James O'Brien reacts to UK's new proposed immigration rules

It hits you quite hard sometimes, doesn't it? Listening to some Trump cheerleader wanging on about how awful everything is and then throwing into the mix, oh yes, but he's stopped illegal immigration. And no one ever stops to wonder whether there might be a link. Everything's got worse, but they're locking up workers. An illegal alien in the United States of America is quite likely to be a taxpayer, something we don't really understand. Well, some people, of course, on this side of the Atlantic merely pretend not to understand that. Some people genuinely don't. And so that... Promise from a certain type of right wing politician, usually quite far right politician, that your life will get better if we make the lives of people who don't look like you worse. Your life will get better if we make their lives worse. It's not true, is it? I mean, it's such a fundamental falsehood that it's extraordinary humankind has been dancing around it or feasting on it for millennia. Your life will get better. If we make their life worse, it doesn't work. It hasn't worked in the United States of America, and I don't think it's going to work here. Brexit was largely about making their lives worse, send them back where they came from, tell them to sling their hooks. Has your life got better in the last 10 years? Of course it hasn't. If you make their life, and then the politician comes along promising to make their lives worse, and because it doesn't work, they have to promise ever more hideous things. So you move from control our borders to send them home, to forced repatriation or deportation. Deportation. And from there, it's a short skip to, And. I don't know, what comes after that? What comes after that? Concentration camps? Holocausts? These people are making your life awful. We must do something about them. We must get rid of them. And yet, and yet, and yet, on we go. More and more of it. And, of course, not just from the far right. From everybody, really, these days. Shabana Mahmood, later today, is expected, well, is going to announce. Her changes to right to remain legislation, migration legislation in general, and it seems to me to be an exercise almost entirely without evidential basis. It is an exercise designed almost entirely to address feelings, feelings, indefinitely to remain, which is something you achieve having contributed to this country for, at the moment, five years. Something that, of course, a million young people who were born here don't currently do. I've got no beef with them, let me be absolutely clear, but I don't want to live in a country that has hierarchies of citizenship or hierarchies of belonging, and yet it seems I already do. I already do. I wrote a newspaper column that got published on Wednesday pointing out the insidious nature of proposals to strip people who've already been here three, four years caring for people like my mum of their expectation of right to remain, sticking an extra decade on the status and stability that they signed up for when they agreed to do jobs that many people born here will not do. It's an incredible thing, isn't it, racism? Because that is sadly what it is. I wish it wasn't. I wish that maybe we could call it jingoism or xenophobia. But once people are persuaded that the reason why their life is getting worse is because of people who are coming here, all bets are off. Never stops. It's like an insatiable beast. So you've now got some weirdos even further to the right than Nigel Farage. The wheels are falling off Nigel Farage's share of bank. And up pop other people to insist that, no, we've got to be even more racist. We've got to be even more vile. We've got to be even more. And then you get some bloke on the radio who sounds very plausible, a former Trump advisor. Well, everything's gone down the toilet. But, hey, he stopped illegal immigration. And you're supposed to celebrate that? Even as you can't afford to fill your truck with gasoline? You're supposed to celebrate that? Yeah, you are, actually. You are supposed to celebrate that. You're poorer. You're meaner. Your country is weaker. Your world is darker. But hey, they've been really flipping horrible to some foreigners. So, well, hey, Merry Christmas. Or maybe not Christmas. It's kind of got a bit of a subtext. If you believe in Christian values, then obviously racism is quite bad. But merry flipping Christmas. They have rendered your existence measurably worse in every feasible way. But you're supposed to celebrate because they keep promising to make life even harder for, well, for who, really? I think at some of the extremities of British politics, the pretense that this is about anything other than skin colour has completely disappeared. You see the conversation about slavery, reparations and apologies and people turning it into a conversation about skin color rather than humanities or man's inhumanity to man, humankind's bleakness, nastiness, simply, of course, creating the idea that it's yet another culture war. Of course it is. The proposal on how long legal migrants sort of. What a grim phrase that is. Legal migrants must wait for settlement in the UK. Most likely to wait a decade now and some up to 15 years. Now, here's the problem with this story. Here's the problem with this proposal. I don't believe that anybody changes their politics because of this policy. I don't believe that any of the people tempted to the deportation parties or the kind of far-right fun houses, none of them ever go, oh, that's good, the person that's wiping my dad's backside because I'm not going to do it myself, they're going to have to wait 15 years now before they have independent leave to remain. I'm actually going to vote Labour. Sorry, Nigel, I'm switching sides. On is Bob Jenner. It's going to undefect. Back to... Oh, no, he can't do that. He might join. No, that's Lee Anderson. He's already been in Labour. We're making life measurably harder and the welcome measurably colder for people who do many of the jobs that the country falls apart if they are not done. And the idea is that it's a political calculation by Shabana Mahmood that is likely to turn your head and make you go, oh, yeah, they've really got a handle on this. One hundred and fifty. £115 billion. Is the figure estimated to be contributed to the Treasury by skilled migrants settling in Britain? Who looks at that figure and thinks, right, we've got to make life harder for them? We've got to make life harder for them. At the moment, this is a five-year wait for these people. And under Mahmood's proposals, it would double to 10 years and it could be even longer. The right to remain would not even be automatic. Um, listen, if you could tell me why this is a brilliant idea and why it's going to work or why it's going to ensure that the Labour government, even if you want to be cynical and self-serving about it, why it's going to ensure that the Labour government. It's going to stay in power for another two electoral cycles and that all of the people who are, you know, eating flags for breakfast are suddenly going to abandon their quotes and legitimate concerns, end quotes, and start actually putting their shoulder to the wheel to turn this country into what it could be. If you can convince me that this is designed to do anything other, anything other than appease stupid people, then I'll bite your arm off. I'll bite your arm