Ross Clark

early years in Britain, when landlords used to hang out brazen signs saying “no blacks”, only now to find themselves running up against a bureaucratic brick wall and treated as illegal immigrants.

Another is Albert Thompson, who came to Britain from Jamaica in the early 1970s to join his mother, who was working here as an NHS nurse. He built himself a career as a car mechanic, rising to oversee operations for a string of garages. He has paid his taxes and raised a family here. But now, in need of a life-saving operation for prostate cancer, he has been told he must pay £54,000 for the treatment – on the grounds he can’t prove that he has the right to live here.

It isn’t just the Windrush generation either that is being treated roughly by the immigration system. Dr Luke Ong came to Britain from Singapore to study medicine in 2007. By last year he was three years into training as a GP – a profession for which the country has a desperate need. But that hasn’t prevented the Home Office trying to deport him – on the grounds that he was two weeks late in applying to renew his visa. It seems pretty obvious what is going on. Finding itself impotent in trying to reach the Government’s target of reducing net migration to fewer than 100,000 people a year the Home Office is lashing out at soft targets.

The failure to control migration is partly down to EU rules on free movement, of course – something that the Government cannot change until we leave. But that is not the whole story. How many times have we heard of convicted criminals unable to be deported in spite of having entered the country illegally because their publicfunded human rights lawyers have found some wheeze why they cannot be sent home?

We have seen adult migrants from Calais blatantly posing as children in order to gain entry to Britain under asylum rules. Many granted the right to stay here have come from countries where there is no war or reason to fear for their lives. We have had a case of a Romanian Big Issue-seller allowed to stay in the country on the grounds that she was engaged in selfemployment – despite the Big Issue being set up to help homeless British people.

Even under the rules of EU free movement it is possible to deport people who are not gainfully employed – and other EU countries manage to do so.

THEN there is the issue of illegal migrants who have been ordered to leave but whose departure has not been enforced. According to the former head of the Border Agency, Rob Whiteman, there may be one million illegal migrants living in Britain.

Yet in these kind of cases the Government seems to lack the bottle to act. It all seems too difficult. One glimpse of a human rights pressure group and officials roll over and give in. As for enforcing removals, no government agency seems to bother – in some cases people have simply been told to deport themselves.

Instead, officials start picking on the easy targets: honest citizens who are not trying to hide, who came legally on the invitation of the government in the 1950s and 60s and who have been living here and paying their taxes ever since.

It stinks. There is good migration and bad migration – yet our immigration system all too often seems unable to tell the difference.

‘Home Office is going after soft targets’