Introduction

Today, the terrain for migrants and people seeking asylum is being reshaped by a political race to look “tough”. Labour in government has wrapped itself in the language of “secure borders” and “restoring control”, pursuing new border-security powers, ramping up deportations and a tightening agenda on asylum, returns, and settlement rather than breaking with the underlying logic of the border regime. Meanwhile, Reform and the Conservatives are bidding to push the settlement further right. The effect is a ratchet: when government and opposition compete on cruelty, the centre of gravity shifts against migrants and refugees unless it’s met by organised resistance.

That ratchet is not new. Postwar British racism wasn’t a problem of attitude that later seeped into policy. It was built through policy: by turning race into “immigration”, and immigration into a state machinery for sorting people into graded levels of safety, rights, and voice. The comforting story that the Windrush Generation were “invited” to rebuild Britain is a myth—and it does political work. It turns citizenship into hospitality, and rights into charity, so that non-white settlement can later be framed as a favour that can be withdrawn rather than a reality rooted in imperial history and legal entitlement.

From the 1960s onwards, the legal architecture becomes unmistakable. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 is a decisive turn: it brings Commonwealth citizens under immigration control, introducing restriction and deportability that can be presented as neutral “administration”. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 sharpens the logic further by tying entry to the “right” kind of UK connection—ancestry dressed up as technical criteria. And the Immigration Act 1971 consolidates the new order by formalising the “right of abode” and patriality: a two-tier system in which some people are effectively outside immigration control, while others live inside it—permanently conditional.

Everything that comes later—citizenship narrowed, citizenship made more revocable, and asylum law made steadily more punitive—extends the same governing idea: keep a layer of the population insecure, and coercion becomes cheaper. Wages are easier to undercut, exploitation easier to enforce, and solidarity easier to fracture.

That is why we have to organise. Not to “be heard”, not to supply a representative voice that can be thanked and ignored, but to build collective power among immigrants, racialised minorities, and refugees/asylum seekers—so the organisation cannot slide into the same border bargains that always land on the same people.