How would we treat Paddington Bear if he came to the UK today? Perhaps he would be a casualty of extortionate visa application fees; perhaps he would experience a cruel term of imprisonment in a detention centre; or perhaps his entire identity would be torn apart at the hands of a hostile environment that delights in the humiliation of its victims.

Britain thinks of itself as a welcoming country, but the reality is very different. This is a system in which people born in Britain are told in uncompromising terms that they are not British, in which those who have lived their entire lives on these shores are threatened with deportation, and in which falling in love with anyone other than a British national can result in families being ripped apart.

Now fully updated to include the Nationality and Borders Bill, in this vital and alarming book, campaigner and immigration barrister Colin Yeo tackles the subject with dexterity and rigour, offering a roadmap of where we should go from here as he exposes the injustice of an immigration system that is unforgiving, unfeeling and, ultimately, failing.

Auteur

Colin Yeo is a barrister, blogger, writer and campaigner. He appears regularly in the media and has given evidence in Parliament on several occasions. He writes regularly for newspapers and websites, including a celebrated piece on Paddington Bear as a refugee in modern Britain. He runs the campaigning website freemovement.org.uk, which receives around 2.5 million page views per year. He lives in Bristol.

Texte du rabat

Britain thinks of itself as a welcoming country, but the reality has always been different. Migration is viewed benevolently when hypothetical, but heaven forbid anyone should actually try to migrate here. Nicholas Winton famously had to forge papers to smuggle Jewish children into Britain before the Second World War, and hostility to post-war Commonwealth immigration quickly led to limits being imposed. New arrivals were not well treated, and race equality legislation had to be imposed on a grudging populace.

As if to prove little has changed, modern immigration policy since 2010 has meant Britain has become a 'hostile environment' for migrants, particularly following the exposure of the Windrush scandal in 2018 and successive Tory governments' strategies to make staying in the country as difficult as possible for people, in the hope that they will just leave.

In this innovative and alarming book, blogger and campaigner Colin Yeo exposes the iniquities of an ugly, unfair and failing approach and offers a manifesto for a new immigration system that would roll back the hostile environment laws, consolidate immigration legislation and introduce a statutory time limit on immigration detention.