The Day I Asked The Home Office To Help Me Go Home - To Willesden Green ...
'These billboards - with their dark background, pictures of handcuffs and threats of arrest - are designed to be menacing rather than to offer assistance.' Photograph: Rick Findler for the Guardian
A few angry comments on social media were my first response to the Home Office campaign last week telling illegal immigrants to ‘go home or face arrest'. Then I made a protest call to the company hiring out the mobile billboards, and exchanged some tentative emails about a counter campaign in the London borough of Brent where I live. By Thursday my curiosity had got the better of me, and I texted the number advertised on the bilboards. The auto reply offered a callback in Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, English or other language. I noted the racial profiling but went to bed and thought no more of it.
The next day, just as I was looking for a distraction from my dull sandwich-at-a-desk routine, the telephone rang. It was the Home Office. Although I had no script planned, I was up for some fun.
"Umm, I need to go home."
"Where do you need to get home to?"
"Willesden Green."
"This scheme is for people who need to go home to a place abroad."
"Yes but I'm in Harrow now and your poster said you'd help me get home …"
"We provide help to people who are here illegally, such as people whose visas have expired."
"I don't have a visa."
"Do you think you might be here illegally?"
"I don't know. Do I need a visa to travel between Willesden and Harrow?"
I kept the (very polite) Home Office man on the phone for some time, all the while sounding more and more despondent at the fact there was no chance he would get me a taxi for my five-mile journey home.
It wasn't the most considered form of political action I have ever engaged in. But I soon wondered if it might be the most effective. The tweets I posted summarising my conversation reached hundreds of thousands of people and trended second in the UK. Others began to text messages to the Home Office asking for help to "go home": road updates, train times and lost keys, all reported under the #racistvan hashtag, utilising both wit and disgust. People saw the humour in the mild trolling of the Home Office, and the responses demonstrated that they too recognised that this is a vicious, hateful campaign.
You don't need to be an expert in graphical communication to realise that these billboards - with their dark background, pictures of handcuffs and threats of arrest - are designed to be menacing rather than to offer assistance. They are the latest in a succession of stunts by a government desperate to win a populist vote based on racism - something all too familiar to anyone with an immigrant background.
As a child in the 1970s with migrant parents I remember how "go home" was shouted at us in the streets and graffitied on walls. One of my earliest memories is of the panic I felt when hearing my parents discussing in hushed tones whether we would indeed have to "go home" as we watched the National Front march on TV. So when the government today tells illegal immigrants to "go home", the phrase is not an abstract one: it is rooted in the popular fascism of that period, a fascism we were forced to challenge in order that we could say "we are here to stay".
That is why when these vans appear on the streets of Brent, where I have lived most of my life, I believe they should be questioned and opposed. We cannot allow them to promote fear and division in our communities, to make us suspicious of our neighbours. Although the pilot scheme has now ended, the vans may yet be back - my guess is before the next election - and I will continue to protest. A gentle wind-up of a Home Office official on a dull Friday afternoon is just the start.
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