN General Assembly last month, U.S. President Donald Trump harangued European leaders saying, “It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders… Your countries are going to hell.” It was an explicit export of his anti-immigrant ideas to the continent that his Scottish mother had departed as an immigrant to the U.S.

Shift in focus

Immigration has long been a fraught subject in the U.K., with waves of anti-immigrant sentiment fanned by the far right, be it Enoch Powell’s incendiary ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968, the National Front’s activism of the 1970s, or the ‘Take Back Control’ rhetoric of the Brexit debates of the mid 2010s. However, Mr. Trump’s speech marks a turning point: conversations about immigration have gone from decrying illegal or irregular immigration to denouncing legal migration. The focus has shifted from a state’s ability to absorb immigrants to nativist concerns about culture and heritage, dressed up as ‘integration’.

In case those in Britain harboured any illusions to the contrary, three events in quick succession last month dispelled false hopes. First, English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson led a 1,50,000-strong rally called ‘Unite the Kingdom’ in what was billed as a festival of free speech but was, in reality, an anti-immigration protest. (The far-right French politician, Eric Zemmour, spoke to the crowd of the “great replacement of our European people by peoples coming from the south and of Muslim culture.”) Then, Nigel Farage’s upstart Reform UK party (with just 4 MPs) announced that should they come to power, they would scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), which qualifies migrants for permanent settlement after five years, and replace it with a five-year visa with significantly higher income and language proficiency thresholds. The policy would apply to current ILR holders, throwing in doubt the futures of not just those who have moved to work, but also those families with some members resident via ILR. It also raises questions about whether older residents whose income might drop on retiring would find their visa requests rejected. The policy is patently unworkable, but that is besides the point. Reform UK has become a political force to be reckoned with by running on an avowedly anti-immigrant, nativist platform, hewing closely to Mr. Trump’s MAGA politics.

It took the Labour government a few days to call Reform UK’s ILR policy racist, but the new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, then laid down new requirements for permanent settlement: the qualifying period for ILR will now be 10 years; applicants have to demonstrate a “high” standard of English proficiency; possess a spotless criminal record; show that they are in employment and have not received benefits; and prove that they have contributed to society by volunteering. In short, those applying for residency will be held to a higher standard of behaviour and a nebulous higher bar of moral worth than their British neighbours. This creates two tiers of residents: British citizens who can live their lives as usual, and legal migrants who will have to live a life of precarious conditionality.

Keen to prove themselves tougher on immigration than Reform UK (Mr. Farage is far ahead of Prime Minister Keir Starmer in opinion polls), Labour has changed the goal posts for settlement. The Conservative Party is not far behind: former Conservative Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick, complained about “not seeing another white face” in a 90-minute visit to a Birmingham neighbourhood and framed his concern as an issue of integration. This is now no longer about migrants or settlement; it is about race. The debate is turning toxic.

Today, it is settlement, tomorrow it could be citizenship. If the goalposts are changed on citizenship, there is the danger that the U.K. will move towards classes of citizenship: white British and others. And the others will need to constantly prove themselves worthy. The U.S. has already shown that this proposition is not improbable; it has tried to strip constitutionally mandated birthright citizenship from the children of migrants resident temporarily or illegally. Earlier this year, the Trump administration sent back illegal Indian immigrants in shackles in military aircraft. The dehumanising spectacle painted them as a threat to the wellbeing of “legitimate” Americans. But once some members of a community are painted as a threat to the fabric of a country, the rest of that community, whatever their immigration status, are fair game as targets of this toxic nativism. The othering of those migrants paved the way for subsequent attacks on legal migrants and the changes to the H1B regime.

What is a nation?

Within India too, there has been a steady drumbeat on the purported threat from ‘infiltrators.’ People move across regions and borders for a variety of reasons. Painting them as infiltrators or “termites” is simply performative cruelty for populist gains. In 1882, the academic Ernest Renan gave a lecture titled, ‘What is a nation?’ He argued that a nation does not depend on dynasty, race, language, religion or geography. It is “a soul, a spiritual principle,” based on a shared understanding of “a legacy of memories” (some of which have edited out the violence that created the nation); and “present consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to invest in the heritage that we have jointly received”. Today, the conversations on immigration are chipping away at “present consent” in ways that diminish us all.

Priyanjali Malik writes on politics and international relations