The Windrush scandal and the predictable injustice of immigration enforcement

Thank you for this thorough overview Chris (if I may). It’s little comfort to find out that the DACA fear-mongers here in the US–and as arguments concerning Trump’s travel-ban went in the Supreme Court yesterday, maybe even in a majority of that so-called august chamber–have as many ugly twins in the UK. I look forward to your book.

They want to do it here in the USA, too. Ironically, states rights, that deservedly much-derided part of US law, is providing some protection; state and local forces and immigration police are separate and few major cities want to set up a situation where immigrant communities are hostile to local police.

Chris: please correct me if I have misunderstood you.

Are you arguing, as I think it seems, that states are never justified in excluding would-be immigrants, and deporting those who arrived illegally? If they aren’t, why not?

This is not relevant to the Windrush-related gross misbehaviour of civil servants, which can probably be explained by this sequence. For a certain sort of bureaucrat (you must have come across them in university administration) the main purpose of human life is to fill in forms. With the Windrush generation, we are often confronted with People Who Have Not Filled In Forms, even if there was no need for them to do so at the time. Evil heretics, disobedient to the prime bureaucratic commandment!

Alternative explanation: US progressive usage has obliterated an important distinction, between illegal immigrants (those who have no legal right to be in the country) and undocumented immigrants (those who have no formal proof that they have such a right). In US cases, the two are much the same, but “undocumented” obscures reality. In the UK, where people who immigrated legally but have currently no documents to prove it are distinct from genuine illegals, heartless civil servants (too often a tautology) might prefer to target easily identified, genuinely undocumented, old-established legal immigrants, rather than go to the trouble and danger of looking for illegals in great cities.

Thanks, Chris I guess I have a new donation target. As an American, it’s odd seeing us on the right side of at least some stuff for a change.

BTW, “children are subject to a “good character” test?” FFS. Children? How can children even HAVE a “good” or “bad” character? I though the whole point of juvenile punishment was that children are still forming their characters. That’s is just appalling.

The problem is that we have citizen rights, not human rights, so someone who lives in country X without having filled the right forms (either by error, as Stephen above says, or by being actually illegal for substantial reasons) is deprived of rights that we are inclined to see as human rights, such as the right of searching for a job.

I understand that my ideal policy of no borders is not realistic today, but I think that at least at a theorical level we should agree that governments or states should not have the right to control immigration.

Aren’t all attempts to restrict citizenship going to end up treating people in a draconian way?

Well, no.

For example. The UK government destroyed the authoritative records of people’s arrival dates, which matters for certain statuses: people are currently expected to prove their own arrival date from their own paperwork. This is a retrospective change; people today now have to have records that previously they did not have to keep, and thus did not keep. It’s a needlessly-draconian change — draconianness-by-choice — because people obviously don’t have time machines and can’t adjust their past actions to comply with newly-imposed record-keeping requirements.

[there are other problems: no small number of people kept records that were then destroyed, as a result of accident or in some cases malice.]

And so forth.

[“I’m sorry, Collin. I made sweeping statements without checking the context I was making them in, and conflated gross and petty draconianness for rhetorical purposes. I have learned the error of my ways, and shan’t do that again”]

I like how Stephen immediately assumes the Windrush victims didn’t fill out the right forms. In fact they did – they filled in landing cards and those landing cards were destroyed years later by the government. In fact in British life there are no forms you fill in to say you’re a resident living in place x, so if you don’t travel overseas then you can live decades in the UK without leaving a paper trail. These people’s mistake was to assume that their rights were assured as part of the ordinary process of doing ordinary things as UK permanent residents.

Another example of this “failure” to fill in “the right forms” is the EU citizens who are applying for permanent residence and discover that they need to produce documentary evidence that they have lived in the UK for 10 years. Suddenly they discover that their failure to save dry cleaning receipts and utility bills 8 years ago is being held against them in the matter of their residence in the country they call home.

