Illegals

The WindRush scandal was the tip of the iceberg, as many people had suspected. Yesterday, it emerged that the Home Office had falsely accused 7,000 foreign students of cheating on their English proficiency tests and told them to leave the country, without giving them a chance to appeal. But what really incensed me was a discussion between two colleagues in my PhD room. One of them, who is as Asian on a student visa just like me, was saying that Labour was using the issue to attack the government and that "illegal immigrants" should not be allowed to stay. The government was right to have targets for deportation. I was too worked up to argue that having a target for deportations was like having a target for prison populations. Surely, it should depend on the crime? What is the point at which an "immigrant" becomes illegal? Even if she or he overstays their visa, shouldn't they have a right to explain why they did so? Definitions of "illegal" change with government policy, and someone who is illegal today might not be tomorrow (I don't even want to get into the semantics and morals of the word "illegal", mainly because the people who believe in deportation targets are unlikely to give a toss about the power of words. To be fair, my colleague is a mainstream-as-they-come who believes in quantifying everything, which is possibly why he supports deportation targets).
I don't have a clear view on "open borders", and I wish I could bring myself to support them unequivocally. But, surely there is a middle ground between "open borders" and a "hostile environment"? And, what really gets my goat is black and brown people who identify with the white middle-class rather than with other immigrants of colour. Especially, when some of the people being targeted are exactly like them--foreign students, not cleaners or fruit-pickers.
The Tory party reacted in characteristic fashion by appointing a brown man as Home Secretary. I feel you have to a particularly nasty to be a PoC Tory. However, I realize immigration is not such a big issue for everyone as it is for me. My cousins who work in finance support the Tories because of their pro-financial sector policies (although, they are not Tory ministers/MPs/members and do not have the power to influence immigration policy).
This brings me back to my point that political views are more emotional and grounded in personal circumstance and experience than rational. This might read like an apology for apathy, but I do believe empathy has limits, as much as I wish it didn't.