I am glad to be able to speak about the Bill. I have taken an interest in immigration policy for very many years, first as an administrative trainee in the Home Office, and secondly as somebody who year on year is in the top 10 of MPs processing immigration casework. I have also, of course, taken an interest because I represent a constituency with very many immigrants from all over the world, and, finally, because I am the child of immigrants. I say from my knowledge and experience of the immigration system that it is bedevilled by poor administration and rushed and incoherent legislation, motivated by short-term political advantage—and I do not except the Labour party from that. I am afraid that this Bill is more of the same.
I say right at the beginning that there are many details in the Bill that I agree with—which is not surprising, because some of it merely puts into legislation matters that were regulations under the Labour Administration—but I deplore the rhetoric and I deplore the political direction of travel. I remind the House that immigration as an issue has been freighted with emotion since the days of Enoch Powell, and since those days immigration has been a synonym for black, Asian and foreign-looking people—for “the other”. Any Member of the House who pretends that immigrant, immigration and anti-immigrant rhetoric does not have that underlying narrative in British politics is being naive.
If people do not believe me, I urge them to read the report of the royal commission on alien immigration in 1903 and the subsequent Aliens Act 1905, which deal with exactly the ideas that those on the Government Front Bench are trying to push forward today. What people say about east European migrants today is what was said about east African migrants in the ’60s, what was said about west Indian migrants, what was said about Jewish migrants to the east end after the first world war, and what was said about Irish migrants in the 19th century: driving down wages; living in terrible housing conditions; assaulting our women. It is always the same narrative, which should be a clue to the House that it is always the same issue.
I remind Government Members who think that they can get away with all this anti-immigrant rhetoric and not pay an electoral price that the Republicans in the United States thought that. They went to town with anti- Hispanic, illegal migrant rhetoric; they thought that anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric was a huge vote winner. But at the election they found that perfectly legal migrants ran, not walked, away from Republicans. Not just Hispanic migrants but Chinese, Japanese, Indian migrants—every migrant community—voted in unprecedented numbers for the Democrats, in what was a difficult election for them in many ways, because when people of immigrant descent hear that anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric they think, “Actually, they are talking about me, my dad, my mum, my auntie, the people on the landing.” Government Members should not think that they can continue down this anti-illegal immigrant path and not pay a price with
the votes of the children and grandchildren of migrants. The danger with the Bill is not just that it will create the hostile environment for illegal immigrants that the Home Secretary was boasting of, but that it will tend to create a hostile environment for all of us of immigrant descent and our children.
I know as much about the UK Border Agency and abuse of the system as anyone. I worked in the Home Office and I knew about Croydon. People say that the Government inherited a shambolic immigration department from the Labour party, but as long as I have known the immigration department it has been dysfunctional and shambolic, and there are systemic reasons for that. It was always seen as an outpost of the Home Office in Whitehall and no one wanted to work there, so it was allowed to remain in a welter of administrative confusion. I bow to no one in my knowledge and my disapproval of the chaos, unfairness, inefficiency and poor administration of the immigration department. I also know—this has not been mentioned—of the abuses practised on my constituents by so-called immigration advisers. People talk about abuses of the system, but they are often triggered not by people who are simply looking for a better life for their family but by a class of so-called immigration advisers who systematically rip them off. My constituents come to me years later and I have to try to pick up the pieces of a case that was mishandled right from the beginning by people motivated only by profit.
I agree with what my long-standing friend and colleague, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), said about administrative problems, and I give him every credit for his work on the matter over the years. I also agree with what my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) said about people who are left in limbo, even though they are here legally, because the UKBA has not sent them their paperwork. There are systemic problems with the UKBA, but that does not justify trying to turn doctors and landlords into immigration officers on wheels. We need to deal with what is wrong with the administration before we ask untrained people to pursue matters that the Government and a state agency should deal with.
