If we demonise migrants it reflects badly on us

12 April 2012

There was much talk of "fair" immigration during the election campaign.

Former immigration minister Phil Woolas and others have complained that Labour did not sufficiently publicise its anti-immigration plans, like the startlingly inhumane policy to withdraw welfare benefits from hundreds of thousands of people seeking indefinite leave to remain.

The problem with his "clear tough policy" on immigration, he says, was that "in every part of Whitehall someone was demanding an exception — whether it was Gurkhas, businessmen or students".

Every European country has a problem with xenophobia, latent or otherwise. Labour has played a dangerous game with that latent strain of British culture, by balancing quite high actual numbers of immigrants with anti-immigration tough talk and harsh policies. This has led to an increasingly brutal tone in immigration institutions, and a degree of confusion between different categories of immigrants. British cultural life, too, is reeling from stringent new visa regulations which have discouraged many non-EU artists and academics from coming here.

The coalition has jettisoned the amnesty for long-standing illegal immigrants, and the policy of allowing asylum-seekers to work. Those were good liberal ideas, and I was sorry to see them go. An amnesty would have decreased exploitation, and potentially increased tax revenue.

I hope that they will also abandon the Lib-Dem idea that immigrants should be allowed to work — and therefore settle — only in regions which have the capacity and "need" to take them. This policy should worry us.

People on council estates can't choose to live near family and friends, as they did, by and large, in the old East End. The social networks of those communities compare well with the often difficult neighbourly relations on contemporary estates. In Sweden, where I was born, the Social Democratic government had a dispersal policy for refugees and immigrants. If a council thought they had too many foreigners, it could ban them from council housing. Extended families were split up, and no one really noticed until a Swedish Jewish couple (foreign-sounding name) were denied a flat in a Malmö suburb.

Xenophobia merges ideas about race, religion and security with hatred and fear. The majority of current immigrants are in fact white (quite a few are Americans in the City), but "immigrant" to the xenophobic mind always means black (knife crime/ single mothers) or Muslim (terrorism/ oppressed women); the "savage animals" of the BNP imagination. Those bleak and ugly stereotypes are harmful to all of us.

The coalition decision to cap the numbers of non-EU immigrants at 100,000 was probably politically necessary, given their campaign promises, but they target the wrong people. People who complain about excessive immigration are worrying about illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers, not health professionals and finance workers.

Too many asylum-seekers have been treated with brutality and contempt by staff taking their cue from Labour's "clear tough policy". Respect and compassion would reflect better on Britain, and would make no difference to actual numbers.

Sigrid Rausing is a philanthropist and publisher of Granta

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