The government was always going to say it would learn the lessons from the Windrush scandal. Even as people are still waiting for their compensation – some dying before they receive it, as racism still courses through the system, and as people as still subjected to the Hostile Environment policies, ministers continue to project a sense of remorse and reflection. But the way many migrants have been treated during the coronavirus pandemic tells a starkly different story.

Throughout lockdown, immigration policy has remained much the same – even when these policies had a detrimental impact on people’s health and their ability to survive. There were some very basic provisions the government could have put in place to make people feel safe and confident to access healthcare. But it didn’t. 

There has been no firewall between the NHS and government departments. There is no major communications strategy to inform migrants about changes to the rules. In an already maze-like system of messy, costly and cruel immigration policy, ministers have made ad hoc decisions about immigration enforcement and then posted them on the Home Office website. For a government famed for its three-word catchphrases, the process has been near impossible to follow. 

Government immigration policy also meant little, if any, financial support for some. People who have no recourse to public funds attached to their visa haven’t been able to access state support like universal credit, child benefit or housing benefit. They have been made to choose: go to work and risk contracting Covid-19 or become destitute. Others have lost their jobs and found there’s no safety net to support them – all because of where they were born and their immigration status.

When Boris Johnson had his own government’s policy explained to him, he seemed shocked that it existed and in disbelief about its impacts. But his government is still actively defending and enforcing it. This week, the government was presented with the opportunity to suspend no recourse to public funds for migrant women so they can easily access domestic abuse services. They chose not to. 

The government’s approach to immigration enforcement is more evidence that coronavirus has not been some great leveller. Politicians say we’re all in this together while working to sustain a system of unequal rights. This problem will only get worse as the effects of the economic crisis set alight by coronavirus – but rooted in decades of bad policy – become clear.

Some of the very people Conservative politicians were clapping for every week were, and still are, being subjected to grotesquely unfair immigration policy. NHS and care workers might be exempt from paying the Immigration Health Surcharge – although some are still being charged – but it’s still applied to migrants in all other professions, including other ‘key workers’.

The surcharge forces those who pay into the NHS through their national insurance and taxes to pay again simply because they are migrants. Why should anyone have to pay twice for the health service just because they weren’t born in this country? 

The government’s immigration plans will deepen a system that turns migrants into commodities. One of its key mantras is that you can come into the country if you benefit ‘us’. 

This kind of thinking is not new; New Labour made similar arguments when they were in power. But as the debate around the Immigration Health Surcharge has shown, it has become central to how immigration is talked about during the pandemic. According to this thinking, there are the good migrants who are economically useful and should be treated relatively well, and there are the bad or unimportant migrants who don’t benefit the country in the right way. 

Because immigration ‘control’ is never only about stopping people from coming to the UK. Governments do work to make it harder for people to come to this country. They force many to take life-endangering journeys, and then issue condolences when people die trying to cross the borders they have helped make near impenetrable.  

But they also cobble together policies that let some people come to the UK on time-limited visas and with access to few decent rights. They decide if and how you can come into the country, depending on what country you’re coming from, how much you earn and what your qualifications are. This is a racialised, classed system – and we can well expect our politicians to try and make it worse in the coming months and years.

Too often the focus is on the fictitious problems migration creates, rather than the damage done by immigration policy. But the problem is not and never has been migration; it’s with the way migrants are treated. As we imagine new worlds, that is one of the fundamental things that must change.