This isn’t a bureaucratic bungle, it’s a deliberate policy to destroy lives.

I’m sure this is dealt with in the scholarship, but one of the things I find very odd, from the perspective of studying citizenship and mobility in classical antiquity, is the idea that states not only have the power to determine who’s allowed on their territory but have a duty to obsess about this, with the implication that only approved persons are really entitled to walk on Our Soil and breathe Our Air, and anyone else is a threat.

Is this a legacy of C20 world wars and ideological struggle, so that any ‘alien’ comes to be seen as a potential ‘enemy alien’? And/or driven by conception that citizens should be privileged in all respects, including being given priority in private transactions like jobs and renting accommodation? An argument that official sanction is necessary to access public services would make some sense, whether or not one agreed with it, but this goes much further in asserting that someone’s mere presence can be illegal, regardless of what they’re doing – hence the familiar claim that migrants are simultaneously taking jobs from People Like Us and lounging about on benefits in free housing paid for by People Like Us, and therefore you shouldn’t employ or rent to someone who hasn’t demonstrated their entitlement to be here.

It’s also worth noting that the Windrush case is a specific case of a small number of people coming to the UK in a specific time period with no special objections at the time, nor any significant impact on Britain. Yet Dipper has immediately jumped to “so chris, do you think everyone in the world should be able to move to the UK tomorrow?” This is obviously disingenuous. There is a discussion to be had about how attempts to prevent the latter must inevitably lead to gross injustices like the former, but Dipper isn’t having that conversation because Dipper wants to make sure every discussion of immigration is held in an atmosphere of terror of the brown invasion.

@5

Stephen, if your analysis is correct, it implies that the civilian politicians in charge of the Home Office for the last few years haven’t been doing a very good job of keeping their officials on track.

Which of them do you think should resign first?

@L2P, as far as I understand thegood character test isn’t really a formal test with criteria to prove the goodness of your character it is an intended loophole for immigration officers or the Home Office to use their discretion to refuse leave if people cannot be refused on any of the other grounds in the immigration rules. I believe it has to be justified in terms of either national security or being conducive to the public good.

Sometimes the use of this makes sense like this. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/vbpw8y/border-control-enthusiast-banned-from-crossing-uk-border

Other times it is ridiculously punitive like this https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/29/girl-with-autism-at-risk-of-deportation-over-accountancy-errors. And as you say using it against children is especially repulsive.

Clearly, if a state wants to deprive somebody of their livelihood, their home, etc, then the burden should be on the state to show, beyond reasonable doubt, that they are not entitled to that livelihood, etc. Thus, the Home Office should have to show, beyond reasonable doubt, that Joe Bloggs did not arrive on the Empire Windrush (or similarly before 1971).
It’s one thing (a terrible thing) for the Government to impose absurd and inhuman new requirements for citizenship. It’s quite another (and IMO considerably more terrible) to require people to demonstrate in some arbitrary way that they meet those requirements.
In the current situation, the Government kidnaps people off the streets, requires them to jump through arbitrary hoops of the Government’s own devising, and deports them (/denies them healthcare/home/work/education) if they fail. It’s hard to exaggerate or express how unjust it is.

The repeated mention of “the government” in the OP makes me wonder if this is a case where a parliamentary system is a net negative. The lack of initiative available to the minority party in the UK, and the lesser ability of members of the majority to break with party discipline and vote for a minority bill, might be holding back efforts to address the problem.

Nick B. @ 27 is right about the change in requirements. It seems similar to sudden recent requests in some US states that voters must present driver’s licenses.

@ Chris Bertram – 16 “Unsurprisingly both @Stephen and @Dipper have made an appearance in this thread. “. Well, this is a site where blogposts have comments, and you have posted about UK politics. I am a UK citizen interested in politics, so here I am.

