The world order we live in isn’t exactly known for its equitable treatment of people across national, racial or economic boundaries, but there are times when the klaxon sounds especially loudly for double standards. In recent months we’ve seen that when it comes to free movement, there’s one set of rules for oligarchs and big corporations and a completely different one for agricultural workers from eastern Europe, nurses from the Philippines and war-afflicted refugees in desperate need of shelter.
So it should come as no great surprise that for all the bluster about Brexit enabling “closer” relationships with Commonwealth countries (read “former colonial possessions”), Prime Minister Theresa May has arrived in India with little to offer in exchange for desperately needed post-Brexit trade deals. That is, little other than bespoke treatment for the Indian super-rich, “high net worth” individuals who will receive preferential visas and immigration opportunities in exchange for investment.
There’s also some talk of throwing down a few concessions in return for India assisting with the “speed and volume of returns of Indians with no right to remain in the UK”. For all the banal grandstanding about Britain’s and India’s love for each other’s cricket and music and a “shared history” (glossing silently, of course, over the bits that involved massive violence by the former to hold down the latter), the long-established racially discriminatory disgrace that is Britain’s visa regime for citizens of its former colonies is set to continue.
The infamous “virginity tests” of the 70s – when women from the Indian subcontinent were subjected to gynaecological examinations at Heathrow to establish their bona fides as prospective brides of British Asians – may thankfully only be a traumatic memory. But if you are from India or another Commonwealth country and don’t have enough wealth to neutralise your skin colour with the “bespoke visa” offered by May, then expect to continue to be put through a byzantine application procedure to come to the UK to see the sights.
If you are not deemed a member of the absurdly but tellingly named Great Club – India apparently has the honour of becoming the first government in the world invited to nominate top business executives to it – then expect to pay the staggering visa fees put in place by May during her tenure as home secretary for the privilege of visiting your cousins in Birmingham and spending your hard-earned holiday money in London.
My parents, who will have a month next summer taking constitutionals along the River Cam, comparing it (unfavourably) with the Ganges and, more inexplicably, watching Coronation Street in the evenings, will undergo an intrusive application procedure that entails handing over confidential financial information going back several years to British visa officials.
For this privilege and to be able to come at short notice over the next few years to the country where their daughter lives and works, they will, as presumably “low net worth individuals”, spend nearly £1,000 each, a significant portion of their annual pension.
The government of India, for its part, is not generally unhappy to be invited to be a member of Great Clubs where business deals and corporate profits matter above everything else.
With its strong middle-class support base, it has, however, protested on behalf of information technology professionals and Indian students. Those who come from India to study in the UK, like other international students, bring with them the high fees that the defunded British university sector is increasingly reliant on and who are, inexplicably, counted as migrants, despite stringent visa conditions ensuring their return home and abolished post-study work schemes.
We have already seen that the grand promises of Brexiteers, who suggested that British Asians would benefit from an immigration system that no longer discriminated in favour of Europeans, were – like much else emanating from that camp – not based on fact.
Any protest premised, however, on India’s ambitions to be counted a “major power” is inconsistent with the principles of free movement and equitable travel regimes. In an already inequitable economic order, where most Indians cannot anyway afford to travel to Britain, it enshrines the idea that dignity and respectful treatment can and should be paid for. Already, those on low incomes in Britain with partners from Commonwealth countries and elsewhere are not eligible to bring a partner or spouse to join them.
In the meantime, it would be a mistake for Britons, even those without connections to the Commonwealth, to imagine that making financial “high net worth” the basis of how people can travel to or settle in Britain and how they are treated by immigration authorities does not concern them.
On the contrary, it is one of those features of prospective post-Brexit life that tells us a great deal about who or what matters both outside and inside Britain; the principle that only the lives and futures of the wealthy matter will be entrenched as much within Britain as it applies to those travelling here. Freedom to travel, like free movement itself, is indivisible, and any discriminatory regimes bite back at source. It is time to fully decolonialise travel regimes and end the discriminatory privileging of both wealth and whiteness.
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