My mum relies on migrant carers. Mahmood’s cruelty horrifies me

I am increasingly drawn to subjects about which you know nothing until you suddenly need to know everything. It’s probably an age thing. The older you get, the more topics that seemed somehow irrelevant to your younger self edge ever closer to importance: pensions, inheritance tax, social care, death. It doesn’t matter how often you talk about these things or read articles about them or listen to people with firsthand experience share the fruits of their learning. Until you run headlong into the issue for yourself, you cannot truly grasp its width, depth or scale. My lovely mum, 86 in December and increasingly immobile, is currently enjoying the services of in-home carers. Recently returned home from hospital, she gets two visits a day, and I don’t know what she would do without them. It is not a perfect situation. There is little or no consistency. We don’t know who will be coming or exactly when they will arrive until they turn up. And because some of them have only visited once while others have become semi-regular, it is hard for mum, a woman so innately sociable that she used to start conversations with strangers on the London Underground when visiting from Kidderminster, to form relationships with them. What she does know, though, is that most of them were not born in Britain. A young Nigerian woman is her current favourite, a Filipino man is best equipped to help with the lifting she sometimes requires, a Ghanaian woman makes the best cup of tea. They all work very hard, do their level best in often trying circumstances, and together inform my growing horror at what Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood wants to do to people like them.The Home Secretary is planning to extend the time foreign nationals must wait before being granted indefinite leave to remain (ILR) in the UK from five to 15 years, and it is the impact on social care workers that has prompted a backlash from Cabinet ministers and trade unions. And now, rather less importantly, Mum and me. I’ve always been vaguely uncomfortable with calls to “train our own” instead of some sectors relying on workers born overseas. Even if there were powerful economic and social reasons for doing so – which there aren’t – the message it sends to doctors, carers, drivers or accountants who are already here and not “our own” is ugly. Under this largely unchallenged umbrella of preference, they all become inevitably and irreversibly second class. Mahmood’s plans would surely make that message starker and that designation meaner. Carers already looking after people like mum, but still shy of the current five-year requirement, will suddenly see the promise of improved security and status postponed for an entire decade. To all intents and purposes, it is a breach of the metaphorical contract they signed when they decided to come here and do work that many of “our own” reportedly consider beneath them or too poorly paid. Immigration “debates” are always riven with lies. For all the talk of “legitimate concerns”, the importance of “integration” or intolerable “burdens” on public services, the rhetoric of resistance to foreign-born arrivals is at best ambushed, or at worst driven, by a base bigotry. Namely, the idea that a person’s worth or value to society can somehow be determined by where they come from, as opposed to what they do. It is, for example, now almost entirely futile to point out simple statistics to people determined to believe – or at least to persuade others to believe – that we are in the grip of some sort of crisis and that immigration is somehow the root of myriad social and economic problems. You can, as a caller to my radio show once plaintively opined, “prove anything with facts” and the immigration conversation in Brexit Britain is now entirely about feelings. By pandering to feelings built on lies, or at least profound misunderstandings, Mahmood is tying herself in a large and unedifying knot. Carers, she is asking us to believe, do not earn enough to make the sort of financial contribution to our society that would earn the sort of exemption from ILR reforms planned for higher earners in other sectors. No matter that their contribution to society, and to the lives of people like Mum, might be better measured on a non-financial metric, the other reason reportedly behind the Home Office’s position is absurd and, to coin a phrase beloved of people who prefer their immigration conversations fact-free and full of feelings, profoundly “un-British”. Because, as well as insisting that carers cost too much, an assertion expertly dismantled by Professor Jonathan Portes, they are simultaneously asking us to deny carers these exemptions because they might use their ILR to become better integrated members of our society. “I don’t want us to get into that spiral where people move out of the care sector because they’ve got leave to remain,” said immigration minister Jo White at last month’s Labour conference. It is a mess entirely of Mahmood’s making and it is a consequence of her craven pandering to immigration rhetoric as opposed to immigration reality. Happily, it should be easy for her to see the error of her ways. She just needs to entrust the care of her own fragile and elderly mother to one of the people she is currently targeting with a cruel and illogical policy. She would, I hope, soon change her mind.