UK Law & Rules

Race and immigration: is it the end of the affair?
By Rhian Beynon

This article appears in the Spring 2006 edition of JCWI's Bulletin

It is becoming something of a commonplace for policy experts to note the break in the link between immigration and race - but can we take this to mean that either policy, or the debate surrounding it, has ceased to be racist?

The Institute for Public Policy Research started the ball rolling last year with a report entitled Beyond Black and White which argued that policy and perception would have to adjust to fact that the majority of migrants now come from outside the traditional source regions of the Commonwealth and Europe.

Will Somerville in his new paper for JCWI Success and Failure Under Labour , argues that "the Hattersley equation" has been sundered: that is to say restricting non-white immigration is no longer framed as a quid pro quo for guaranteeing protection from discrimination to migrant communities.

And Trevor Phillips, head of the CRE has lauded the new points-based system for economic migration for "potentially offering a more objective entry criteria system that relies on human capital rather than requirements that favour certain colours, races or places of birth."

All these commentators point us to highly relevant changes in migration policy and the public debate. Certainly the points system has ushered in a climate that is more expansive toward immigration. Politicians, civil servants and the media now concede that immigration can be beneficial - a far cry from the assumptions underlying the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

However, it would be precipitate to argue that race is out of the picture on immigration, either at the level of policy formation or public debate. In fact it is fair to say that we can continue to expect some negative association between the two.

For while the points system holds out the promise of greater objectivity, this promise is limited. The system is after all based on the assumption that most of Britain's migrant labour needs can be fulfilled from Europe and its Accession area. Thus the economic migrants subjected to the points system will be those seeking to enter from outside Europe.

While arguably the rest of the world includes the US, Australia and Canada, and the former Communist bloc, it also includes the indigenous peoples of the developing world countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America, Middle East and the Caribbean - the people with the most powerful drivers to migrate.

Thus it is people of colour from the regions subordinate in the global economic structure - those who would benefit most from being able to migrate to do unskilled as well as skilled work - who will continue to find their opportunities to migrate restricted out of proportion to their need to do so.

If they manage to reach the UK in an unskilled capacity, their leave will be temporary and consequently their social rights and employment protection limited. In due course they may find themselves subject to forced remittances.

It is difficult to argue that this is racist in the sense that racism is usually viewed as a deliberate exercise in using deterministic attitudes about other people's biological make-up or culture to subordinate or exclude them in a social hierarchy. Arguably peoples of all races including from Australia and North America will be subject to the same rules.

However, it can be seen that in combination with the plight of people from the developing world, the points system will act to disadvantage further those from already disadvantaged migrant groups. If this is not an exercise in racism, the institutional structures and mechanisms of immigration control are promoting disadvantage in racial ways.

Interestingly the first casualties of the new points system appear to be not the unskilled but the highly skilled: trainee doctors from the non-EEA countries. Before this year they were able to enter the UK on a permit free basis. As of April, all doctors from outside the European Union needed a work permit to train in the UK. In order to recruit trainee doctors who qualified outside the EU, NHS trusts need to demonstrate that they cannot not recruit a UK graduate.

This has already ruled out many people who had entered under the permit-free system and thought they had a right to work here from the current recruitment rounds. They are now in limbo.

Who are the people who will suffer most from paying £645 for qualifying medical examinations, and living expenses with no prospect of a job? Those from developing countries who are likely to have invested heavily in migration in relation to their family's income and savings. The points system is objective it seems -as long as you're not a trainee doctor from Africa or Asia.

Managed migration piles it on for migrant communities from Africa and Asia and Middle East given that these are the groups who are already most likely to be here in the UK in an irregular capacity. According to Home Office statistics these groups constituted 74 per cent of the 1,950 people detained under the Immigration Act in December 2004. While no definitive statistics exist, this profile may be reflected in the irregular population at large, particularly as this snapshot was provided before Accession, when Poles, Czechs and the other ten new EEA members were still liable to be detained for immigration irregularities.

The possibility that the irregular workforce is racialised in this way is increased if we extrapolate from the fact that failed asylum seekers constitute over a quarter of a million of those present irregularly in the UK and secondly that the top ten nationalities of those refused asylum according to the 2004 figures were from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

It can be seen that economic migration is also responsible for promoting irregular immigration status among these groups. Unskilled migrants from the developing world who manage to enter the UK legally will have their leave to remain sharply limited. Thus the incentive to stay in an irregular capacity will be strong even if many in the end decide to play by the immigration rules and return to their sending country.

The risk with having irregular migrants drawn disproportionately
from the developing world is that people from visible minorities will overwhelmingly constitute a segment of the workforce with no
social or employment rights, working in unsafe conditions and living in poverty. This can only entrench existing inequalities experienced by the settled migrant communities.

The other risk is that irregularity criminalises visible minorities as a whole. Already these communities are disproportionately subjected to stop and search. With the advent of a system of immigration control based on surveillance within the UK, rather than simply at port of entry one can forecast the trajectory that will lead to stereotypes. Research conducted in Europe has shown that that where there is workplace enforcement against irregular working, officials are more likely to target people from visible minorities for checks.

In addition to the racialisation of the irregular population by the asylum and managed migration regimes, the negative linkage between immigration and race is reinforced by what is happening in the arenas of national security and citizenship.

An expanded group of UK dual nationals is now at risk of deportation following the latest immigration legislation, which lowers the threshold for preventing acquisition, and enacting deprivation, of citizenship. As visible minorities constitute the majority of persons seeking to acquire citizenship, they are also likely to comprise the majority of dual nationals affected by these changes.

Overall while it is right to be more optimistic about the more positive tone of the recent debate on economic migration, it is difficult to argue that the link between race and immigration is broken.

What may be more true is that the relationship between race and immigration is simply being remade in different and less overt ways - although as ever largely according to the racial disadvantage built into our socially unjust planet.