We must not let the mass migration lobby win

The Windrush scandal is tragic but it should not be used to stop sensible immigration controls

In 1997, when Jack Straw became home secretary, he sought the advice of his predecessors. One told him: “The thing about being home secretary is this: at any one time there are 50 sets of officials working on projects that will destroy your career. The problem is, you don’t know who they are, and they don’t either.”

The Home Office is a dangerous place for ministers because it is an operational department as much as a policy department. It is responsible for devising laws and rules, but also taking hundreds of thousands of decisions – of huge importance to the people involved – about nationality, visas, deportations and more. As they require judgment and discretion, mistakes are sometimes made.

In the case of the Windrush generation – the people who came to Britain between 1948 and 1971 on their parents’ passports – the department has been slow to realise there was a systemic problem, rather than a handful of tough cases.

The trouble is caused by two pieces of immigration legislation more than 40 years apart. When the 1971 Immigration Act granted the Windrush generation “indefinite leave to remain”, they were given no paperwork to confirm their status, and the Home Office kept no records. Now, because recent immigration laws require employers, landlords and others to check whether a prospective employee or tenant is in the country legally, the Windrush generation are finding themselves unable to work, rent a home, or go about their lives in other ways. Some might even have been wrongfully deported.

It is a tragic tale. The people of the Windrush generation are here legally, they are British, and their experience is intolerable. The Home Office must fix the problem, and quickly.

Some say ministers must change their approach to illegal immigration. But this is wrong. We have hundreds of thousands of people living in Britain illegally, a number that is growing every year. With limited budgets, time-consuming legal processes, and often a lack of cooperation from other countries, it will never be possible for the authorities to arrest and deport their way to success. Neither can illegal immigration be prevented through tougher border controls: most illegal migrants are “overstayers”, not “clandestines” who enter the country illegally.

So ministers are right to make Britain a harder country to live in for people who are here illegally. In recent years, they have made it more difficult for illegal immigrants to rent property, get a job, claim benefits and obtain bank accounts and driving licences. Even sceptical studies find that this increases the number leaving the country voluntarily: ministers should not reverse the policy, but extend it to include other services.

Clearly, things must not go too far. As home secretary, Theresa May was criticised for the notorious “go home or face arrest” vans that were deployed in 2013. In fact, she blocked the proposal, but it was revived and approved in a communications plan while she was on holiday. She killed off the scheme later that year, but by then the damage had been done.

The difficulty for the Windrush generation is their inability to prove their immigration status, and the solution lies in addressing this problem. As David Blunkett, the former home secretary, says, this should be straightforward to manage: education and health records are enough for officials to confirm the status of the people concerned.

So there is a solution. None the less, campaigners remain determined to destroy the hostile environment strategy.

Their first reason is political: Labour want to blame Tory “callousness”. The trouble with this explanation is that the approach began under Labour home secretaries. In 2007, John Reid said “living and working here illegally” should become “ever more uncomfortable and constrained”. Under Alan Johnson, the Border Agency said it would “make the UK a hostile environment” for illegal immigrants.

The second reason is many campaigners oppose controlling and reducing immigration. Partisan academics, immigration lawyers, Labour lefties and even liberal Tories find the very idea of immigration control distasteful. Unable to win the argument for mass immigration, they adopt the tactic of cynical obfuscation.

Suggest limiting legal migration, and they say the public only wants the system to work better. Try improving the system by reforming human rights law, and they say the problem is poor enforcement. Suggest increasing spending on enforcement, and they say you have the wrong priorities. Pursue the hostile environment strategy, and they accuse you of turning civil society into a police state.

Their objective is to maintain high immigration, and their method is to wear everybody down until nobody believes it is even possible to control the numbers. They must not be allowed to succeed. What has happened to the Windrush generation is cruel, unfair and must be remedied. But we cannot allow it to be used to overturn good policies.