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Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System
How would we treat Paddington Bear if he came to the UK today? Perhaps he would be made destitute as a result of extortionate visa application fees; perhaps he would experience a cruel term of imprisonment in a detention centre; or perhaps his entire identity would be torn apart at the hands of a hostile environment that seems to delight in the humiliation of its victims.
Britain thinks of itself as a welcoming country, but the reality is, and always has been, very different. This is a system in which people born in Britain are told in uncompromising terms that they are not British, in which those who have lived their entire lives on these shores are threatened with the most unyielding of policies, and in which falling in love with anyone other than a British national can result in families being ripped apart. Here, citizens are called on to police each other, targets matter more than people, and death in detention centres is far from uncommon.
In this vital and alarming book, campaigner and immigration barrister Colin Yeo tackles the subject with dexterity and rigour, offering a roadmap of where we should go from here as he exposes the iniquities of an immigration system that is unforgiving, unfeeling and, ultimately, failing.
Britain thinks of itself as a welcoming country, but the reality is, and always has been, very different. This is a system in which people born in Britain are told in uncompromising terms that they are not British, in which those who have lived their entire lives on these shores are threatened with the most unyielding of policies, and in which falling in love with anyone other than a British national can result in families being ripped apart. Here, citizens are called on to police each other, targets matter more than people, and death in detention centres is far from uncommon.
In this vital and alarming book, campaigner and immigration barrister Colin Yeo tackles the subject with dexterity and rigour, offering a roadmap of where we should go from here as he exposes the iniquities of an immigration system that is unforgiving, unfeeling and, ultimately, failing.
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Published March 17, 2022
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January 21, 2021
If you want the full nine yards on the abstruse irrationality of the UK immigration control system this is the best book you could find. Others have provided more eloquent prose on the sheer cruelty of the way the Home Office runs its ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants (viz. Amelia Gentleman’s ‘The Windrush Betrayal’) and with more penetrating political purpose (Maya Goodfellow’s ‘Hostile Environment’) but none have done quite so well as to account for its sheer perversity as Colin Yeo.
Yeo’s advantage is that he is a lawyer who works on the injustices of immigration control as his day job. He has not been introduced to the subject out of journalistic interest in a notable case or a concern to trace out the lineage of brutal state power. He picks up the issues as they come to him in the briefs from solicitors who have clients entangled in the coils of a regulatory system which seems intent on squeezing the life out of them. On his barristerial desk one imaginations bundles are piled high which relate to a work permit squabble here, a complaint about thwarted family reunification there, and the account of an asylum seeker in fear of being returned to persecution somewhere in the mix. This is a good place to judge the merits of the system as a whole.
The chapters in the book explain how immigration control has come to take the shape it has under headings which deal with family migration, asylum seekers, economic migrants, students, and EU nationals. But for the core of Yeo’s explanation as to why the system is so appalling the three sections entitled ‘Hostile Environment: Papers, Please’, ‘Net Migration: The Accidental Target’; and ‘Complexity and Cost: No Way to Run a Whelk Stall’, serve best. These trace out a trajectory for the development of the system for the years after 2010. The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government had inherited an approach from New Labour which conceded the important of migration to the UK economy, but which aimed at a tightly-honed form of management which would ensure that only the ‘brightest and best’ would be permitted to enter, or even more importantly, remain in the country.
This required upgrading the systems used to maintain surveillance of migrants, both during the procedures for considering applications for visas but also of the performance of the people who had been permitted to enter the country. Under the terms of the hostile environment this meant enrolling civil society actors as well as state agencies in the task of maintaining a watchful eye. Employers were already required to play a role in this task and the coalition government’s legislation added private sector landlords to this list, as well as banks and other financial institutions. The police and the driving licence issuing authority was obliged to check the immigration status of individuals who they were in contact with, with information sharing also expected from local government, the NHS, and schools and universities.
But Yeo explains that lumbering these bodies with responsibility for checking immigration status was a dangerous route to go down precisely because the idea of a clear and explicit ‘legal’ immigration status is not present in British law. Instead, what we have is the idea of the right of abode that is a component of being a British citizen on one hand, and a myriad of statuses which the courts are best described as ‘precarious’ on the other. The status of being ‘precarious’ includes hundreds of thousands – probably millions – of people without British citizenship who are lawfully resident for the time being in the UK, plus another group who have crossed a line that makes them, in the official terminology, ‘illegal’. Sorting out one from the other is no job for the non-legally trained layperson. Asking them to do it is to court disaster.