Firstly, no-one, and I mean absolutely no-one, is on the other side of the Windrush argument. Everyone agrees this is a Grade A cock-up. The best that can be said is that the checks and balances which include parliamentary debate appear to have worked and as far as we know anything there appears to have been no-one deported and the government has promised to fully recompense anyone affected.

My understanding of the history of immigration controls is roughly this. Pre 1997 there was little net migration, hence no need to check entitlement for access to public services; in effect, checking was done at the border, and if you got on the island you could have access to whatever you needed. This changed around 1997 and then again in 2004 with FOM when inward migration increased significantly. The increase in immigration is significant (projected population increase of 25% in 40 years) and has a significant effect on public services (e.g. over a quarter of births to foreign-born mothers in 2016 ). As the UK was unable to prevent mass immigration from Europe at the border, the control point for public services was inevitably moved to the point where these services are accessed, hence the massive growth of bureaucracy. This is pretty much how the rest of the EU operates where they control access by having insurance-based health-care systems and ID cards. Given the imperfect nature of bureaucracies and the huge benefits that accrue to people from poorer countries if they can successfully game the system then we see large numbers of complaints and issues. Much as I dislike ID cards I believe it is time we adopted them to avoid precisely this kind of fiasco.

Piling in on the side of the complainants, which the left in the UK are doing, seems at first sight to be free pickings. They get lots of positive noises with no down-side. However, I think the left needs to be careful. Most people in the UK are sensitive about people coming from overseas to access public services they haven’t paid for, and are highly suspicious that Labour is simply going to allow a free-for-all for anyone who can get here with consequent degradation of services for UK tax payers.

What is missing from left-wing criticism of the current state of immigration such as this, is any idea how a Labour government would address these issues. The overall policy appears to be that we should have restrictive immigration laws and then not enforce them. This is clearly nuts. Take for instance people who arrive on temporary visas and then massively overstay. Whenever a case arises where someone has been here for ten years, or has had a child (as if having a child is some kind of unexpected lottery win not a deliberate act) then there are calls for the person to be allowed to stay. In which case, why not simply make the law on temporary visas that if you overstay a temporary visa you can be thrown out unless you manage to remain undiscovered paying taxes for ten years or have a child? Once framed like that, the problem becomes apparent.

So a little more practical honesty and real proposals from critics would be appreciated, and a little less holier-than-thou grandstanding.

Casmillus@23: Dead right, I entirely agree “that the civilian politicians in charge of the Home Office for the last few years haven’t been doing a very good job of keeping their officials on track”. In my opinion, indisputable. And as for which should resign first: both of them, together with some of their senior officials. But do I, or you, expect that?

Oh Dipper, Dipper, Dipper! So much wrong, so little time. Let’s look at just three ways your last comment is wrong. 1) the history of freedom of movement you give is tits up; 2) your use of the passive voice; 3) another round of silliness about public services.

1) Your borked up history of freedom of movement
Freedom of movement didn’t start in 1997 or 2004, it started when the UK entered the EEC in 1973. Here’s a history of the UK’s freedom of movement policies. Note that the UK had freedom of movement before 1963, and in that time 31% of NHS doctors were from outside the UK. Oh the humanity! If you don’t believe the New Statesman, allow me to remind you of the comedy Auf Wiedersehn, pet! about some northern British workers living in Germany and taking German jobs and benefits back in 1983. Hmmm, I wonder how they did that? We have these migration discussions every couple of months and I consistently have to remind you that your basic story is factually wrong and you consistently ignore it.

