Hostile review – documentary highlights nastiness of UK immigration policy

One of the ugliest and most fatuous chapters in Home Office history arrived in 2013, when under the auspices of the then home secretary Theresa May, vans toured London areas with high immigrant populations displaying the sign: “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.” Of course, this ridiculous piece of toxic bossiness was not really addressed to illegal immigrants: Home Office officials were well aware that they themselves would be unable or unwilling to respond. It was a piece of taxpayer-funded party-political posturing, dogwhistling or humanwhistling to the bigots and intended as part of a charmless new policy of “hostile environment” – making things unpleasant in the country generally, a way of trying to pressure people to leave of their own free will.

Sonita Gale’s interesting and highly pertinent documentary is about how that nasty little malaise spread outwards, but is coming to a crisis now that Brexit has brought it home to the governing classes just how reliant our service industry is on casual labour, and how reliant the NHS is on immigrants. Many of these are former students applying for leave to remain, but have thereby been denied public funds, and so were ineligible for furlough payments or any support as the lockdown hit. It has meant utter poverty and Kafkaesque bureaucracy – for once, that adjective really is justified.

And this brings us to the other, truly sinister part of this story, uncovered by Gale’s film: the staggering sums of money charged directly to the immigrants themselves, thousands of pounds simply to make these applications, far in excess of any conceivable administration costs – again, a hostile state-mugging of otherwise innocent people, a deliberate use of deterrent pauperisation.

This is a powerful film, though in her reporting of the Windrush scandal, Gale could have acknowledged the work of the Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman.

• Hostile is released on 21 January in cinemas.