Immigration Hostilities

After I graduated from the RAF Staff College, I was posted to the Ministry of Defence as the Personal Staff Officer to a Senior Officer in the Defence Intelligence Staff.  Our department was responsible, amongst other things, for the administration of Service intelligence gathering and liaison with other intelligence agencies, at home and abroad.  Naturally, there was a great deal of paper work, most of it highly classified and requiring appropriate protection.  My boss, an Admiral, became challenged by a project to reduce the amount of historic classified material that was clogging up the registry system.  Unfortunately, this was not just a case of throwing a few files in the shredder.  Each document had to be reviewed individually and, if judged suitable for destruction, processed through signature and countersignature and records compiled for audit.  This was a hugely time-consuming and labour-intensive process. Undaunted, and in true Trafalgar spirit, there was a task requirement, a target, and milestones against which progress could be measured.  Things went well, initially, as the “low-hanging fruit” of lesser classified documents were dispatched to the incinerator.  However, the hopelessness of the task rapidly became apparent as more and more sensitive material was tackled, each document requiring greater scrutiny at progressively higher levels.  At times, new documents were being created at a faster rate than the old ones were being destroyed.  It was a bureaucratic nightmare of Der Zauberlehrling proportions.

I expect the majority of us feel that immigrants who have entered our country illegally should be sent back from whence they came? Give or take the odd humanitarian or political case, I expect most people would agree that the target for removal should be all of them?  I suppose the Home Office could put out a media campaign asking all illegal immigrants to own up and report to a remote airfield somewhere prior to being flown back to their country of origin by the first available means.  This probably would not work for the obvious reason that, having taken the trouble to get into this country illegally, such immigrants would be unlikely to surrender their hard-won position to a legal challenge. Presumably, successive Home Secretaries have cottoned-on to this impediment and applied other methods of rooting out people who should not be here.  If, as an illegal immigrant, you are being hunted down to be deported, you may well feel that the forces ranged against you are hostile.  On the other hand, as a law-abiding citizen who has just been the victim of a violent crime perpetrated by a gang who should not be here, you may feel differently?

The fall-out from the Windrush debacle has exposed another side of Home Office business, the bungling of which has provided a bonanza of personal stories, viciously exploited by those affecting to be offended on behalf of others and the media to cast the Government in a dark and unfeeling light. In fairness to the Home Office, they need to manage and vet new arrivals, administer applications for people already here, and get rid of illegals all under the political banner of reducing net migration to the tens of thousands.  It may be that some of the Home Office servants may have ignored the old adage - when you are up to your arse in alligators, it’s easy to forget that the original aim was to drain the swamp.  The bureaucratic parallels with my earlier remarks about classified documents are obvious – illegal immigrants will be difficult and expensive to catch and deport.  There must be a temptation to go for the low-hanging fruit, in this case the generally law-abiding, who just want to apply to be British or, in the case of the Windrushes, perhaps forgotten to apply in the first place.  This is the heart of the problem.  Lionel Shriver, writing in the Spectator, cites “arcane rules to bureaucratic waterboarding: elaborate procedures, absurd documentation requirements, confiscatory fees and fickle decision-making.”  This is the hostile atmosphere which needs to change, not the hostile approach to tracking and dealing with illegal immigrants.  I wish Sajid Javid well (and I hope he has more success than we did in Defence Intelligence)!