Next net migration didn’t “increase significantly” in 2004, the graph you link to shows a simple straight line from 1970 onward, and no statistical test is likely to show that there was any change in 2004. And need I remind you that you linked to a graph of net migration, so it tells us nothing about the impact of the accession of the eastern European states to the EU, since whatever bump you think you’re seeing in 2004 could be due to baby boomers retiring to Spain (we really don’t want to mention Spain though do we?) It’s true that the accession of the eastern European states led to fears of a migration wave, and all EU nations had a choice to implement a 7 year restriction on migration, which Ireland, the UK and Sweden chose not to because they needed the labour. I point you to your fear-mongering about births to foreign-born women in the ONS data. That ONS data also points out that the total fertility rate amongst foreign born women is 2.05, and among UK born women it is 1.75. Without the considerable natal efforts of those Polish chicks, Britain would be below replacement rate. Now aren’t you one of these right wing scaremongers who thinks we’re all doomed if we don’t force our women to pop out babies at a frantic rate? I suggest you go and thank your Polish neighbour for her sterling efforts to keep your welfare system afloat.

2) The passive voice
You say that enforcement of migration laws “was inevitably moved” from the border to institutions, as if the process of checking migration status is some natural law that just happened to shift after the Tories took power. The correct language you should have used here was “the Tories moved” the enforcement to institutions, “in response to” pressure from people like you. People like you who, clearly, do not understand a single shred of a thing that is actually happening in migration.

I live as a foreigner in a country that sometimes seems hostile to foreigners. e.g. right now I’m looking for a house and yesterday I got an email from a real estate agent telling me “I have confirmed that it’s okay for foreigners to look at this house.” Very blatant! When laws that affect me change I don’t think “oh, the law was changed”, I think “oh, that person responsible for that law changed it.” When my ID card changed from an “Alien registration” card to a “foreigner registration” card and then to a “residence card” I didn’t see this as some kind of natural law, I saw it as the deliberate act of politicians responding to public pressure to improve their language and then to regularize treatment of foreigners. You should try the active voice, it might help you to understand politics.

3) Your ongoing deceptions about welfare
First of all let’s make clear: The NHS is funded from general taxation, not from an insurance based system, so as soon as anyone moves to the UK if they pay taxes they are “contributing” to it. Secondly, in almost every other “insurance-based” system (as you describe it) in Europe, as soon as someone starts paying into the insurance pool they’re eligible for the service. This is how insurance works, typically. So there is no situation where anyone who moves in Europe is taking public services without paying into them. Secondly, those foreign-born women you’re scare-mongering about are almost certainly delivering their grotesque foreign babies into the hands of foreign-born midwives, and there’s a non-negligible chance that it’s a foreign-born obstetrician overseeing the process. If the obstetrician and midwife aren’t foreign born there’s a good chance they’re the descendants of a Commonwealth citizen who moved here in the 1960s or 1970s, and set up as a doctor. Your entire economy and much of your health service is now completely dependent on foreign-born labour or the descendants of foreign born labour. I keep making this point on these threads and you keep ignoring it: Once those foreign-born nurses go back to the EU and aren’t replaced, you’re fucked. I don’t know how to put it more clearly than that: fucked. Your country has decided to exit the EU and kick out its foreign doctors at just the time that all your local doctors are about to retire. The same with your local-born nurses, who are actually not all young white girls in short dresses as you probably like to imagine in your post-brexit fever dreams, but middle-aged women working under intense pressure with strong incentives for early retirement. I don’t know how many times I have to say this before it gets through your skull but your entire health system and a huge part of your social care system is built on foreign labour, and you just chose to send them all packing at a time when your native staff are retiring and your medical education system has been gutted. Far from sponging on your (incredibly stingey and underfunded) public services, these foreigners are keeping them afloat.

Stephen, you say Nobody supposes that people who arrived claiming to be refugees were therefore illegal immigrants. This is again completely disingenuous by you. The main hate newspapers in the UK (Daily Mail etc) are constantly conflating these things. Here’s an example, the first hit on a google search, which claims the man in question “arrived illegally on a boat”, something which is impossible if he is a refugee.

Seriously Dipper and Stephen, do you bother to do any research at all before you comment here?

CB @24.

What did dipper propose that you found ridiculous? Are you really proposing no borders?

