Migrants are expected to obey rules that govern almost every aspect of their lives. Yet, the state increasingly reserves the power to change those rules and exercise its authority with little regard for the uncertainty it creates. What does freedom mean when the rules only seem to apply one way?
What does it mean to be free if the conditions of your life depend on the decisions of a power you cannot meaningfully control? You might never be stopped by the police, detained by immigration officers or refused permission to remain in the country. But if those possibilities hang over your everyday life, and the rules governing your future can be changed after you have organised your life around them, how secure is your freedom really?
It is a question Britain's immigration system increasingly raises. The Government insists that migrants must obey the rules, demonstrate their contribution and accept the consequences when they do not. Yet the state itself seems increasingly comfortable with the uncertainty it creates for those under its authority.
Something is unsettling about the image of twenty immigration officers arriving at a restaurant during dinner service, entering without a warrant and leaving with a worker in handcuffs. Not because immigration enforcement should never take place, or because the state has no legitimate interest in enforcing its laws. But because the worker they detained was legally entitled to work in the UK. He was released only after the restaurant owner contacted his sister, who arrived with the documents needed to establish his status.
Nanu Mia had been packing takeaway meals at Sultanz, an Indian restaurant in Camborne, Cornwall, when Home Office officers arrived. He is a dependant of his wife, a care worker, and had the right to work. When he struggled to communicate with officers and asked for a translator, he was instead offered Google Translate. He was detained, handcuffed and taken away. He also suffers from asthma, and the panic of the situation left him struggling to breathe.
The incident is one of several documented in a recent investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism into the growing scale of immigration enforcement visits. Its findings raise questions not only about the treatment of individuals, but about the standards of evidence and legal safeguards governing the exercise of state power.
In 2025, the Home Office carried out more than 23,500 enforcement visits – around 60 every day. Two-thirds resulted in no arrests. Warrants were used in only a quarter of raids, down from more than 40 per cent a decade earlier. Meanwhile, 89 per cent of leads relating to alleged immigration offences came from members of the public or Crimestoppers, with only around two per cent originating from the police.
These figures do not, by themselves, establish that individual visits were unlawful. Officers have several legal routes for entering premises, including consent and certain statutory powers. But they invite a serious question: what happens to the safeguards that are supposed to constrain enforcement when visits are increasingly prompted by uncorroborated allegations and conducted without warrants?
A former immigration officer interviewed for the investigation described how anonymous tip-offs could be too weak to justify a warrant, but would not necessarily prevent officers from carrying out a visit. The consequences are not abstract. A person might be reported because somebody assumes they are working illegally based on their appearance or their ability to speak English. A business might be targeted following an allegation from a disgruntled employee or competitor.
At Sultanz, the consequences extended beyond Mia's detention. The restaurant experienced a drop in customers and racist abuse online after the raid. Its owner described the damage to a business he had spent years building. Mia, meanwhile, has been left anxious about the possibility of officers returning.
Enforcement is often discussed in terms of arrests, removals and the Government's ability to demonstrate control. Much less attention is paid to the people caught up in operations that produce no arrest, or to the businesses and communities left dealing with their consequences. A visit that finds no immigration offence is not necessarily a harmless exercise. The disruption, humiliation and suspicion can remain long after officers have left.
The significance of this extends beyond the conduct of individual enforcement officers. Political philosopher Philip Pettit offers a useful way of understanding the problem through his concept of freedom as non-domination. Freedom, in this account, is not simply the absence of interference. A person can be left alone and still be unfree if their security depends on the goodwill of someone who possesses the power to interfere in their life at will. The problem is not only whether that power is exercised, but whether the person subject to it has any meaningful control over its exercise.
For migrants, this distinction is particularly important. The possibility of an enforcement visit, detention or removal can shape everyday behaviour even when none of those things actually happens. People may feel compelled to avoid drawing attention to themselves, to accept poor working conditions or to remain silent when they have been mistreated. The power of enforcement lies partly in what it does, but also in what people know it is capable of doing.
There is a second dimension to this insecurity, less immediately visible but no less consequential: the instability of the rules themselves.
