Vote Brexit, stop the boats – the goalposts on immigration keep moving, and those who oppose it will never be appeased | Nesrine Malik

A few weeks after the Brexit referendum, a leave-voting friend of mine told me what the biggest benefit would be. “We will never hear about immigration again,” he said. If you give the people the control over the border they want, the logic went, then Brexit will finally dissolve immigration as an issue that politicians can exploit, and the country can crack on with all the other important stuff that needs doing. And, well, let’s just say that this prediction did not pan out on such a colossal level that no follow-up conversation has been necessary.

Because that’s just not how the whole immigration thing works. The goalposts always move. Nothing clarifies that more than Nigel Farage getting everything he has said he ever wanted, the country heaving itself out of the EU and ending free movement, only for another boil to fester around the issue of immigration – and guess what, only Reform UK can lance it! Nothing is ever enough. One only needs to look at the escalating crackdowns in the US to see how the net keeps getting wider and wider. In a matter of months, immigration crackdown has expanded so rapidly that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are afraid to leave their houses to buy groceries or go to work, as the national guard patrols the streets.

It starts with the border, a boundary so porous that it must be policed with military levels of force and those crossing it treated with maximum levels of punishment. People crossing the border are portrayed as “invaders” intent on carrying out some criminal or exploitative act. Rightwing politicians in the UK have been speaking of “invasion” for years. After Donald Trump came to office for the second time, he codified that notion, expanding the constitutional protection of states from invasion to include immigrants.

The US’s southern border is now so militarised that armoured vehicles previously stationed in Iraq are positioned there. Border crossings have been falling since before Trump became president, but that decline has accelerated since he took office. In April this year, they were down 94% on the previous year. Is that enough? No. Because really, the numbers are irrelevant: the point is to maintain the flamboyant show of force. “Containment is at 95%. But 95% is not 100%,” said Brigadier General Jeremy Winters in response to the drop.

When the UK media suggests it may be time for “gunboat diplomacy” in response to small boat arrivals – which in 2024 made up about 4% of total immigration arrivals to the UK – something similar is playing out. These responses are about posturing, not results.

And it doesn’t stop, and, in fact, can’t stop there. Because what about those already in the country? Under new laws that empower US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), everyone from undocumented migrants to those who are law-abiding and with residence permits have been arrested, while the Trump administration suggests that “criminality” is the main criterion for detention. Ice is on its way to becoming the biggest police force in the US, and the powers it wields, its high-octane arrests in public spaces (some including flash-bang grenades) and confrontations with the public, again conjure the appearance of a large, intractable problem, rather than solving it. Trump decided he wanted to deport millions, and if those millions don’t actually exist, then, through the invoking of old laws and their re-definitions, they can be created.

Once he has secured the border by automatically deporting all who arrive on small boats, Farage intends to deport 600,000 people over the course of a five-year parliament. That is a number, like Trump’s, plucked from the air, and then whole plans are devised around it. And that path only goes in one direction: towards creating large enforcement agencies, rewriting or unpicking laws and even reinterpreting the concept of legal residence altogether. It is entirely foreseeable that those who arrived irregularly and were then granted leave to remain could be grandfathered into illegality and thus be added to the numbers of invaders. If you think that’s dramatic fortune-telling, you have not been paying attention.

Once that sort of climate sets in, of a nation battling immigrants on the borders and in the streets and in their workplaces, then how can it be prevented from extending to British citizens? The very concept of Britishness is slipping, redefined already by some to mean “born in Britain”. When the academic Matthew Goodwin states that “more than 50% of social housing in London is now occupied by people who are not British”, he names a figure that corresponds to those not born in Britain, many of whom are naturalised citizens. The fixation on a non-native population with no rights then also extends that precariousness to those with citizenship. The result is that blended families, containing those with citizenship and those without, become tethered to those with the weakest protection. In the US, citizens, in some cases children, have been deported as part of the crackdown.

One can make the argument that it doesn’t really matter what the facts or the numbers are, because asylum hotels are inflammatory and small boats make people feel deluged. And it is the job of politicians to assuage the public’s concerns and meet them where they are. But that assumes that the public is always in the same place, and not subject to political and media influences that reinforce a sense of crisis, and then constantly move it along to the next stage of crackdown. When Keir Starmer made his landmark speech announcing a raft of measures to ensure that migrants must “earn” the right to stay, the Daily Mail capslock headline was “NO CAP ON MIGRANTS IN LABOUR’S CRACKDOWN”.

That is because the question at the heart of immigration crises isn’t “how many is too many”, but “how few is few enough”. The answer is “fewer than zero”. And because that is not a scenario that is possible, no matter what ever-escalating pledges, solutions or policies are offered, nothing will ever be enough. And each time that one decisive solution is executed – whether that be Brexit, increasing deportations, mobilising the navy – a chorus of voices will tell us that these are necessary placatory measures, and then promptly forget when the next one is demanded, and sign up to that as well.