The Conservative politician Nicholas Soames, scion of the aristocracy and grandson of Winston Churchill, has attracted some news coverage for a recent ranthref> in which he expressed fear of “the scale of immigration to this country”, voiced all sorts of dire warnings about net migration and population growth, and exhorted his fellow MPs to adopt a tougher policy on immigration.
Nicholas Soames is very worried about numbers. But immigrants aren’t numbers. They’re people. It’s easy for wealthy white politicians, looking down from their ivory towers, to wring their hands about population statistics and declare that immigration policies need to be made tougher. They don’t, after all, have to experience the suffering of the people – overwhelmingly, people of colour from developing countries – whose lives are actually affected by immigration enforcement. To put it another way, Soames is speaking from a position of unexamined privilege. I wish only that he and his colleagues could learn a little more about what life is actually like for refugees and undocumented immigrants who arrive in this country.
If he could hear their voices, I wonder what Nicholas Soames would say to the women of Yarl’s Wood,href> locked up in a hellhole prison camp run for profit by a private security contractor, and abused so severely that they went on hunger strike to protest. I wonder what he’d say to Tarik Adam Rhamahref>, the Sudanese torture victim held in detention despite his deteriorating health, and fearing removal to Sudan, a country where he may well be killed because of his ethnicity. I wonder what message Nicholas Soames might have for Aziz Hussini,href> just eighteen years old, arrested on his wedding day by UKBA officers and threatened with removal to war-torn Afghanistan. Or for the children still held in immigration detention centreshref>, two years after the coalition pledged to end child detention. Or for the failed asylum-seekers living in desperate povertyhref> as a result of deliberate government policy. Or for the families split apart by the new Family Migration Rules,href> which deny people the right to bring their loved ones to this country if they don’t earn enough money. Are all these people to be swept aside in the name of “cutting net migration”, their lives sacrificed on the altar of population statistics? Are numbers more important than people?
Soames warns that a rising population will lead to “pressure on our already hard pressed public services building up relentlessly and as a result, social tension mounting.” Instead of blaming immigrants, perhaps some of the blame for this situation might be laid at the door of politicians who have slashed public services in the name of austerity. If the rich paid a greater share of tax, if we had a government willing to invest serious money in education and health and social housing, our public services might not be so strained. But rather than engage with these difficult economic questions, our politicians continue to pin the blame on immigrants, a marginalized group with no vote and no political voice. It is not just Soames who has been tempted to try this line of argument: our new Immigration Minister, Mark Harper, has argued that capping net migration will help to get more disabled people back into work,href> in an apparent attempt to pit one marginalized group against another.
It is easy for those in a comfortable position of privilege to forget what life is like for asylum-seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants. But our politicians should remember that tougher immigration policies come at a terrible human cost.