off. Such a mad combination of stories. Listen to these three headlines. Revealed today, the full scale of Mahmood's immigration retreat. Daily Mail is furious. Furious that she may not be quite as vile as was initially expected to people doing jobs that we struggle otherwise to fill. Plans to toughen immigration rules are expected to be watered down today after a damaging battle within Labour. Hang on a minute. Is that the same issue that prompted this headline? Skilled migrants make £115 billion tax contribution to UK. Yes, it is exactly the same headline. So the people that brought you Brexit, which has made you measurably poorer, now want to decimate immigration, which will make you measurably poorer. You don't believe me? Have a look at the United States of America. I mean, it is occasionally important just to step back and twist the knob on the focus, isn't it? Just to bring things into absolute clarity. Absolute clarity. You are being persuaded that your life will get better if the lives of these people are made worse. And it's not true. It's simply not true. And I don't quite understand why a Labour government is doing this except as a form of surrender to the rhetoric of what I've just described. Your life will get better. Your life will get better if we make their lives worse. MPs will see it today. They are expecting some exemptions. I mean, I welcome them. As I say, I wrote a newspaper column that was published on Wednesday calling for exemptions for care workers already in the UK, and it is expected that she will actually now announce, not I'm claiming for a nanosecond that it's a consequence of my burblings, but she is expected to announce that some care workers will be exempted from that. But since when are care workers more valuable than other workers? What about people who deliver the medicine that the care workers dispense or help their charges to take? What about the people that feed them? What about the people that prepare the food that the old people eat? So I got a bit emotional about this because my mum is currently benefiting from the ministrations of largely foreign-born care workers. She gets a couple of visits a day. It's a veritable United Nations of people. And that's in Kidderminster, by the way. It's not in, you know, the... It's not in some sort of London no-go zone or whatever nonsense the race is spouting today. That's in rural Worcestershire, where the care workers are, a majority of the care workers that visit the house are foreign. They are precisely in this category of people who were expecting to be able to stay here once they had put five years on the clock. And they were in danger of being told today that actually they're going to have to wait 10, or in some cases 15. 15! Extraordinary, really. Isn't it? Isn't it? Because you can tell from what I've just said that I feel quite strongly about this. I mean, let's not beat about the bush. It's my job to feel strongly about things. As I get older, I find it harder and harder. So sometimes when something comes along that strikes me as being absolutely unjust... Absolutely insidious. It's almost reassuring to know that those buttons still get pressed, you know? To know that I still care enough about this stuff after 20-odd years of watching everything get worse while all of the people insisting that if you just hate them or you just expel them or you just shut them down, winning every battle and everything getting worse. It's comical. A story like this, a policy like this, a proposal like this, I sometimes think it's important to recognize your own fallibility, your own potential to be an idiot, right? So I look at this story, I look at this story, and I think, what if I'm missing something? What if I'm missing something? Because I watch the rhetoric change. Oh, they're a drain on our economy. £115 billion in tax. Well, all right, they're not a drain on our economy. And the people leading the march, the people sticking flags on lampposts or going to France to beat up migrants, they don't really strike me as the very best of British. They don't strike me as the people that are going to put their shoulders to the wheel and really start working to improve the conditions of this country. They certainly don't strike me as the kind of people you'd want visiting your sick mum In the event that she needed help. Getting to the bathroom and back. Yeah, you want to get one of Stephen Yaxley Lennon's little troll army to look after your grandma? You're more than welcome to ask them, but they don't strike me as the kind of people that represent the best of us. But that's what this policy is designed to do. It's designed to say they are better than them. They are more deserving than them, based not on anything they've done, not on anything they believe, not on anything they've contributed, but based entirely upon where they were born. Born here? Complete scumbag? Oh, have a biscuit. Born somewhere else? Absolutely tireless worker in the service of our most vulnerable? I'm really sorry. You're going to have to wait another ten years before you can relax. And that's a Labour governor doing that. That's a Labour governor. So, what do you think? I mean, what am I missing? What am I missing? I mean, I can find you a text. It won't take me long. So, sort of... Here we go. Maybe it will take me a little bit longer than usual. Maybe people are beginning to realise the scale of the nonsense that they have been sold. But here you go. How many of them leave the care sector after five years? Well, since when did anybody of us do jobs that we're handcuffed to? How many do the non-skilled migrants take out of the system? 52% of our population takes more out of the system than it puts in, mate. Probably including you. You're just too thick to do the maths to work it out. Or too scared to Google it. Or too busy shinning up lampposts. It's a desiccated, grim idea, this. And it doesn't really matter, does it? Because the people it's designed to delight will not be delighted. And the people it is going to disgust will not be heeded. So why is she doing it? And that is my question. That's my question. Why is Shabana Mahmood making it harder for... People who come here and work and contribute and do all of the things that the racist rhetoric for the last 20 years has told us that they have to do. You remember? Oh, you've got to integrate. You've got to get a job. You can't be a drain on the state. This is about the people who have done all of those things. This is about those people. Shabana Mahmood is looking at people who have integrated. She is looking at people who have got jobs. She is looking at people who have contributed. And she's saying, sorry, I'm going to make your life harder. I'm going to make your life harder. Why is she doing that? Because if you had, quote, legitimate concerns a few years ago, right, you should be outraged by this. I'm not a racist. I just want people to contribute. I'm not a racist. I just want to control our borders. Well, these people are coming here via controlled borders. These people are coming here, quote, legally, end quote. These people are getting jobs. These people are paying taxes. These people are among us. Doing all the things you said you wanted them to do when you were claiming that immigration was out of control or that immigration was a massive problem and Shabana Mahmood is treating them worse than they are already treated and I don't know why.