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Immigration to the UK may rise or fall but our laws are still barbaric

<span>Photograph: Aaron Chown/PA</span>
Photograph: Aaron Chown/PA

Should net immigration to Britain rise or fall? That’s the question many journalists have asked party leaders last week and it’s one that neither Labour nor the Tories are able to answer. Partly, that’s because the immigration policies of both parties are incoherent. It’s also because the question itself is incoherent.

The presumption in the question is that those hostile to immigration want to reduce numbers, while those with liberal views want them to rise. The former may be true. The latter isn’t.

I don’t care if the net immigration level falls to zero. Immigration rules are detestable not because they let in too few people but because of the way they treat immigrants, both those let in and those kept out.

Britain’s “hostile environment” policies led to the Windrush scandal, when thousands of its own citizens of the wrong colour were denied basic rights from benefits to hospital treatment. They have caused tens of thousands to be incarcerated for indefinite periods and often facing abuse. They have resulted in deportations for ludicrous reasons and to many being returned to persecution, even death. And they have thrown up horrors such as the deaths of 39 migrants in a shipping container, which politicians are happy to blame on people smugglers, but for which their own policies also bear responsibility.

The question I would ask of politicians is not: “Should immigration levels go up or down?”, but: “Do you think that the deaths of the 39 frozen migrants, the detention of tens of thousands held in the most degrading of conditions, the deportation of people to persecution and death, the denial of rights to its own citizens, is a price worth paying for Britain’s immigration policy?”

• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist