This immigrant knows all too well the bureaucratic horrors of Windrush

All migrants experience an existential crisis – and the Home Office has confirmed their worst fears

the poor. That offer was certainly not unconditional. Incoming applicants had to pass quite rigorous physical and mental health checks to establish that they were not likely to become a “charge upon the state” and they were required to show evidence of existing contacts within the United States who could assist them with housing and employment. There was no welfare state to rescue or provide support so new migrants had to cleave to their own communities to survive: hence the self-imposed ghetto culture of the traditional Italian, Jewish and Irish neighbourhoods. This is why ethnic identity is, to this day, so much a feature of American political and social life.

Half a century or so later, I came to London as a postgraduate student and decided almost immediately that this was the country in which I wanted to spend my life. That choice was, it was quite clear, a possibility but not an unproblematic one. My student visa had to be renewed each year and I was issued with an Aliens’ Registration Card, which required me to report every change of address to the local police station. When I married my British husband, I was given what was then regarded as a permanent, unalienable right to stay: an unrestricted visa. But after another 20 years even this seemed unsatisfactory and insecure: feeling so totally committed to this country – which had given me the only personal happiness I had ever known – but still needing legal permission to reside in it. So I applied for UK citizenship (which was then an automatic right to spouses), took my oath to the Queen and became legally British.

The US, which did not permit dual nationality back then, promptly cancelled my American passport and issued me with a Certificate of Loss of Nationality, which I keep on file along with my cherished British naturalisation papers.

So yes, I have considerable knowledge of the inherently strange experience of reinventing oneself in a new land: probably one of the most liberating, and psychologically dangerous, adventures it is possible to undertake. This freedom to uproot oneself is bought at a tremendous price, which is why migration is often such a desperate act. What is gained may be immediate safety or economic opportunity. But what is lost is the sense of communal birth-right and natural belonging that most ordinary people take for granted.

This Windrush mess, they say, is being cleared up. The specific damage will be undone at least in a material sense, but the trust is probably gone for good. Of course, this was a political disgrace because any effect of public policy, even if it is an unintended consequence, is the responsibility of government. But in truth the real fault lies with officious insensitivity of the kind that harassed administrators excel at. Obtuseness is a permanent fixture of bureaucracies and it is exacerbated by the kind of political pressure that produces sweeping policy changes and sudden reversals of long-standing assumptions. Change the law so that evidence of a kind that no one had previously thought necessary is now a requirement for everyday essentials like healthcare and employment, and then threaten NHS providers and employers with sanctions for not enforcing the new rule? What could possibly go wrong? Who could have failed to see that this was a potential

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion human disaster? Answer: people who have no idea what it is like to be living permanently in a foreign country. Who have no experience of the extraordinary complications that can arise when all your personal security – the stability of your family, your capacity to earn a living, your right to participate in civic life – can all be altered by law overnight.

This latest change of policy was a result of an unprecedented crisis: the phenomenon of mass migrations produced by regional war, terrorism and – paradoxically – the greater mobility that comes with affluence have produced a dilemma that the advanced countries have absolutely no idea how to control. Modern social democracies, with their comprehensive welfare systems and liberal social attitudes, were utterly unprepared for it.

Where American schooling was consciously dedicated to turning the children of successive waves of immigrants into proud patriotic Americans, European education was still immersed in post-colonial guilt. Where America threw its incomers on to their own resources, Britain and Europe had no lawful mechanisms for such ruthlessness.

The loss of individual interviews and evaluations, which Border Agency staff now claim might have spared so much injustice, was almost certainly inevitable regardless of Home Office policy: the possibility of human understanding and personal intervention has been trampled in the rush. Veering wildly between recrimination and apology accomplishes nothing. The developed world is going to have to deal properly with a problem that threatens to undermine its own humanity.

The freedom to uproot oneself is bought at a tremendous price, which is why it is so often such a desperate act