How does that work? Explain please. It looks like the ideal way to get a radical right wing government into power. There is only a certain amount of change/disruption that people will tolerate.

Unless you are assuming a better grade of humans.

@Dipper, I didn’t read your last post beyond this sentence ‘ Everyone agrees this is a Grade A cock-up.’ No, some people think it was an entirely predictable result of a deliberate policy and something is only being done now because of the media furore. See also Amber Rudd’s claims about not knowing about targets for deportations as another attempt to conflate deliberate policy with bugs in the system.

@Stephen: ‘Nobody supposes that people who arrived claiming to be refugees were therefore illegal immigrants. But they became so, wouldn’t you agree, if their claim was not found to be valid and they then did not leave.’

No, I wouldn’t agree. After a first appeal is unsuccessful it is pretty much impossible to get legal for further appeals and the best chance someone would have is to find a solicitor prepared to go for a judicial review or submit new evidence and apply to be allowed to make a fresh claim. If the Home Office decide new evidence does not meet its thresholds then you won’t be allowed to even make a further claim so the new evidence won’t be considered. This is similar to the Windrush cases in that failing to provide evidence to meet the standards of the Home Office does not make someone ‘illegal’.

I’m pro-borders, but interested in the discussion. Here’s a Vox piece arguing against open borders from David Miller, who I suspect CB knows. https://www.vox.com/2016/9/6/12805140/open-borders-immigration-liberals-deportation

The obligations of colonial powers to those they colonized seems obvious, to me. I checked Pew and support for a path citizenship for children brought into the US ‘illegally’ runs at 74 percent.

I’m guardedly optimistic that a solution for the dreamers can be found, with expedited citizenship available to all adults without criminal records who’ve been in America for some time. The principle obstacle to such progress comes from cynics unwilling to hand the Trumpster a victory. The ‘shit-hole’ nations controversy allowed Dems to storm away from a deal that would have granted citizenship to significant number. Trump can definitely sell just about any deal to his base, who everyone should know by now couldn’t care less about ‘conservative’ orthodoxies. There are two versions of reality being promulgated – in one the sky is always falling, in the other Kim crossed the border and the possibility of peace and even re-unification on the Korean peninsula can at least be envisioned. It will be interesting to see how entrenched interests respond. The Nevertrumpers seem more stressed out by the possibility of Trump succeeding than Democrats, who are now busily assuring each other that Kanye West represents nobody but himself.

It would be nice to see some forward movement, but I don’t expect any from Theresa May.

@ Collin Street. Of all the excuses I’ve come across for why people cannot answer a question that is clearly the best. My problem is too much knowledge and the expectation that explanations would be consistent with that knowledge? Award winning stuff.

I must confess I was under the impression the subject under discussion was “the predictable injustice of immigration enforcement”, probably because those words appear in the title of the OP. In which case it doesn’t seem to my primitive mind to be unreasonable to ask what an immigration policy that didn’t have injustice as part of it might look like.

Matt says “a bad application of a bad policy doesn’t imply more than that better policies and applications should be put in place” So what are those better policies and applications? And how are those better policies going to prevent people believing they have been treated unfairly? I’ve suggested ID cards which will force the issue of establishing citizenship and entitlement before we get to the “been here 20 years, paid taxes, and denied cancer treatment” stage and suggested insurance-based healthcare provision so again entitlement is evident before-hand. Perhaps one or two others might like to contribute their favoured policies?

Oh, it’s also confirmed that Amber Rudd agreed to the establishment of deportation quotas. It’s not actually-technically confirmed that she pushed for them, but there’s no real alternative plausible explanation .

Now. A just system could establish target numbers for resolved matters or opened investigations, but target numbers for matters resolved with specific outcomes is difficult to justify/explain. This is the sort of policy vs execution issues that require we separate discussion of policy from discussion of how the policy is carried out,

… which is why we probably shouldn’t discuss immigration policy in this specific context and why Dipper’s demand that we do is inappropriate [“inappropriate” -> “fucking pig-headed moronic”].

