By Megan Gibson

Copyright newstatesman

A few hours after Nigel Farage announced his plan to retroactively rescind indefinite leave to remain (ILR) in the UK if Reform wins the next election, my husband James texted me. “We should start thinking about a back-up plan over the next couple of years,” he wrote. ILR is the legal status giving many immigrants – like me – who don’t yet have citizenship the right to live, study and work in the UK permanently. After almost a decade and a half of seemingly endless visa applications amid increasingly rigid restrictions and many thousands of pounds paid to the Home Office, I had thought with ILR my status in this country was at last secure.

That feeling has steadily eroded, however, over the past year as the rhetoric of Farage and the far-right has migrated into the mainstream. Anger at illegal immigration morphed into the outright demonisation of asylum seekers and refugees, before mushrooming into promises of mass deportations. Though it is Farage who has led this anti-immigrant extremism, his crusade receives little demonstrable pushback from either the current or former governing party. As my colleague Tanjil Rashid wrote a few weeks ago in his cover story on the Age of Deportation, “Both mainstream parties have now vacated the high ground, allowing the politics of mass deportation to become the driving force of future UK governments.”

Now we are seeing just how that driving force might soon play out in practical terms. Under Reform’s proposed plan, ILR would be rescinded across the country (though EU nationals whose settled status is protected under the European Union Withdrawal Agreement would be exempt). Everyone else who once held ILR would be required to re-apply for a new visa, the details of which are sketchy – though Reform has promised that the previous thresholds would be raised. It is far from clear whether I would qualify for this visa.

Faced with the prospect of being deported, I find myself tempted to justify my existence in the UK, mounting a defense that is as desperate as it is ugly: I have always been in work; I have paid far more to the state than I have ever taken from it; my husband was born in this country; our child was born in this country; my husband’s parents were born in this country; hell, all of my great-grandparents, bar two, were born in this country.

In reality, I don’t believe any of this matters – and none of it should matter. What matters is this: I, like millions of other immigrants, came to this country, followed the law, filed the necessary paperwork and paid the necessary fees in order to secure what we were told was the right to build a life here. Contrary to the prevailing political narrative, doing so was not easy, nor cheap. But I, like millions of others across the UK, have honoured my part of the social and legal contract agreed to by the British state. The fact that the state could then turn around and retroactively erase that contract is not just a betrayal; it’s an erosion of Britain as we know it and it’s happening faster than we think. For many on the right, that seems to be the point.

I can already hear my British friends and family’s reassurances: surely, I won’t have anything to worry about; Reform’s policies are designed to placate their base, and that base isn’t furious over educated professionals with surnames like Gibson. I take their point: in his policy announcement, Farage directed his harshest criticism toward the “low-skilled” and “unproductive”; recall the ugly words of former MP Douglas Carswell just weeks ago, “From Epping to the sea, let’s make England Abdul-free.” In many ways I have been spared the frenzied contempt so many across the country now seem to feel for foreigners. Yet however well-intended and seemingly justified the suggestion that I won’t be affected by Reform’s policy, it’s just not true. I am not special. The cruel net of this plan as proposed will be cast so wide, it will have far-reaching consequences for potentially millions across the country — many of them British-born – as mass deportations break up families and fracture communities.

I can hear my friends’ next suggestion too: why don’t you apply for UK citizenship? To which I respond: I downloaded the application from the Home Office website this morning. The prospect of pledging allegiance to a country out of fear that said country might deport me is an unsettling one. But I am in the fortunate position where I am able to do so and, all being well, I should have a UK passport secured well before Nigel Farage enters No 10.

But what will that passport even mean? How will I – or anyone – ever be able to trust that it, too, won’t be retroactively revoked? Or even that my daughter’s citizenship won’t one day be called into question because her mother was born in another country? Who can feel settled in a system this arbitrary or a state this cruel? I suspect that no matter what my immigration status is, I may never feel secure here. My husband is right; we will need a back-up plan.