“A government that demands certainty, compliance and accountability from migrants should be prepared to offer those things in return. ”
Last week, the Home Secretary announced the details of the Government's earned settlement reforms. The starting point for settlement will increase from five to ten years, with different qualifying periods depending on income, occupation and other circumstances. Some people in specified public-sector roles will retain a five-year route, while higher earners may qualify sooner. Others will face substantially longer waits.
For people who have already spent years working in the UK on the understanding that they could apply for indefinite leave to remain after five years, this is not simply a change to future immigration policy. It is a change to the conditions under which they made decisions about their lives.
The Skilled Migrants Alliance is preparing a potential legal challenge, arguing that the Government should not retrospectively apply the new settlement conditions to people who entered the existing five-year route in good faith. Its position is not that the Government has no authority to reform immigration policy. It is that people who have organised their employment, finances and family lives around the rules in place when they arrived should not simply have those expectations discarded.
Amnesty International UK has raised similar concerns in its November briefing on the reforms. It warns that the Government's decision to provide no general transitional protections for most affected people risks undermining the principle that rules should be reasonably clear and predictable. People need to be able to organise their lives around them. Radically moving the goalposts can be unfair and, in some circumstances, unlawful.
The distinction matters. Governments must be able to change policy, and the precise legality of applying new rules to existing visa holders will depend on the circumstances and any eventual legal challenge. But possessing the formal authority to change the rules does not settle the question of whether doing so is compatible with the principles of legal certainty and legitimate expectation. Nor does it answer whether people who have made substantial commitments in reliance on those rules should be protected from sudden changes.
The reforms also reveal something about how the Government understands the people whose futures it is deciding. Settlement will increasingly be tied to income tax thresholds, with people on lower earnings potentially facing ten-year routes while some higher earners qualify after three or four. Economic status becomes a measure of who is considered to have contributed enough to deserve permanence. This risks treating the cleaner, care worker or hospital porter as less valuable than somebody earning considerably more, despite the essential work that keeps public services and communities functioning.
There are practical consequences, too. Longer and more complicated routes mean more applications, more fees and more opportunities for people to fall out of the system. Amnesty warns that the reforms could create prolonged uncertainty for families, increase pressure on an already overstretched Home Office and leave some people in a state of indefinite limbo.
The connection between enforcement and settlement is not that they are identical exercises of power. One concerns the state's capacity to intervene in people's lives in the present; the other concerns its ability to determine the conditions on which they can build a future. But both expose the same imbalance. Migrants are expected to organise their lives around rules that are exacting, complex and consequential, while the state retains considerable discretion over how those rules are applied and when they are changed.
This is what makes the idea of freedom as non-domination so relevant. A person does not have to be detained, removed or refused settlement to experience the effects of a system in which their future remains subject to decisions they cannot meaningfully influence. Uncertainty itself becomes a form of control. It can shape where people work, whether they challenge an employer, how securely they establish a family life and whether they feel able to participate in the society they are already helping to sustain.
The rule of law is supposed to guard against precisely this kind of arbitrary power. It cannot mean simply that the state has rules for other people to obey. It must also mean that state power is constrained, that decisions are open to scrutiny and challenge, and that people can reasonably understand the conditions under which they are expected to live.
There is a particular irony in a political climate where migrants are repeatedly told that the country needs to restore control of its borders and re-establish respect for the rules. Control is presented as an unquestionable public good, but the more important question is who exercises it, over whom, and subject to what constraints. Warrants, informed consent, evidence and transitional arrangements are not bureaucratic obstacles to effective government. They are part of what makes the exercise of government power legitimate.
This is not an argument against immigration enforcement or the possibility of changing immigration policy. It is an argument that the people subject to those decisions are entitled to more than the assurance that the Government is acting within its powers. They are entitled to safeguards against arbitrary interference, and to a system in which the rules are sufficiently stable to make a life possible.
A government that demands certainty, compliance and accountability from migrants should be prepared to offer those things in return. Otherwise, the rule of law becomes something demanded of the governed, rather than a principle that governs the state itself. The rules, in other words, only seem to apply one way.