Are you in favour of the repeal of all the hostile environment measures pending a successful introduction of your preferred policies?

The question you just asked is essentially a double-layered hypothetical, not that simple.

If a person was giving you answers like Dipper’s in a classroom, would you genuinely expect them to able to understand the question you just asked and give you a coherent answer?

@ Prof Bertram

You can indeed count on my support for just and fair procedures. You can count on Jacob Rees-Mogg’s support too, so you are not narrowing the field much. And there are very few people I disapprove of. Which brings us to

@ Collin Street – 54

I am privileged indeed to be given such a clear distinction of framework and implementation. And that’s a very nice distinction. But to the paying punter the distinction is at best academic and at worst causes dishonest behaviour.

Consider the UK policy on child refugees. The problem is that the implementation of this policy requires something impossible to be done, which is to identify a person presenting with no documentation as both a child and a refugee. The majority of people presenting as child refugees appear on further analysis to be adults both in the UK and Sweden. Furthermore there is growing evidence that the “refugees” appearing in the Mediterranean Sea are there as paying customers in an industrial scale people moving enterprise, part of which is telling people how to get round the regulations.

There is widespread suspicion that politicians are proposing this policy (accepting child refugees) in full knowledge that it is impossible to implement. They know full well that what will get implemented is actually a different second policy (mass immigration of young men who are not refugees). If they were to propose implementing this second policy they know it would never get accepted, so they are doing something dishonest in that they are pretending to have one policy whilst actually having a different one.

Finally in the OP Prof Bertram raises ” … the issue of whether immigration enforcement can ever be compatible with human rights and the values of liberal states”. I’m guessing that observing human rights and having liberal values are policies in your definition. So the OP itself suggests that implementation and policy cannot be separated as in this instance it is impossible to implement a policy of restrictions on immigration in a way that is compatible with implementing a policy of observing human rights, or to put it more graphically, in the Venn diagram of implementations of a restrictive immigration policy and implementations of a policy of human rights and liberal values, the intersection is the empty set.

Collin Street@48: may I reassemble things for you?

When somebody arrives claiming to be a refugee from persecution, that is (I hope you will agree) a claim which may or not be true. Someone making such a claim is not doing anything illegal, and (despite CB’s unevidenced assertion to the contrary) I don’t know of anyone ever saying it was illegal.

If you can accept that, let’s go on to the next point. I hope you would again agree that there are then two options for the state: accept such every claim as true, or investigate claims to determine, as far as is possible, which are true and which aren’t. Now, I have never said that such investigations are, in your words “authoritative. Indisputable, even.” I don’t know how you can honestly attribute such a statement to me, rather than to a straw demon of your own imagination.

You may remember that earlier in this thread, when I said that government bureaucrats often got things wrong, Steven T Johnson @14 replied that such a belief is “popular BS with vicious reactionaries”.

It does look as if, by SJ’s criteria, you are a vicious reactionary. I would advise you to discuss the matter with him.

But as one vicious reactionary to another: would you not agree that before a legal finding about asylum seekers, they are here legally: and if the finding is adverse, they aren’t here legally even though they have the right to dispute that finding, since government error is always possible? And if they dispute it successfully, their presence must become legal again? And if not, not?

Oh dipper. I showed you were completely wrong about freedom of movement and migration numbers, with no rebuttal or admission from you, and a comment later you brag to Collin about how you are “full of knowledge”. I suggest you take that contradiction and have a long hard think about what it means.

“But recently an increasing number of normative theorists have started to tackly the issue of whether immigration enforcement can ever be compatible with human rights and the values of liberal states. ”

If a person learns that from abstract principles A one can deduce concrete B, where the person now accepts A and rejects B, which is more likely: that the person will change his or her mind and reject A or change his or her mind and accept B?

Dipper

Far better to have strict and clear entry and entitlement requirements and stick to them.

