Expelling legal migrants is a move straight from the Idi Amin playbook

Conservative MP Katie Lam, touted as a future Tory leader, told the Sunday Times last week that she would deport not just all “illegal immigrants” but many legal migrants, too, who “shouldn’t have been able to” settle here in the first place. These are mainly people granted “indefinite leave to remain” (ILR) or permanent residency. The forcible deportation of legal migrants is necessary, she insists, to make Britain “culturally coherent”.

The Sunday Times described this as “unsentimental toughness”. It is something far uglier, taking us, as Rob Ford, professor of politics at Manchester University, put it, into “Idi Amin territory”.

In August 1972, Amin, Uganda’s president, ordered the expulsion of the country’s Indian minority who had not obtained Ugandan citizenship. Many had been settled in Uganda since the 19th century. It was the culmination of the policy of “Africanisation” begun by Amin’s predecessor, Milton Obote, who was ousted by Amin in a military coup.

Amin accused Ugandan Asians of sabotaging the nation’s economy and of failing to integrate. It is “your refusal to integrate with the Africans in this country”, he told Indians, that has created hostile “feeling towards you”. Hear the echoes?

What Lam proposes is the British version of Amin’s Africanisation policy. She wants not just to tighten the rules to make it more difficult for migrants to obtain ­settled status (a policy that Labour, too, has adopted) but to retrospectively impose those changes on people already settled here. In other words, to label legal migrants as illegal, and expel them.

Lam’s approach, Kemi Badenoch has confirmed, is “broadly in line” with Tory policy. Last week, the Conservatives put forward a draft immigration and visas bill (which the party is currently “reviewing” after criticism) that would revoke ILR for anyone who has ever received “any form of ‘social protection” – that is, state support – or whose dependents have; or whose “annual income has fallen below £38,700 for six months or more”. Someone who may have lived and worked here for decades, paid taxes, put down roots, started a family and become part of the community, could be deported if they had ever received maternity allowance or drawn a pension, or had ever been made redundant and forced to take a lower-wage job. Proponents of such policy vacillate between justifying it on economic or on cultural grounds. Either way, such retrospective erasure of legal status has been until now largely the province of authoritarians and dictators.

What is striking in all this is how quickly the national debate has moved from “mass deportations are a political impossibility” (a position held by none other than Nigel Farage just a year ago) to “we must deport all illegal immigrants” to “we must make it harder for migrants to gain legal status” to “we must deport legal migrants whose faces don’t fit”.

I have written of how the postwar firewall between far-right and mainstream policy-making has eroded. A host of far-right ideas and policies have come tumbling through the breach to become normalised, from the castigation of migrants as “invaders”, and laments for white people losing their “homeland”, to policies of mass deportations and, now, the retrospective removal of legal status.

Lam’s admirers hail her skill at making the unacceptable seem acceptable – a “pantsuit deporter” as one enthusiast called her, someone able to make Idi Amin policies seem “dull, technocratic, softly compassionate” and “dinner party acceptable”. Such is the degradation of political and moral thinking wrought by the immigration debate that the brazen overturning of democratic norms is regarded as “sensible” and critics dismissed as “hysterical”.

For Lam, the retrospective erasure of legal status may be “unfair”, but, as she told parliament last month, “our only fundamental responsibility is not fairness to foreign nationals but fairness to the British people”. What, then, is to stop a future government deciding, on the grounds of its “only fundamental responsibility”, that citizens with migrant backgrounds should not have received citizenship in the first place, and retrospectively removing that status from Britons of the wrong heritage? That might sound an absurd suggestion – but then the claim that mainstream politicians would seek to deport en masse people legally settled in Britain would have seemed absurd even a year or two ago.

Lam, Badenoch, Farage and many others justify their anti-migrant policies on the grounds that they are putting British people and British workers first. Yet these same politicians want also to impose austerity, cut benefits, restrict trade union rights and make it “easier to hire and fire workers”, as Reform UK would like to do. The interests of British workers, it would seem, matter only when there are iniquitous immigration policies to justify.

The demonisation of migrants threatens to diminish the rights not just of migrants but of all of us. Labour’s proposed digital ID card, initially introduced as a means of stopping Channel migrants, soon turned into a likely imposition on all our lives. Across the Atlantic, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Badenoch’s model for a British deportation force, has become a violent, unfettered, unaccountable organisation, seeking to intimidate communities and illegally detaining countless American citizens. Many fear that it “could eventually be turned against any groups the administration labels a threat”.

We should oppose the demonisation of migrants because it is the moral thing to do. We should also oppose it because not to do so opens the door for the curtailment of all our rights, and makes it more difficult to build solidarity against injustice, whoever may be the target.

Photograph by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images