Our immigration system is utterly unfit for purpose
WHAT kind of immigration system invites in an Islamic State terrorist who lied about his age while at the same time trying to expel residents who arrived as children and have since spent decades working hard and paying their taxes?
The answer, depressingly, is our own. Last month Ahmed Hassan was jailed for 34 years for carrying out the failed Parson’s Green terror attack. Three years ago, he was welcomed into Britain as an asylum-seeker in spite of admitting in a Home Office interview that he had been trained to kill by Isis soldiers. The judge who jailed him said he was convinced that Hassan had lied about his age in order to help his asylum case.
Cases such as these might give the impression that Britain is soft on immigration but that is not how it must seem to Michael Braithwaite, 66, who arrived in Britain as a child and has lived here ever since. To him, his adopted country has the most petty-minded immigration system imaginable.
Having grown up here from the age of 11 it had never even occurred to Braithwaite that he wasn’t British – until, that is, last year when he was asked by the school where he had worked for 15 years to provide a biometric card saying that he had the right to remain in Britain.
Unable to produce one, he lost his job. A year later and he still does not have the required biometric card to work in Britain – not least because the Home Office has demanded documentary evidence for each of the 56 years he has lived in this country.
HOW on earth he is supposed to satisfy this demand defeats me. Braithwaite is one of a number of Britons from “Generation Windrush” – named after the ship on which the first migrants arrived from the West Indies in 1948 – who, in their old age, have suddenly found themselves under siege from over-zealous Home Office officials. It is a generation that took advantage of a drive to recruit overseas workers in the post-war years.
They built careers here, survived racist repatriation campaigns by the National Front and others in the 1960s, lived through casual racism in their