Disaster accordingly happened in the much publicised case of the ‘Windrush generation’ migrants who had been settled in the country since at least the early 1970s. This showed how the hope of a system of surveillance that narrowly targeted migrant people who were likely to be in breach of their terms of entry had proven false. Instead it had sucked a whole cohort of long-established residents into it maw, causing them immense harm. Once immigration ministers would have said that this was regrettable, but as long as immigration control could be doing the basic work it had been set by Parliament then we had to accept that there would be some hapless, innocent victims.
Yeo makes the powerful point that it cannot even be shown to being doing this fundamental job. Immigration control has not become more proficient in managing the flow of people across borders and communities: rather, on the contrary it was showing signs of paralysis. Detection and enforcement rates – measured by the numbers of people with no legal status – has actually fallen over the period of the hostile environment.
One reason Yeo sees for this lies in the way the system has become driven by targets which can be offered up to the general public as evidence that the immense investment in controlling the movement is actually working. He points out that using the rate of net migration (the numbers of people entering measured those leaving the country each year) as the standard of success or otherwise of the system means that tension arises between economic efficiency and the management of numbers. What is the priority for government? If economic growth requires fresh cohorts of workers from abroad to provide goods and services then why complain if this means exceeding an arbitrary target. As Yeo points out, for most of the past decade meeting the net migration goals set by the Home Office would have required crashing the economy.
He argues that that immigration control has become excessively complex over the years, reaching the point where it ceases to be ‘intelligent, clear and predictable’ which the common law requires of systems of regulation. In an illuminating section he traces a path of development which, over a period beginning in 1994, has seen the main set of immigration rules expand from a relatively succinct eighty pages to over one thousand as the time of the publication of his book. Since 2010 there has been 5,700 changes to the rules, causing them to more than double in size. The bureaucracies responsible for making the system work, not to mention the employers, landlords and local government officials who are burdened with a share of responsibility, are constantly overwhelmed by the task of understanding what immigration control is aiming for and why they are expected to consign a portion of migrant people to the unwanted and deportable categories.
This is a damning enough critique, but Yeo is less than convincing with regard to his explanation as to why the system has reached such a point of byzantine complexity that it now unworkable across large segments of its span. He suggests that we have gone done this path as a consequence of a series of mistakes on the part of politicians who, in pursuit of popularity with an immigration sceptical public, have aimed for targets which are intended to demonstrate a reduction in numbers beyond any other consideration. The corollary of this argument is that, by taking a deep breathe and stepping back, a better set of politicians could undo the mess. His interest in marking out how this might be done is indicated in the sub-title of the book, ‘Fixing our broken immigration system’. A system that had been fixed would have the elements of a transparently clear and concise set of rules capable of being understood by any person of average intelligence, low cost procedures for making applications, and a robust, independent system of tribunals geared to considering complaints against decisions that were arguably unfair.
On the face of it this sounds, if not ideal, at least as good as we might reasonably hope for. The problem is that it was exactly the system that was in place when I began what turned out to be a long career as an immigration advisor back in the mid-1970s. Even at that time it was generating a lot of concern about the racial justice dimension to immigration controls which were not easily remedied by the appeals system. The treatment of people resident in the UK who were seeking reunification with family members waiting for visas in countries in the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent were to the forefront of what were acute issues of racial justice, by no means the sole matters of concern.
So, if the ideal starting point already seems less than optimal, then how do we account for it becoming so much worse? Stupid politicians might be part of the answer, but the more compelling reason has to be the way in which immigration has become so much more central to the business of running a capitalist economy as globalisation and neoliberal politics has worked to integrate labour markets. Further, this integration has taken place across decades of long-term depression of economic growth, married to the fact technological innovation has worked to reduce demand for labour. The result is that we have more people dependent on waged work across the world (the effect of the imposition of neoliberal models on the development of the economies of the Global South) but with less opportunities for decent work opportunities in these home countries. The predominant model of job opportunity has centred on industries and services out-sourced from the developed countries. Have been called upon to survive in this global labour market some of these workers come to consider the fact that there are some production processes which require workforces to be located close to the place where the goods and services they produce are consumed. This is the reason why sectors like construction, food production and processing, social and health care, hospitality, and domestic work have become the migration industries par excellence.
