ven as the Windrush scandal was being exposed, there were signs that the bad headlines would change neither this government’s treatment of migrants nor the debate about immigration. Certainly not the kind of change that would match the scale of the damage done. Almost without skipping a beat, politicians talked about the necessity of deporting “illegal immigrants”. Before long, they were discussing “highly skilled” and “high value” migrants. People cannot be illegal, people are not economic commodities – they are human beings living in a world structured by class, gender and race. Now we have moved on to “foreign national offenders”. Refusing to release or even pretend to pay the slightest attention to the Windrush Lessons Learned review, the government has deported 17 people to Jamaica – and in doing so it has communicated that it will continue to be “tough” on immigration. It’s necessary, it says, to deport black people from this country – regardless of whether the UK was the only home they’d ever really known or if they’d served their sentences in the criminal justice system. Once again black people are being treated as second-class citizens. The government wants people to feel like resistance will fail; that it’s pointless to even try We hear about black and brown people being deported but almost never white Americans or Australians – do they not breach their visa requirements or commit crimes? T his language of “criminality” has become a blanket term that the government uses to justify its actions. The same politicians who see migrants as a threat to “British values” such as the “rule of law” tried to deport people who didn’t get proper access to legal advice, and then complained when the courts tried to prevent it. The irony is bitter indeed. Advertisement We don’t yet know exactly who the 17 people were aboard the flight, but the impact will likely be devastating to them, tearing them away from the lives they’ve created, their family and friends, and forcing them to a country they haven’t chosen to go to. This is the essence of deportation. The determination with which the government has pursued this illustrates how wedded they are to anti-immigration politics and to flaunting that politics whenever it can. The flight has gone ahead, without a large chunk of its intended passengers on board. It is all to tell us: the courts can’t stop us; we won’t release or reflect on the Lessons Learned Review – no matter what, we’re going to be “tough” on migrants. Such displays of “toughness” are littered through recent UK history. The government’s social media campaign that boasted about immigration raids in 2013, the infamous “Go home” vans, New Labour’s decision to deport at least 20 people to Afghanistan in 2003. All one needs to consider is the fact that the government proudly called its package of policies the “hostile environment” before the recent, largely cosmetic, rebrand. Guardian Today: the headlines, the analysis, the debate - sent direct to you Read more For people on the receiving end of that toughness, what they experience is cruelty. This isn’t peripheral to how the UK immigration system functions, it is central to it. It is in detention centres, rat-infested asylum accommodation run by private contractors, dispersal schemes, immigration fees. But it also spans this country’s history, from the deeply antisemitic Aliens Act 1905 to the unequivocally racist Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968. “This is not a glitch in the system”, wrote Gary Younge about the Windrush scandal. “It is the system.” To reckon with all of this, we have to confront and ultimately dismantle the core anti-immigration arguments that have been circulating for decades. It is not enough to snip around the edges of this subject: “migrants” are people and movement is not inherently threatening. Most of us are familiar with them: immigration is bad for the economy, driving down wages and draining public services. The “migrant” is someone who is at once taking that nursing post that supposedly could have been filled by a “British worker”, and also pushing the NHS to breaking point. Politicians get fixated on numbers – how many people are coming into the country, how many are leaving – until numbers tell them something that isn’t helpful for their anti-immigration argument. The Windrush review hasn’t been released in much the same way as nine reports showing immigration didn’t have any negative impact on wages were suppressed by Theresa May’s Home Office, according to the former Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable. I served my time in prison. So why am I being deported? Michael McDonald Read more Advertisement The other anti-immigration argument that snakes perniciously around the debate, strangling attempts to locate where race is and how race functions, is: “It’s not racist to be concerned about immigration.” Too many immigrants of a certain kind, we are told, are “culturally” incompatible with Britishness or Englishness – just as people of colour who were born in the UK are questioned about whether they’re truly British. But there is no static British or English culture. “What does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they can’t get through the day without a cup of tea?” said the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall. “Where does it come from? Ceylon – Sri Lanka, India. That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no English history without that other history.” Yet precisely because this history is poorly known, race continues to be central to the debate in complicated and subtle ways. It shapes who is seen as a “migrant” and who isn’t; who is a threat and who isn’t. None of this means change isn’t possible – deportation laws did not always look like this. The government wants people to feel like resistance will fail; that it’s pointless to even try. But the opposition to this deportation can be the start of something bigger: a refusal to accept anti-immigration politics in all of its forms. • Maya Goodfellow is the author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats As 2020 begins… … we’re asking readers, like you, to make a new year contribution in support of the Guardian’s open, independent journalism. This has been a turbulent decade across the world – protest, populism, mass migration and the escalating climate crisis. The Guardian has been in every corner of the globe, reporting with tenacity, rigour and authority on the most critical events of our lifetimes. 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