Silence in the UK immigration system
A year ago, I wanted to speak out on the abuses of the UK immigration system, but fear prevented me from doing so. I’m marking that anniversary by sharing how this system keeps immigrants silent.
This post is a copy of a thread I posted on Twitter.
What happened on 3 June 2020
A year ago today, I read this headline and got so enraged to the point where I felt I had to speak out on the abuses of the UK immigration system.
I wrote a 3,000-word article on the topic and then got too scared to publish it.
Here’s the story of what happened and of silence in the UK immigration system.
I’ll start by reflecting on silence in my immigration experience, and then end by talking about silence in the immigration system more generally.
Now back to that headline.
Not giving immigrants access to public funds in a pandemic
A week prior, the PM seemed surprised to learn about NRPF, the stipulation on visas that immigrants have no recourse to public funds. He said he would look into it and then returned a week later to say nah, we’re not gonna help immigrants out.
Let’s review the context here: 2 months into lockdown. People losing their jobs, not everyone eligible for the Covid government support schemes. If you were an immigrant who lost a job not covered by one of those schemes, you were on your own.
Part of me genuinely couldn’t believe it. Even in a public health crisis, where we were told to stay home to save lives, the Government would rather immigrants face unsafe work conditions, or destitution even, over controlling the virus. Over compassion.
Converging with the start of Black Lives Matter protests
A year ago was also a little over a week into Black Lives Matter protests. The conversation around systemic racism that started in the US was spreading to the UK and around the world.
The part of me that could believe the PM would do nothing about NRPF realised this: Nothing will ever change in this immigration system while bashing immigrants wins politically for this Government. More specifically, while racism wins politically.
With these 2 events converging, I wanted to shout to the world how inhumane this immigration system is. How, in a world now paying attention to racial inequality, this system was a component that was fuelling that inequality.
Bear in mind, I had no immigration Twitter followers at this point. It was mainly fellow content professionals and runners. The large majority of them with no or little knowledge of the immigration system.
I needed people who didn’t know about this system to know how it hurts people, and to want to do something about fixing it.
Kept silent by my upcoming residency application
I wanted to say something, but I was 6 weeks away from applying for indefinite leave to remain (ILR). I didn’t feel safe writing something in my name criticising the immigration system when the Home Office was about to decide on whether I could live in my home permanently.
I thought maybe I’d publish something anonymously. I wrote a 3,000-word article over the following weekend I was going to send to a news outlet. But I ultimately decided I was too scared to even publish something anonymously.
I was so close to the finish line. I had kept silent for this long, I just needed to wait a bit longer before I could say what I wanted to say.
But I want to tell everyone now how much I hated that I had to keep silent. How much it hurt to keep silent. All because this immigration system made me fear it.
It made me fear it to the point where I decided not to like or share any tweets having to do with UK immigration until I got ILR. It just felt safer not to have any log of my criticism of the system.
Using silence to plan what I wanted to say
But I told myself I would use this silence to plan out what I wanted to say for when the time came that I could speak out. If I was going to keep quiet, I wanted that final product to be one epic, well-researched piece of writing.
I spent the next 4 months collecting the links of every tweet or article I read that talked about how this system hurts people. When I got ILR, I started grouping those links by topic and drafting what I wanted to say on each topic.
After a few iterations, that draft turned into the 114-tweet thread I published on 21 October 2020.
Not shutting up about the abuses of the system
Since then, you might have noticed that I haven’t shut up about how this system hurts people. I’m writing monthly recaps about it. I’m liking and retweeting all the tweets I think are worth sharing on the topic. I’m connecting with people who’ve had experience with the system.
Not only that, I get to do all these things in my name and not anonymously.
And guess what? It feels so freaking good not keeping silent anymore.
But yet silence remains
Or at least, it feels good to not keep silent about this one particular aspect. The thing is, my immigration experience was full of keeping silent. Not feeling able to speak out about the system was one of the lesser concerns of my experience.
There are many things about my experience I’m not comfortable talking about. I might never feel comfortable talking about them publicly.
Keeping silent didn’t end with getting ILR. It just slightly opened the door for me to feel okay saying some things.
So I wanted to write this post to mark the 1-year anniversary of this news story because I can say something about it now. But I also wanted to talk about silence in the UK immigration system more generally.
How this system keeps people silent
This system can easily silence immigrants because it enables exploitation. When your ability to live your life in the place you call home is conditional upon something, you have to keep quiet if things go wrong.
Lose your documented status? Keep quiet or risk deportation. Exploited by an employer or abused by a partner that sponsors you? Keep quiet or potentially lose that sponsorship.
Granted, you could say this of any immigration system. But what makes the UK especially bad is the time. You have to have been here 20 years to start regularising your status if you lose it. Settlement routes take 5 to 10 years, and you might have been here long before that.
That’s a very long time to keep people in silence. And as I said, ILR might not mean a complete end to that silence.
I hate that this system took my voice from me. I hate that it does this to others. I need this system to stop hurting people.
A call to action to reflect
My only call to action with this post is that you take some time to reflect on this statement from my October thread.
If you can say something without fear, use that power for good. If you don’t know what to say, listen to others who do. There are plenty of people going through this system, or campaigning for a better one, who use their own power to keep calling out the abuses of the system.
To those people, I want to end by saying: Every day you inspire me. Keep being awesome.
To those who have to remain silent: I might not know you or be able to hear your story yet, but know you inspire me, too. I’m rooting for the day we can all say what we want to say.
Thank you to Duncan Stephen for providing feedback on this post and for telling me that ‘friggin’’ sounds ‘a little bit icky in a British context’. Hence the use of ‘freaking’ in this post.
