Labour’s new ‘hostile office’ immigration plans: racist political theatre for the far-right

As the new Labour Party government panders to the right-wing fascists in the wake of the UK race riots, a migrant rights non-profit has exposed its latest plans for the violent, racist sham they are.

Notably, the group has called out Labour’s immigration raids as:

a form of racist kidnapping and an extension of colonial divide and rule tactics

Labour’s ‘hostile environment’

As the Canary reported, on Wednesday 21 August, Labour announced that the government aims over the next six months to:

to achieve the highest rate of deportations of failed asylum seekers for five years. The goal is to remove more than 14,000 people by the end of the year, according to the Times.

The new Labour government intends to increase detention capacity at removal centres and sanction employers who hire people with no right to work in the UK.

Now, the Migrants’ Rights Network has produced a report exposing the abhorrent racism at the heart of Labour’s new policies.

Its new ‘Hostile Office’ report is titled ‘Immigration Raids: An Anatomy of Racist Intimidation’. The Migrants’ Rights Network and academics Monish Bhatia and Jon Burnett collaborated on the new analysis. As it says on the tin, this delves into the government’s use of immigration raids against migrants communities.

Unsurprisingly, far from fomenting the violent deportation aims of the state, it found instead that these function as a “fear mechanism”. In other words, the government uses these as a form of racist intimidation, to divide racialised communities.

The Migrants’ Right Network therefore argued that:

Raids are meant to humiliate, intimidate, racially subjugate and inflict harm on the “Other”, specifically migrants and/or racialised people.

Raids and racial profiling

Notably, the new report revealed that authorities have targeted South Asian communities the most. Between January 2022 and September 2023, immigration enforcement officials conducted a disproportionate number of raids on Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani nationals. While people of Asian heritage made up just 9.3% of the population, the state carried out 50% of the 19,895 immigration raids during that period against them.

Central and Eastern Europeans were the next largest group authorities targeted at 21%. Following these groups, the stated had targeted Albanian nationals and Romanian nationals most, in 8% and 7% of raids respectively.

The charity has also released groundbreaking research mapping the location and frequency of raids. Crucially, it showed that immigration enforcement often carry these out either in city centres on businesses, in areas with significant racialised populations, or in significant areas for migration routes.

In particular, authorities executed the greatest number of raids in Belfast, Northern Ireland (1,277), and Stranraer in Scotland (1,102), around their harbours. These are all areas covered by Operation Gull, the joint border policing exercise between police and immigration services in the UK and Ireland.

Similarly, authorities had implemented a high number of raids in areas of London and Birmingham with high racialised populations.

Raids and deportations on the rise after Tories’ racist bills

Given immigration enforcement’s focus on these communities, the report challenged the:

efficacy of the intelligence used versus the influence of racial profiling.

Critically, it demonstrated that raids are highly secretive and ambiguous. For instance, it underscored that it is unclear how officials conducting the pre-visit checks determine the immigration status from surveillance at the premises, or how thorough these checks are. Instead, the report suggested that most immigration raids take place as a result of low-grade intelligence such as ‘tip-offs’, including fabricated reports from rival businesses or gossip.

Significantly, the report highlighted how raids had sky-rocketed. In particular, it found that:

The number of immigration raids increased by 68% from September 2022 to September 2023. Almost constantly since March 2023, more than half of people present at an immigration raid have been arrested. The arrest rate peaked at 64.24% in April 2023 and has only fallen below 50% twice – to 47.31% and 47.83% in May and August 2023, respectively. This is a significant increase: before August 2022, the percentage of people arrested following an immigration raid was largely between 25% and 30%.

Alongside this, the report identified how the deportation rate appeared to ramp up in tandem:

From January to August 2022, the median deportation rate following an immigration rate was 6.26%. Between September 2022 and February 2023, this increased to 9.17%. The largest increase in deportation rates following an immigration raid rose to 14.83% in March 2023 and 19.95% in April 2023.

Notably, it highlighted how the state had increased these after passing the Tories’ racist anti-immigration acts. Specifically, the spike in arrests in deportations followed the state putting the Nationality and Border Act into effect in July 2022, and the Illegal Migration Act in July 2023. Given this, it stated that the timing reinforced:

the function of immigration raids as a fear mechanism and as ‘political theatre’. These two pieces of legislation created new immigration offences for which people might be arrested, increased punishments for existing offences, expanded powers for Immigration Enforcement (and other agencies) and sought to reduce legal protections for migrants in conflict with the law.

Labour: fomenting ‘state-sanctioned fear’

Largely, the report concluded that immigration raids were a tool of “state-sanctioned” fear against racialised communities across the UK.

CEO of the Migrants’ Rights Network Fizza Qureshi said:

Raids are an extension of colonial ‘divide and rule’ tactics that pit neighbours, colleagues and the wider community against each other and while inflicting fear. It’s time to send a clear message to the State that we will be holding them to account for the intimidation of racialised communities. I hope this report marks the beginning of an organised effort to scrutinise incredibly secretive operations, and encourage more community-led pushback to these raids.

Echoing this, academics and co-authors of the report Monish Bhatia and Jon Burnett said:

Raids are a mechanism to create State-sanctioned fear. They are utilised as part of attempts to disrupt and intimidate communities. They turn neighbour against neighbour, and legitimise the idea that they need to exist. This report makes it loud and clear that raids are part State violence and part political theatre.

And Home secretary Yvette Cooper’s latest parade of deportation policies and goals cannot be extricated from this racist political pantomine either. Needless to say, it’ll do nothing but stoke more fear and division against migrants and racialised communities. And much as the Tories toxic anti-immigration acts and raid culture have done – fan the flames of fascist bigotry festering on this racist island.

Feature image via the Canary