YouTube footage of an immigration enforcement team conducting spot checks of people's immigration status at North Greenwich station only depicts the team questioning black or Asian men. One man panics and is detained while trying to flee. Another man who challenges the arrest, ("Go and control your borders, not the station!") is briefly detained for obstruction but later released. This footage is not from the high-profile spot checks at London stations in the last couple of weeks; it's from an episode from the first season of Sky's UK Border Force programme, made in 2008.
I've been an immigrant in Britain for 12 years and in that time, I've seen attitudes towards migration harden. The recent actions of the Home Office – the Twitter campaign detailing immigration enforcement raids, the "go home" vans and the plans for a £3,000 visa bond for tourists from "high-risk" countries – are singling out migrants from black and Asian countries like never before.
Immigration is a messy, human story. I don't advocate open borders and the authorities have a duty to deal with immigration offences. As the Migration Observatory points out in their 2011 briefing on irregular migration, "the law defines immigration status in a binary way as either legal or illegal, but in practice irregular immigration status can involve a wide spectrum of violations of immigration and other laws". It must be remembered that while some people come to the UK illegally or overstay their visa (the most likely offence), others are left in limbo as the under-resourced and under-staffed Border Agency staff struggle to work through a backlog of cases. Without the paperwork to work, study or travel, your life is effectively on hold.
Last month Sarah Teather MP told the Guardian about an internal ministerial group set up "on the explicit instructions of the prime minister" and tasked with finding "new ways to make migrants' lives more difficult". How can the Home Office administrate an efficient immigration system while government ministers are looking for ways to make life intolerable for migrants? Those are competing aims and efficiency is the casualty. While the Tories may champion this particular initiative, it's important to remember that the Liberal Democrats joined the working group after insisting on a cosmetic name change from "hostile environment committee" to "the inter-ministerial group on migrants' access to benefits and public services". Meanwhile, the immigration spot checks that have been decried in the news in the last week as "the new stop and search", due to the alleged use of racial profiling, have been going on since at least 2008, under Labour.
It's often said that we don't debate immigration but the subject is never far from the headlines, especially if there is political capital to be made from stoking people's anxieties. To say that some measures are racist is not to shut down the debate – race and immigration are often intertwined issues. You don't know an irregular migrant by looking at them, but enforcement teams aren't searching for overstaying Australians and Canadians. The historical resonance of black and Asian people being asked to prove their status when simply going about their everyday business is overwhelmingly negative and the assumption underpinning it equates being British with being white.
Immigration has challenges and benefits, but it's not something "happening to" Britain, it happens everywhere and Britons also emigrate and travel. It is a reality that needs to be managed fairly and efficiently; we can't just "opt out" of the global marketplace.
In an interview at the Africa Centre summer festival last weekend, the artist Yinka Shonibare described how aspects of African art, fashion and culture that have come to Britain in the past 50 years are now part of Britain's story. Many of those who have come to Britain are now your family members, colleagues and neighbours. Some of us are British, too.