First they came for the Immigrants

 

I am writing to express my disgust at the government’s “Hostile Environment” campaign and its divisive, scaremongering and scapegoating tactics, including the “Go Home” van campaign, the Home Office “anti-illegal workers” twitter campaign, the Home Office plan to force visitors from certain Asian and African countries to pay £3,000 to visit the UK, and the UK Border Agency stop and search campaign, as well as the plans for further curtailment of immigrant’s entitlements to education, healthcare and benefits.

The very concept of creating a hostile environment for immigrants is morally repugnant. Whether legal or illegal, economic migrant or asylum seeker, black, Asian, Jewish, whatever – immigrants face extremely tough challenges and deserve the respect and compassion of those of us lucky enough not to be in their shoes.

To claim that the “Hostile Environment” campaign is not racist is total rubbish. Threatening and stigmatising people of ethnic minority backgrounds in ethnically mixed areas by driving vans around with pictures of handcuffs and the message “Go home”, sending out border patrols to stop and search dark skinned “suspected illegal immigrants” at tube stations and tweeting pixellated photos of arrested individuals (without even mentioning that they are mere suspects) are strategies designed to portray non-white immigrants as undesirables and criminals and, by association, place all non-white people under suspicion and mistrust.

Using the label “illegal immigrants” is just a smokescreen.
Statements made by the government deliberately blur the distinctions between legal and illegal status and between economic migration and political asylum, fostering a general suspicion of immigrants whilst simultaneously denying their positive contributions to Britain's culture and economy.

The “illegal workers” campaign deliberately obfuscates the fact that not all illegal workers are immigrants, or non-white, feeding on the myth that hordes of immigrants are invading Britain, “stealing our jobs and ruining our economy”.

The government’s cynical manipulation of information casts immigrants – both legal and illegal - as undeserving spongers and, because it is impossible to tell an immigrant from a born and bred non-white Briton just by looking, threatens anyone with dark skin who comes across as “a bit foreign”.  The obvious and deliberate implied overall message, which lacks supporting evidence of any kind, is that Britain is being taken over by a mass influx of non-whites.

What evidence there is suggests that legal immigration is actually a boon for Britain, and that the numbers of illegal immigrants entering Britain are in fact quite low. In terms of being a drain on the economy, the “problem” of illegal immigration is of little significance compared to, for example, the tax avoidance of big business or the huge payouts given out under the Private Finance Initiative. Immigration as a “problem” is just a red herring, a handy way of distracting the populace from focussing on the real issues and the real culprits, and shifting the blame onto vulnerable and disenfranchised groups.

The “Hostile Environment” campaign uses heavy-handed and frightening tactics based on false and misleading statistics and calculated to stir up resentment and hostility towards non-whites. Whether or not it is simply a publicity stunt aimed at winning over UKIP voters is irrelevant. To send out this message using these kinds of tactics is an absolute disgrace to the British government.

Humanity has an unfortunate tendency to scapegoat and blame those perceived as outsiders. Hitler knew this and used it very effectively to gain power. That this government is prepared to feed into the nastiest and most shameful inclinations of the electorate and stoop to these rabble rousing propaganda techniques, reminiscent of those used by Goebbels in pre-Nazi Germany, sets an extremely dangerous precedent. Targeting minorities on the grounds of their ethnicity is racist, no matter how much the Conservatives deny it, and as such is but the first step on a very slippery slope, as doubtless all those at the top of the party are fully aware.

I haven’t voted for years, feeling utterly disenchanted with party politics and the lack of choice between the parties, but under these circumstances I urge everyone to vote against the Tories, if only because of the vicious racism and intolerance of this campaign of calculated and cynical evil.
 

Charwoman Miaow

4^th August 2013