I was one of the more than 1.3 million people who immigrated to the UK between 2022 and 2023. At the time, I was employed by an American firm that had asked me and my partner to choose between moving to the US and the UK. We chose the UK because London is a diverse, cosmopolitan, multicultural city where we felt at home as South Asians.
In the process, we created two well-paid, well-taxed UK jobs – and we became two more brown faces waiting in the endless queues with our older, predominantly white neighbours, struggling to access crumbling public services staffed by migrants such as myself.
For too long, the immigration 'debate' has created a binary that fails to represent the diverse experiences of migrant people and their relationship to the state. Whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment is easier than reframing the discussion, so politicians from Keir Starmer to Nigel Farage deliberately leave a major player out of the conversation.
That player isn't me or my partner, the disgruntled pensioner in the queue, or the asylum seeker in a hotel. It's the multi-billion-pound industry of opaque global corporations, contractors and subcontractors profiting off politicians and the media's fearmongering around migration and borders.
This is what we're calling the Borders Industrial Complex: a network of international actors cashing in on a so-called 'migrant crisis' in the UK, scooping up government contracts to 'manage migration', all while migrant people are scapegoated for costing taxpayers' money.
We want you to help us investigate Borders Inc. We want to expose how it works, who is making money, who is losing it, and who is suffering the human rights implications of this mass outsourcing of the immigration sector. Can you donate £5 today?
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