Thread by @AdamWagner1

1/ Some thoughts on #WindrushGenerarion and why the immigration system is so badly broken. Hope I can offer a bit of insight having acted for both immigrants and the Home Office for many years (I no longer act for the HO).

2/ First thing’s first. I don’t really blame Theresa May or Amber Rudd for what’s happened - I see them as products of a political choice made many years ago to cut net immigration to ridiculously low numbers - 100,000 or so.

3/ That choice, which we need to remember was a popular one, created the modern immigration system. In a sense the voters, not Theresa May, are the culprit here.

4/ Why was it such a bad choice? Because you can have a fair and equitable immigration system where migrants are treated like people.

And you can have net immigration at 100,000.

But you can’t have both.

5/ Why can’t you have both?

Because migrants are human beings with families, back stories and often sympathetic reasons for being here. Britain is a great place to be. We should be happy it is so attractive! But here’s the problem...

6/ If you have a system which treats people as humans with sympathetic reasons for being here you will inevitably never get to the ridiculously low net migration targets.

No, to reach that you have to put in quite a different system.

7/ The system you need to expel millions - millions! - of people who didn’t come here legally, or morally should be able to be here legally, such as children of established immigrants or asylum seekers - is inequitable and unfair.

I’m not even criticising, I’m just describing

8/ That endemic unfairness - the ‘hostile environment’ as Theresa May termed it with no appearing irony - has to be baked in to the system at every level.

And take it from me, as someone who has been in the immigration courts hundreds of times - it is.

9/ My experience is that the hostile environment infects everyone. The Home Office staff (from experience) who in other roles might have been caring civil servants, become overwhelmed by the hostile environment. They become natives of it. They become hostile people.

10/ In a way I don’t blame them, well sort of. The absurd and unreachable targets turn HO officials into moths trying to reach the moon but getting burned on the lights. I have never experienced anything like it.

11/ HO is not like other government depts. I have acted for many . The HO is a place where there is no room for equity or treating stakeholders like people. Because you can’t have both, remember.

It’s also a place where Daily Mail headlines have an absurd amount of importance.

12/ The immigration rules. Not ‘laws’ in the normal sense. They are a bizarre game. Home Office and immigration lawyers pitched in endless battle of one-upmanship: ‘Just wait until you see this law! It will tie those immigration lawyers up for years!’ Not about people but targets

13/ It’s a nightmare for those caught up in system because unfairness is baked in. If not deliberately then recklessly. So #Windrush no surprise - these people are lucky their case has been taken up by media (see also Gurkhas) but they are the exception that proves the rule.

14/ What’s the prescription, doc? Without a fundamental rethink about how we see migration, or an amnesty for people who have been here for many years and we will never get out without becoming a country we don’t want to be, nothing is going to change.

15/ People will forget this scandal, and nobody will resign from their jobs. Why should they? They were doing their jobs. The hostile environment was never a secret. The system will remain unfair unless we fundamentally rethink our approach to migration. /end

16/ A few people saying I should blame officials and May more. I understand and agree. They are responsible. What I’m trying to do here is add the context that it isn’t just about their decisions about about policies many people agreed with and voted for