This is the reason why the business of controlling the movement of people has become so intractable from the standpoint of governments which have the responsibility of managing the conflicting interests bound up in a capitalist economy. Getting the balance right between admitting the ‘right’ sort of workers and keeping this at levels which the rest of the population are prepared to concede as acceptable has become so problematic because both of these nodal points are located withing the realm of politics in a constant state of flux. There is no ‘right’ number of workers to be admitted each year and no fixed level of entry which is assured of the support of the general population. All is the subject of contention, and on every point there are different viewpoints and interests to be taken into consideration. It is not because politicians are particularly stupid that they have been led down the path of astounding complexity as the way to resolve their immigration problems. The range of issues they need to be take into account have become so vast and of such critical importance to the running of a capitalist economy so thoroughly integrated into global markets and now require the political elites to return to the drawing board with a frequency that constantly overlays each set of control measures with another, to a point that hardly anyone understands what needs to be done and how to go about doing it. If fixing a broken system is ever to be possible, the starting point has to be the role labour, and the movement of people who carry its potential in their brains and muscles, needs to play in rebuilding the world from bottom up.
Yeo’s advantage is that he is a lawyer who works on the injustices of immigration control as his day job. He has not been introduced to the subject out of journalistic interest in a notable case or a concern to trace out the lineage of brutal state power. He picks up the issues as they come to him in the briefs from solicitors who have clients entangled in the coils of a regulatory system which seems intent on squeezing the life out of them. On his barristerial desk one imaginations bundles are piled high which relate to a work permit squabble here, a complaint about thwarted family reunification there, and the account of an asylum seeker in fear of being returned to persecution somewhere in the mix. This is a good place to judge the merits of the system as a whole.
The chapters in the book explain how immigration control has come to take the shape it has under headings which deal with family migration, asylum seekers, economic migrants, students, and EU nationals. But for the core of Yeo’s explanation as to why the system is so appalling the three sections entitled ‘Hostile Environment: Papers, Please’, ‘Net Migration: The Accidental Target’; and ‘Complexity and Cost: No Way to Run a Whelk Stall’, serve best. These trace out a trajectory for the development of the system for the years after 2010. The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government had inherited an approach from New Labour which conceded the important of migration to the UK economy, but which aimed at a tightly-honed form of management which would ensure that only the ‘brightest and best’ would be permitted to enter, or even more importantly, remain in the country.
This required upgrading the systems used to maintain surveillance of migrants, both during the procedures for considering applications for visas but also of the performance of the people who had been permitted to enter the country. Under the terms of the hostile environment this meant enrolling civil society actors as well as state agencies in the task of maintaining a watchful eye. Employers were already required to play a role in this task and the coalition government’s legislation added private sector landlords to this list, as well as banks and other financial institutions. The police and the driving licence issuing authority was obliged to check the immigration status of individuals who they were in contact with, with information sharing also expected from local government, the NHS, and schools and universities.
But Yeo explains that lumbering these bodies with responsibility for checking immigration status was a dangerous route to go down precisely because the idea of a clear and explicit ‘legal’ immigration status is not present in British law. Instead, what we have is the idea of the right of abode that is a component of being a British citizen on one hand, and a myriad of statuses which the courts are best described as ‘precarious’ on the other. The status of being ‘precarious’ includes hundreds of thousands – probably millions – of people without British citizenship who are lawfully resident for the time being in the UK, plus another group who have crossed a line that makes them, in the official terminology, ‘illegal’. Sorting out one from the other is no job for the non-legally trained layperson. Asking them to do it is to court disaster.
Disaster accordingly happened in the much publicised case of the ‘Windrush generation’ migrants who had been settled in the country since at least the early 1970s. This showed how the hope of a system of surveillance that narrowly targeted migrant people who were likely to be in breach of their terms of entry had proven false. Instead it had sucked a whole cohort of long-established residents into it maw, causing them immense harm. Once immigration ministers would have said that this was regrettable, but as long as immigration control could be doing the basic work it had been set by Parliament then we had to accept that there would be some hapless, innocent victims.
Yeo makes the powerful point that it cannot even be shown to being doing this fundamental job. Immigration control has not become more proficient in managing the flow of people across borders and communities: rather, on the contrary it was showing signs of paralysis. Detection and enforcement rates – measured by the numbers of people with no legal status – has actually fallen over the period of the hostile environment.
One reason Yeo sees for this lies in the way the system has become driven by targets which can be offered up to the general public as evidence that the immense investment in controlling the movement is actually working. He points out that using the rate of net migration (the numbers of people entering measured those leaving the country each year) as the standard of success or otherwise of the system means that tension arises between economic efficiency and the management of numbers. What is the priority for government? If economic growth requires fresh cohorts of workers from abroad to provide goods and services then why complain if this means exceeding an arbitrary target. As Yeo points out, for most of the past decade meeting the net migration goals set by the Home Office would have required crashing the economy.
