Britain thinks of itself as a welcoming country, but the reality has always been different. Migration is viewed benevolently when hypothetical, but heaven forbid anyone should actually try to migrate here. Nicholas Winton famously had to forge papers to smuggle Jewish children into Britain before the Second World War, and hostility to post-war Commonwealth immigration quickly led to limits being imposed. New arrivals were not well treated, and race equality legislation had to be imposed on a grudging populace.
As if to prove little has changed, modern immigration policy since 2010 has meant Britain has become a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants, particularly following the exposure of the Windrush scandal in 2018 and successive Tory governments’ strategies to make staying in the country as difficult as possible for people, in the hope that they will just leave.
In this innovative and alarming book, blogger and campaigner Colin Yeo exposes the iniquities of an ugly, unfair and failing approach and offers a manifesto for a new immigration system that would roll back the hostile environment laws, consolidate immigration legislation and introduce a statutory time limit on immigration detention.
