Tory Policy Panders to Racial Stereotyping

05 Feb 2005

Hackney Gazette

Last week, the Tories unveiled their new immigration policy which includes plans to introduce health checks for immigrants. Those who fail can be denied entry to this country. There are real issues in Hackney and Stoke Newington with diseases such as TB, HIV and Hepatitis B but none of the Tories’ plans will address these.

The Tory proposals remind me of classic racial stereotyping which implies that people that are not born in this country are likely to be diseased. Shades of the same slur have been heard for decades. Politicians complained bitterly in the early years of the twentieth century that Jewish migrants to the East End were riddled with disease. Michael Howard and his ‘health checks’ are nothing new. The truth is that fear of immigration is really about fear of the strangers “of inferior stock” in our midst – from unskilled and uneducated to uncultured or, as in this case, diseased. This is the latest incarnation of a very old theme.

If an immigrant tests positive for tuberculosis their visa application will automatically be turned down under these proposals. A disproportionate number of people who become sick with TB are the most vulnerable in any society: the elderly, children, the poor, the homeless, racial and ethnic minorities, and people already infected with HIV. Immigration policy should not stigmatise and refuse treatment to the most vulnerable. We should be testing people for this disease in this country because, until about fifty years ago, it was one of the main killers but we should test in order to detect it early and treat it, not to exclude people from entering the country thereby denying them treatment from the NHS.

These ‘health checks’ will be aimed primarily at people who are coming to work in this country and pay tax. These taxes will help to fund the NHS. Surely we should allow people access to a service which they are helping to fund. Even the Tories would not exclude foreign workers who smoke from entering the UK. Yet smokers are voluntarily increasing their likelihood of being a ‘burden’ on the NHS. The underlying philosophy of the Tory plans which state that people can only come to work in this country if they can provide us with maximum benefit without us having to forego anything is inconsistent, and cynical in the extreme. 

The most appalling thing about this proposal is that it is not the result of rational, informed debate. It is like the scum washed up on the beach during a frenzied media and political storm. Once again, an ill thought-out and opportunistic policy thought up by a party approaching a general election is being offered to the people of Britain. It is obvious that both parties are scuttling to the right to appease the tabloids with this pointless race to the bottom.



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