The Home Office threatened to deport a woman in a coma – it’s like the Windrush scandal never happened

A year ago, Sajid Javid said he would create a more ‘humane’ immigration system in the wake of the scandal. He hasn’t

Maya Goodfellow
Monday 13 May 2019 16:05 BST
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Woman in a coma threatened with deportation by Home Office

It was only a year ago, but if government policy is anything to go by, it’s almost as if it never happened. Last spring, in what quickly became known as the Windrush scandal, the devastating impact of some of the most pernicious parts of government immigration policy were splashed all over newspaper front pages and dissected in TV news segments.

In a country where anti-immigration politics is the default, the immediate fallout was unprecedented. Issuing somewhat half-hearted mea culpas as they went, politicians who had just months before been peddling xenophobia, promised to change policy and change the debate – as if they had previously nothing to do with either. The UK’s immigration system would become more “humane”, newly-appointed home secretary Sajid Javid pledged; we’ll improve the way we talk about immigration, MPs from across the political divide promised. It seemed like there might be a shift – but Bhavani Espathi is one of many people whose experience shows just how little has changed.

She was in a coma – which lasted for a week and a half, following a major operation – when she received a letter saying her application for leave to remain had been refused. Her fiancé immediately appealed the decision; that too was denied. We don’t know all the intricacies of this one case but it sits alongside so many others; people who have had their whole lives turned upside down by the UK’s immigration system. After nine years of living in the UK, Nasar Ullah Khan was told he couldn’t have a heart transplant because he didn’t have leave to remain, he died in February this year. Countless people are currently locked in detention centres with too few avenues to justice. Meanwhile, some of the people caught up in the original Windrush scandal are still suffering.

Despite all the promises politicians made, the UK’s immigration system remains inhumane and callous. Take the hostile environment. For all the remorse Conservative politicians expressed over Windrush, there was none for the existence of the policies that created the scandal. They remain in place. And so, people who are undocumented or who don’t have the “right” documentation are still denied basic services, as doctors and educators are still forced to work as border guards.

The problem doesn’t end with the hostile environment – it’s UK immigration policy more broadly. Families and loved ones remain separated by earnings thresholds – UK citizens must meet a minimum income threshold of £18,600 per year to bring a partner into the country from outside the EU – and the Conservative’s commitment to reduce net migration down to the tens of thousands still lingers in the background.

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Proudly stated in their 2015 and 2017 manifestos and repeated time and again by senior Conservative politicians, including by Theresa May, there is an obsession with numbers. This has consequently filtered down through the system, right down to the immigration officials who were allegedly offered a cake or a box of chocolates if they arrested the highest number of people suspected of being undocumented migrants.

A quick glance at the UK’s history of racist immigration legislation and rhetoric will show you that this regressive fixation with numbers began before May’s hostile environment and the Coalition government. This history is instructive; it shows the problem isn’t just about policy but how immigration is understood and talked about. From Conservative through to New Labour, politicians have spent decades problematising particular groups of migrants as a threat to the UK. Deploying racism while denying that it plays any factor in the “debate”, they have laid the ground for restrictive policy by suggesting continuously that the “numbers” are “too high”.

Not currently front and centre of political discourse in the way that it has been in the past, anti-immigration politics has not simply disappeared. It is still subtly written into pledges to end freedom of movement, it can be read in the disinclination to make sense of and grapple with the xenoracism that formed a central plank of the EU referendum and it still shapes how immigration continues to be understood as a problem to be managed.

The scale of outrage Windrush produced hasn’t been met with anywhere near the kind of rhetorical and policy shifts necessary to make the UK’s immigration system less violent. If we want to change the appalling ways people are treated simply because of where they were born, challenging the rationale of anti-immigration politics is where we have to start.

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