What the commentators said

“Could the Home Office have made a more humiliating hash” of things, asked the Daily Mail. The Windrush generation was invited here to help with Britain’s postwar reconstruction, and since then has “hugely enriched our cultural life”. Yet thanks to “bureaucratic pettifogging”, its members have been treated with “callous indifference”. The cruelty really strikes you when you look at individual cases, said Brendan O’neill in The Spectator. Take that of Michael Braithwaite, a special-needs teacher who came here at the age of nine: he lost his job last year when he was deemed an illegal immigrant. Or consider what happened to 63-year-old mechanic Albert Thompson. He has lived here for more than 40 years, yet was recently refused treatment for prostate cancer. In 1948, the Empire Windrush arrived with the first group of 492 immigrants from Jamaica: 70 years on, we are turning the lives of their children upside down.

May is to blame for much of this, said Jonn Elledge in the New Statesman. She may be no racist herself, but she has been happy to woo right-wing voters with policies that aggravate racial tension. Recall how, as home secretary, she ordered lorry-mounted billboards to tour London effectively telling illegal immigrants to “bugger off”. But bear in mind that the Home Office, for all its heavy-handedness, is trying to cope with a real problem, said David Goodhart in The Daily Telegraph. There are close to a million people living here illegally, and each year thousands more “illegals” arrive. Few ever get removed against their will. It was in an effort to promote their voluntary departure that May came up with her “hostile environment” policies. Yet if this crisis has taught us anything, it is that no policy will get far without the introduction of ID cards. If everyone who’s here legally had one – the Windrush generation and three million EU citizens included – the problem of having to prove their legal status would disappear.