That has to depend on what those entry and entitlement requirements are; but you omit to give the sort of detailed explanation of the policy you favour that you so freely demand from others.

[the original comment this replied to has been deleted at the request of the author, so I’m deleting things downthread from that too. CB]

Keith @ 66

Of course, if there’s no will among politicians in the opposition to change the law, how easy or hard it is for them to propose a change won’t matter. Searching on “windrush labour” gets me a lot of Corbyn attacking the Conservatives, though, so I assume he’d be submitting a bill if he could. He isn’t, though.

The problems with ICE are a combination of problems with the law as written, and police officers overstepping the law, which from what Chris says doesn’t appear to be the case with Windrush. When police resent being hemmed in by the law and the President, and feel they can make their own law, when the actual law isn’t harsh enough for them, that’s a different problem, isn’t it? Awareness of what’s going on, among the public and also politicians, would presumably make a difference.

@ J-D

Firstly I’d have an overall objective of an immigration policy which would be :
1. Maintain UK population constant or slightly growing.
2. Bring in skills where there are shortages, more so at the senior end, but the expectation would be that skills for the UK are predominantly provided by training UK workers.
3. Allocate a limited quota for refugees and other humanitarian cases.

I’d have a three phase approach to skills and general immigration; limited period working in the UK for individual or family as required, then settled status, and then migration to full citizenship.

The devil is in the detail as if you start making humanitarian exceptions such as having children here then that acts as an incentive to have children just to stay in the country. So I’d do what I believe the US procedure is which is children born here get UK citizenship but their parents don’t.

For implementation I’d use ID cards. I don’t like them but we are heading to a surveillance society and forms of ID are becoming required, so may as well bite the bullet and implement them. They will make life a lot easier for many people.

I’d be quite harsh about clear breaches in immigration policy. I have friends who have gone to the USA and eventually naturalised as I’m sure most non-US folks on here have, and they all know exactly what the rules are and what their immigration status is all the time. So this isn’t hard.

And for clarity the issue with Windrush was these people came prior to the introduction of records, and the requirement on them to prove their right to citizenship is a cruel one. Everyone agrees it is a mistake and it is being put right.

I wonder how Stephens position on “mindless boxtickers” changes now we know that the government was setting removal quotas for them? Not quite so mindless now, are they?

Stephen

Governments maintain that they have rights to do a large number of things.

I notice that you haven’t explained why you think governments have such rights (or even confirmed explicitly whether you do think so).

@37

Narrator’s voice: “Amber Rudd resigned.”

Dipper @49 it doesn’t seem […] unreasonable to ask what an immigration policy that didn’t have injustice as part of it might look like. […] So what are those better policies and applications?

An immigration policy, just as any other policy or collective decision, will always be somewhat unjust, so we are not aiming at perfection here. Eliminating entirely predictable and easily preventable injustice is already a good step forward, don’t you think? And that is not hard to achieve. Here follows a quick list of policy recommendations that would (very probably) make the system relatively less unjust and which involve no sweeping change of currently existing laws.

– Be predictable and consistent. I myself have been a migrant worker in four different countries – and have had to manage a birth and a pregnancy in two of them – so I can tell from personal experience that having a clear, exhaustive and moderately short list of the documents you have to provide to be able to reliably perform a given administrative task is extremely important and helpful. My own country emphatically does not provide such a list for many if not most immigration administrative procedures, even the most trivial ones, and this justifiably drives immigrants here crazy.
-Grant appropriate time and resources to present legal cases and appeal those decided. A significant number of asylum cases are rejected on technicalities that can be cleared if given appropriate time (to give a concrete real-life example, the asylum claim of a South Sudanese an association I participate in was helping was rejected because the village she claimed to be coming from did not appear on Google map).
-Collectively decide on the interpretation of the crucial legal terms (to give another concrete example from the same source, the asylum claim of Shi’a Syrian living in a zone under the control of the Sunni Islamist rebel was rejected because the convention on refugees grant protection to people being persecuted and the verb “persecute” carries the presumption that the person is especially singled out, whereas in the context of the Syrian war, the judge argued, everybody in Syria was a target for one or the other belligerents so nobody in particular was persecuted).