He argues that that immigration control has become excessively complex over the years, reaching the point where it ceases to be ‘intelligent, clear and predictable’ which the common law requires of systems of regulation. In an illuminating section he traces a path of development which, over a period beginning in 1994, has seen the main set of immigration rules expand from a relatively succinct eighty pages to over one thousand as the time of the publication of his book. Since 2010 there has been 5,700 changes to the rules, causing them to more than double in size. The bureaucracies responsible for making the system work, not to mention the employers, landlords and local government officials who are burdened with a share of responsibility, are constantly overwhelmed by the task of understanding what immigration control is aiming for and why they are expected to consign a portion of migrant people to the unwanted and deportable categories.
This is a damning enough critique, but Yeo is less than convincing with regard to his explanation as to why the system has reached such a point of byzantine complexity that it now unworkable across large segments of its span. He suggests that we have gone done this path as a consequence of a series of mistakes on the part of politicians who, in pursuit of popularity with an immigration sceptical public, have aimed for targets which are intended to demonstrate a reduction in numbers beyond any other consideration. The corollary of this argument is that, by taking a deep breathe and stepping back, a better set of politicians could undo the mess. His interest in marking out how this might be done is indicated in the sub-title of the book, ‘Fixing our broken immigration system’. A system that had been fixed would have the elements of a transparently clear and concise set of rules capable of being understood by any person of average intelligence, low cost procedures for making applications, and a robust, independent system of tribunals geared to considering complaints against decisions that were arguably unfair.
On the face of it this sounds, if not ideal, at least as good as we might reasonably hope for. The problem is that it was exactly the system that was in place when I began what turned out to be a long career as an immigration advisor back in the mid-1970s. Even at that time it was generating a lot of concern about the racial justice dimension to immigration controls which were not easily remedied by the appeals system. The treatment of people resident in the UK who were seeking reunification with family members waiting for visas in countries in the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent were to the forefront of what were acute issues of racial justice, by no means the sole matters of concern.
So, if the ideal starting point already seems less than optimal, then how do we account for it becoming so much worse? Stupid politicians might be part of the answer, but the more compelling reason has to be the way in which immigration has become so much more central to the business of running a capitalist economy as globalisation and neoliberal politics has worked to integrate labour markets. Further, this integration has taken place across decades of long-term depression of economic growth, married to the fact technological innovation has worked to reduce demand for labour. The result is that we have more people dependent on waged work across the world (the effect of the imposition of neoliberal models on the development of the economies of the Global South) but with less opportunities for decent work opportunities in these home countries. The predominant model of job opportunity has centred on industries and services out-sourced from the developed countries. Have been called upon to survive in this global labour market some of these workers come to consider the fact that there are some production processes which require workforces to be located close to the place where the goods and services they produce are consumed. This is the reason why sectors like construction, food production and processing, social and health care, hospitality, and domestic work have become the migration industries par excellence.
This is the reason why the business of controlling the movement of people has become so intractable from the standpoint of governments which have the responsibility of managing the conflicting interests bound up in a capitalist economy. Getting the balance right between admitting the ‘right’ sort of workers and keeping this at levels which the rest of the population are prepared to concede as acceptable has become so problematic because both of these nodal points are located withing the realm of politics in a constant state of flux. There is no ‘right’ number of workers to be admitted each year and no fixed level of entry which is assured of the support of the general population. All is the subject of contention, and on every point there are different viewpoints and interests to be taken into consideration. It is not because politicians are particularly stupid that they have been led down the path of astounding complexity as the way to resolve their immigration problems. The range of issues they need to be take into account have become so vast and of such critical importance to the running of a capitalist economy so thoroughly integrated into global markets and now require the political elites to return to the drawing board with a frequency that constantly overlays each set of control measures with another, to a point that hardly anyone understands what needs to be done and how to go about doing it. If fixing a broken system is ever to be possible, the starting point has to be the role labour, and the movement of people who carry its potential in their brains and muscles, needs to play in rebuilding the world from bottom up.
July 20, 2022
Incredibly informative and thorough on all aspects of the current immigration system and the devastating impact it had on people's lives. Surprisingly light on fixes, I think due to an excess of pessimistic realism on the author's part. He suggests simple measures that would immeasurably improve things for many in the current system but doesn't let himself get carried away into wholesale change or imagining what an immigration system that recognised migrants as human beings and citizens in waiting would actually look like.
