Immigration has been a fixture of Britain’s political discourse for so long, it now feels, like Voltaire’s god, that if the issue did not exist, we would have to invent it. What would our politics look like, what would the broad majority of Britain’s media do with themselves, without immigration? It has become such a feature of the country’s political culture, it amounts to a sort of historical 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 riots.
What conjoins all of these is one thing: misinformation. I have banged on for years in this column about the disconnect between immigration discourse and the reality of how hard and expensive it is to enter the UK and stay there. A poll from last week demonstrates that gulf with striking simplicity. The conclusion to be drawn from the survey is that support for hardline immigration policies is linked to ignorance about migration figures. Half of all respondents thought that there were more migrants living in the UK illegally than legally. According to YouGov, these perceptions are “wide of the mark”, with those in the country legally vastly outnumbering those who are not, even at the most generous estimates of irregular migration.
But there is a new development related to that ignorance. Over the past 20 years or so, immigration demands have shifted from variations of “controlling our borders” and reducing numbers of new 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”. This is an “extraordinary” development, according to YouGov. Indeed, the last time a member of a political party even hinted at any sort of deportation policy was in the late 00s, when British National party leader Nick Griffin (another installation in the immigration exhibit) stated that he would “encourage” voluntary repatriation of legal migrants and “those of foreign descent to return to their lands of ethnic origin”. On Saturday, far-right protesters clashed with police while holding signs saying “Remigration NOW”.
This latest mutation of migration discourse to include mass deportation is down to, as ever, media and politics. Rightwing media not only constantly cover immigration negatively, but go through different seasons of doing so, depending on the political climate. The 2010s was about Muslims, the run-up to Brexit about certain east European nationalities and how their presence had a deleterious effect on British society, and the latest phase is about “numbers”. Specifically, numbers of irregular arrivals. The small boats fixation here is central, as they evoke a sense of losing control of the borders, sadly no longer as easy to pull off after Brexit.
That fixation has been mirrored in political discourse. The last government’s contribution to this was the Rwanda scheme and Rishi Sunak’s “stop the boats” campaign – one of his five promises, which was given equal weight to such macro challenges as bringing down inflation and cutting NHS waiting lists. And this government has continued in the same vein.
Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech, which referred to an era of rising migration as a “squalid chapter” in the country’s history, was the rhetorical opening salvo in an anti-immigration campaign that in its tone and relentlessness reinforces the issue as a crisis. Starmer’s X account constantly posts highlights of crackdowns against those who try “to cheat the system” and even Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)-like videos of deportations. In the past week alone, Starmer has posted 14 times on X; 10 of those posts were about immigration, particularly irregular arrivals and those arriving on small boats. This is a wildly disproportionate emphasis, considering this cohort makes up a minuscule percentage of overall immigration to the UK.
The result is a framing of all of immigration through the lens of irregular arrivals, and therefore cultivating a sense of crisis and overwhelm. A study by the University of Birmingham that surveyed thousands of media texts and political documents earlier this year found that that disproportionate focus on small boats shapes public attitudes towards migration, fuelling “a sense of crisis and emergency”.
There’s something compulsive about all of this, almost addictive. Posturing on immigration is a cheap hit, a low-cost (to politicians – the cost is very high for migrants) way to gesture at some sort of executive action, for a government otherwise in the mire. The irony is that this fixation produces ignorance about all immigration, which means there is less and less the government can do to address the very myths it has seeded. If you create the impression that small boats, “illegality” and cheating are the defining feature of the UK’s immigration, then how can you expect the public to make distinctions that their very government does not?
And so in a grim spiral, Labour continues to fuel the sense of crisis, then chase it, never catching up, and always setting the stage for those further right to make ever bigger promises of crackdown and deranged claims about housing and crime. The galling idiocy of it all 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 only credible party on immigration. The more Labour presses the issue, the more it reinforces the validity of anti-immigration rhetoric, empowering Reform as the specialised vehicle of crackdown. To voters mobilised by this, Labour can never be better than the real thing.
And so it can only be a spiral. In order to keep immigration as that easily activated issue central to a political system that has few answers to any of the structural problems that are most salient to people’s everyday lives, from the cost of living to lack of housing, we must always be at some sort of breaking point. That toxic energy has to go somewhere. It’s not the sort of thing that can be just a casual part of discourse and stay in a holding pattern. The stakes are constantly higher, more frightening, more defining of why things are bad. And on and down it goes.
We must wean the UK off its “immigration dependency”, Starmer said in 2022. But the problem is his – and the entire political establishment’s – dependency on immigration as an issue to be exploited, rather than to be handled with honesty, duty of care to immigrants who are now terrorised in the streets, and to the whole country’s social cohesion.