Conversely, if you shorten the time for appeal, or shorten the legal interview during which the legal claims are evaluated, or prevent legal aides (all measures that were voted last Sunday by the French assembly, as it happens), or close all legal roads to come into a country, or make deals with autocracies to stop migrants, then you predictably make the system more unjust. I don’t see that this is hard to grasp.

Faustusnotes@71: sorry to disappoint you, but my opinion of the mindless boxtickers who are a significant proportion of most bureaucracies, perhaps larger than usual in the Home Office, hasn’t changed at all. The government set quotas for removal of illegal immigrants: boxtickers mindlessly tried to achieve these quotas, not always but sometimes, by going for people who were never illegal immigrants at all, not knowing or caring about the difference.

That’s my opinion, anyway. Wouldn’t you agree?

CB@75: I have not studied your works in any detail, and am not certain what you mean by “my book”. Your Crooked Timber entry has a section “Buy my book!”, recommending a volume on Rousseau and the social contract. That does not sound very likely to contribute to the problem. Amazon has Chris Bertram – probably a namesake – as the author of a German thriller trilogy, Todespakt, Todesplan, Seelenblut; even less likely. If you would be so good as to let me know more about your book, then the next time I am in a decent bookshop I’ll see if it looks worth buying.

@80

“Perhaps you’d like to explain what scenario it is that requires the current projection of 25% increase in population in 30-40 years.”

With your usual indignant stupidity you miss the point and throw a worthless pseudo-detail at us instead. No interest.

“Inventing people to complain about isn’t a proper argument”

Like Stephen and his “mindless boxtickers”, whom he has made no attempt at identifying?

Just because the NF and BNP are moribund organisations does not mean their supporters ceased to exist. Quite a few of them went to UKIP. You need to get outside your bubble. You must be one of those liberal elitists who never read the Daily Telegraph letters page in the past 40 years.

Another example of this “failure” to fill in “the right forms” is the EU citizens who are applying for permanent residence and discover that they need to produce documentary evidence that they have lived in the UK for 10 years. Suddenly they discover that their failure to save dry cleaning receipts and utility bills 8 years ago is being held against them in the matter of their residence in the country they call home.

This isn’t a bureaucratic bungle, it’s a deliberate policy to destroy lives.

It appears the notoriously draconian Australian authorities are looking to Britain for inspiration. I have recently made a pension application for my mother who is now a 96 year old invalid confined to a nursing home. Despite the fact that she gained Australian citizenship in 1974 and has been nominated for Australian of the Year for (obviously) being an outstanding citizen, the pensions authority, Centrelink, want proof of her residence in Australia back to… Haven’t got the letter here but it was 80s or 90s.
Of course, this doesn’t have as big an impact on us as it does on the Windrush migrants but it does demonstrate the incredible petty-mindedness and cruelty of Western bureaucracies and their political masters these days. And it’s a slap in the face for her.

My own experience of Heartless Bureaucracy over the years is that the mood and motions are very obviously set from above. If someone thinks that people registered as Disabled should be left where they are, with no attempt to shift them in to the “job seeking” category, then the front-line functionaries will follow that line; if it is decided that the Disabled are in fact malingerers then that’s how it will be treated.

I had the good luck, relatively speaking, to be seriously ill just before and during the financial crash of 2008/9. Although the new benefits regime of ATOS tests etc was being trialled, it was obvious no one wanted the pain of turning lots of Incapacity Benefit claimants (as I was, for a while) into official seekers of jobs that might not be available for healthy people. However a few years later a registered blind man I knew was getting official letters to turn up for work-capability assessments.