January 28, 2022
Sadly, this book is up there amongst the worst I've read. I'm not quite sure what the book is trying to achieve. Is it meant to be an analysis of the UK's immigration system? Is it meant to be an exposer of the UK's dire immigration system? Whichever end it lies, it doesn't fulfil the purpose.
The book reads as a subjective diatribe with a lack of coherence or system. There are plenty of straw-man arguments. At various points the book comes across an interesting point which deserves a fuller explanation, analysis and opinion, but the author is not interested in this.
I would also just point out that the book is out of date. Post-Brexit and post-nationality and borders bill, this book is no longer accurate (not that it even tried to present the current state of affairs in a systematic way).
I regret picking this book up. I'm actually quite annoyed that I spent £15 on this.
The book reads as a subjective diatribe with a lack of coherence or system. There are plenty of straw-man arguments. At various points the book comes across an interesting point which deserves a fuller explanation, analysis and opinion, but the author is not interested in this.
I would also just point out that the book is out of date. Post-Brexit and post-nationality and borders bill, this book is no longer accurate (not that it even tried to present the current state of affairs in a systematic way).
I regret picking this book up. I'm actually quite annoyed that I spent £15 on this.
June 10, 2021
Colin Yeo is a well-known immigration lawyer who knows the technicalities of the law as well as anyone but retains the ability to simplify and explain what is a highly complex subject. His book neatly bundles UK immigration policy into a series of key issues such as establishing nationality, asylum and deportation, which Colin then succinctly explains, enlivening the text with examples (often from his own work).
Many of these inevitably touch the reader's heart, perhaps none more so than the tale of the poor elderly man from Canada who, seriously ill, was attempting to travel via London to see his estranged daughter in (I think) Slovenia. Having to change flights at Heathrow, and pass through border control, he finds that immigration officers won't accept he's on a legitimate journey and prevent him from taking the connecting flight. He ends up spending weeks in detention while they try to make their minds up about what to do next. Then he's taken ill, has to be taken to hospital, and dies while still in handcuffs.
The story is somehow more emblematic of a failed and inhuman bureaucratic system than any of the others which Yeo recounts. This is a book to make you angry and frustrated even if, like me, you know something about the system and have already met plenty of its victims.
Many of these inevitably touch the reader's heart, perhaps none more so than the tale of the poor elderly man from Canada who, seriously ill, was attempting to travel via London to see his estranged daughter in (I think) Slovenia. Having to change flights at Heathrow, and pass through border control, he finds that immigration officers won't accept he's on a legitimate journey and prevent him from taking the connecting flight. He ends up spending weeks in detention while they try to make their minds up about what to do next. Then he's taken ill, has to be taken to hospital, and dies while still in handcuffs.
The story is somehow more emblematic of a failed and inhuman bureaucratic system than any of the others which Yeo recounts. This is a book to make you angry and frustrated even if, like me, you know something about the system and have already met plenty of its victims.
December 4, 2021
This is a lawyer's account of the labyrinthine social, legal and custodial system that makes up the UK's immigration policy. It is harrowing reading. Yeo charts politicians' attempts to court ballot box success through pledges to keep net immigration low. Surprisingly, British citizens and their children are common victims, with many families resorting to Zoom relationships to ensure their children have two recognisable parents. The incompetence of the Home Office and the tawdry pleasure some of its staff take in exercising their life-destroying powers is also documented. As Yeo says, the only people who gain are the immigration lawyers, but often at the expense of their mental health. Yes. PTSD affects people who have to work in broken and tyrannical systems too. The self-harm and mental incapacity wreaked on asylum seekers confined in detention centres such as the infamous Yarls Wood (not the worst, just the best known are heartbreaking. If you need clear, reasoned ammunition with which to argue the case for a complete U-turn from the hostile environment for immigrants, look no further.
January 27, 2021
A harrowing read, but an important one nonetheless. I particularly appreciated Colin Yeo’s ability to remain sensitive to the difficult subjects covered in the book, without underplaying their importance. The suggestions made for changes to the immigration system would be difficult for anybody to disagree with.
December 31, 2020
Great read
I highly recommend this book for all those who work in the field of immigration and asylum. The book is a result of huge wealth of experience from the author.
I highly recommend this book for all those who work in the field of immigration and asylum. The book is a result of huge wealth of experience from the author.
February 12, 2025
Everyone should read. Insights into more aspects of immigration than the first image that comes to your head; that of a refugee. Really shines a light on how messed up Britain has become.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews