Dear *|FNAME|*,
This week, the government put immigration front and centre of its agenda, publishing its immigration White Paper, pushing ahead with its Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill and briefing about Rwanda-style offshore processing hubs. Migrants are not “strangers”. They are our friends and neighbours. They are people who have built lives here and pay their taxes here. Immigration is not the crisis. What we face is a crisis in how we treat people, value rights and understand our responsibilities to each other.
So often when I hear people talk about immigration, what they are talking about is social decline more generally. People talk about pressures on the NHS, public services, housing, education. For as long as I can remember, politicians have posited migration as a central cause of social decline. This framing hands the advantage to the anti-migrant Right and moves us further away from policies that could address their root causes and bring the working class together in all its diversity: austerity, the erosion of workers’ rights, the selloff of council housing, the privatisation of essential services.
