By Qamar Bashir
Press Secretary to the President (Rtd)
Former Press Minister, Embassy of Pakistan to France
Former Press Attaché to Malaysia
Former MD, SRBC | Michigan, USA
When does an immigrant stop being an immigrant? For some British citizens, apparently never. They may have been born in Britain, educated in British schools, worked, paid taxes and raised families there. Their parents and grandparents may have done the same. Yet racial nationalists still describe them as outsiders.
Behind arguments about integration lies a disturbing proposition: however deeply they belong, their appearance disqualifies them. Citizenship becomes conditional, while whiteness becomes an imagined passport to permanent acceptance.
Debating immigration levels, asylum procedures, housing or public services is legitimate. Demanding that citizens leave because of their ancestry is racial exclusion. A British Muslim, Hindu, Christian or atheist does not become less British because their family originated in Somalia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Iraq. For someone whose home and life are British, being told to return to an ancestral country denies their actual belonging.
The supremacist narrative insists that ancestry outranks citizenship, that minority success threatens rightful white ownership, and that assimilation can never overcome colour. Its opponents answer that Britain belongs equally to its citizens: belonging rests on shared civic rights, responsibilities and institutions, while peaceful resistance rejects racial hierarchy and defends everyone’s right to call Britain their home.
The consequences extend beyond offensive speech. In England and Wales, excluding the Metropolitan Police, police recorded 115,990 hate crimes in the year ending March 2025, up 2%. Racial hate crimes increased 6%, religious hate crimes 3%, and religious hate crimes targeting Muslims 19%. Reporting and recording practices affect these figures, but they document substantial harm. Social media compounds the danger when individual crimes become accusations against communities and religious differences become supposed evidence of disloyalty.
Britain’s imperial history makes racial exclusion particularly contradictory. Britain, France, Portugal and the Netherlands established overseas empires that extracted wealth, reorganized economies and imposed authority. They also spread their languages, institutions and cultural practices. Connections between Europe and formerly colonized societies were neither accidental nor created solely by recent migrants. Imperial powers helped construct the relationships and inequalities along which later migration developed.
The military contribution deserves recognition. More than 2.5 million people served in the British Indian Army during the Second World War, helping defeat the Axis powers. Colonial service occurred within unequal systems and reflected varied motivations. Nevertheless, remembering these soldiers as indispensable while imagining their descendants as permanently foreign exposes a profound contradiction. Postwar migrants likewise helped rebuild Britain, often encountering discrimination while supplying labour its economy needed.
Here lies the economic question: are minorities accepted more readily as workers serving others than as equals competing for influence? Migrants have performed essential work in cleaning, transport, hospitality, construction and care. These occupations deserve respect. The injustice lies in expecting particular communities to remain confined to them, as though their presence is acceptable only when accompanied by low wages, limited authority and restricted ambition.
Their children and grandchildren understandably seek advancement as professionals, entrepreneurs, academics and public representatives. For those who associate authority with racial inheritance, this mobility can feel like displacement. Economic resentment may therefore reinforce hostility presented as concern about culture. It does not explain every objection to immigration, however. Economic insecurity, cultural anxiety, prejudice and political opportunism can interact. Housing shortages and strained services require investment and competent government, rather than collective blame.
The legal principle must remain clear. Magna Carta is not a modern racial equality charter. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms equal dignity, nondiscrimination and protection against arbitrary deprivation of nationality.
British law permits citizenship deprivation on specified grounds, subject to legal conditions; ancestry or appearance alone is not such a ground. Minority citizens should never have to earn equality by remaining subordinate or invisible.
But defending citizenship addresses only part of the problem. The larger question is why people must leave their homes at all. When war destroys houses, hospitals, schools, businesses and essential infrastructure, families lose the foundations of ordinary life.
When economic restrictions deepen shortages or obstruct livelihoods, survival becomes harder. People facing these conditions may seek safety or employment abroad, sometimes through dangerous routes because accessible alternatives are absent.
Iran illustrates this danger with particular force. Since the United States reimposed sweeping sanctions in 2018, Iranians have faced eight years of renewed economic restrictions, intensified by further measures in 2026. Alongside this pressure, United Nations reporting has documented airstrikes causing civilian casualties, displacement and damage to homes, schools and health facilities. For a population of roughly 90 million, the combination threatens both physical security and the means of earning a living.
When economic coercion deprives ordinary families of livelihoods and essential goods, it becomes collective punishment in its human consequences, whatever justification governments offer. Families unable to find safety, work or food may seek opportunities abroad; migration then becomes a response to deprivation, rather than simply a preference.
Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq offer different histories of conflict, repression and displacement. Colonial legacies also shape opportunities across South Asia and Africa, alongside domestic governance, inequality and other pressures. These countries cannot be reduced to one explanation or described as uniformly destitute.
Nevertheless, governments whose interventions contribute to destruction must confront the consequences. Condemning migration while helping destroy the possibility of remaining safely at home is a morally indefensible contradiction.
Governments whose military actions and economic restrictions contribute to that desperation should bear a corresponding responsibility: protect those displaced, share the costs of receiving them, and help restore the homes, institutions and productive economy that make remaining—or voluntarily returning—possible. They cannot credibly condemn migration while disregarding their own contribution to the conditions that drive it.
The long term solution is to invest where people already live: rebuild schools and hospitals, train teachers and technicians, support universities, create reliable infrastructure and expand productive employment. Political stability must rest on accountable institutions and public participation, alongside economic opportunity and cultural freedom.
The Gulf’s development, including Dubai, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, illustrates how investment and expanding industries can attract workers internationally. Its circumstances are distinctive, but opportunity clearly influences migration.
This is also a practical answer to public anxiety in destination countries. Money spent restoring livelihoods can address displacement more constructively than rhetoric promising racial exclusion.
Partnerships should be designed with the people affected, offer fair trading opportunities, and support businesses that retain value locally. Their purpose should be to expand people’s choices, so that staying becomes viable and leaving remains a decision rather than a necessity.
Such cooperation must respect sovereignty, empower local communities and prevent reconstruction from becoming another system of dependency. The test of Western commitment is whether it supports prosperity and independence even when these strengthen competitors.
No development programme will end migration, which also reflects choice and aspiration. It can, however, reduce the desperation that forces departure.
A just response combines equal citizenship, peaceful resistance to racism and sustained investment in people’s ability to build secure, dignified lives at home.