I want to say a word about what people hear on the doorstep, which keeps coming up in this debate. I hear about that from Government Members, and I am afraid that I hear about it from some hon. Friends. First, let us kill the myth that Labour had an open-door policy on migration. I have an office with filing cabinets stacked full of files about the thousands of cases that I dealt with year on year under a Labour Government. There was the issue of the miscalculation of the number of people coming from the eastern European accession countries—no one denies that—but if there was an open door, why did so many of my constituents have to wait years and years, divided from their family, to bring their children in? There was no open door. Far from apologising, the Labour party should make that point more clearly and more often.
What do we hear on the doorstep? I can believe that Members hear people complaining about immigrants. I have the children of West Indians complaining to me about eastern European migrants. However, in an economic downturn people always complain about the other, and want to blame the other for their economic circumstances.
Of course we as politicians should deal with the underlying issues when people complain, whether about a lack of housing or job insecurity, but we must not allow public policy to be driven by people who are frightened of the changes they see around them, of economic insecurity and of the fact that the so-called upturn is not helping their living standards. We are now in danger of passing yet another ill thought-out Bill to go on the pile that has been heaped up since the 1960s.
Let us not forget that much of what we hear on the doorstep about immigration is simply not based on fact. It may be easy to say to people, “Oh, yes, you’re so right, we’re going to have fewer of them; we’re going to do this; we’re going to do that,” but politicians should deal with the facts first rather than pander all the time to urban myth, which leads to a downward spiral of rhetoric.
Turning to the content of the Bill, other Members, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), have dealt with the issue of landlords. Even landlords’ organisations are against the Bill. Richard Lambert, the chief executive officer of the National Landlords Association, has said:
“Existing referencing will pick up immigration issues anyway”.
Gavin Smart of the Chartered Institute of Housing has said that the measures will
“make it much harder for non-British people to access housing even when they have a legal right to live in the UK. Checking immigration status is complicated so landlords may shy away from letting to anyone who appears not to be British.”
That is landlords speaking. The effect of the Bill will be that when people such as my son and the children of some of my colleagues go to see a flat, they will be told that the flat is taken. Landlords will not want to take the chance of letting to someone who “might be” an illegal immigrant. I do not believe Ministers understand how it feels to knock on a door and be told, blatantly wrongly, that the flat or room is taken. That is what will happen as a consequence of the Bill.
Ministers like to give the idea that the problems in accident and emergency and the health service are caused by illegal immigrants. That is quite extraordinary. Even if their figures are true—I believe that they are scare figures based on the assumption that every person who comes here and gets treatment came only for the treatment in the first place—we are still not talking about the systemic reasons for problems in the NHS.
My mother was of that generation of West Indian women who came here in the ’60s to build the health service. Whether people like it or not, without immigrants we would not have an NHS. For as long as I am in this House, I will not allow Members to get up and say without challenge that the NHS’s problems are caused by immigrant workers. I owe that at least to my parents’ generation.
Also, there is already legislation about people who are not legally entitled to NHS health care. Why do the Government not get on with collecting money under that legislation, rather than introducing new legislation to do the same thing? It is because they are trying to make a political point and pander to UKIP voters.
On appeals, we have already heard that 60% of successful appeals are due to administrative error. Why can we not move towards a more robust system for making decisions, rather than cutting people’s appeal rights, which currently
are the only guarantee they have of some kind of recourse against administrative error? There is also the way the Bill would undermine article 8 of the European convention on human rights, the right to family life.
In drawing my remarks to a close, let me say this: it is simply not true that immigrants, illegal or otherwise, are responsible for the current pressures on public services. To say that, or to imply it, is to slight the millions of people of immigrant descent who keep all our public services, not just the health service, going, and they will take it as such.
It is also not true, as some people seek to imply, that immigrants cause low wages. That has been the anti-immigration attack since the 19th century. Immigrants do not cause low wages; predatory employers, insufficient workplace protection and weakened trade unions do that. That was true in the 19th century when people accused the Irish of driving down wages, and it is true today when people make the self-same accusation against the eastern European community.