Opinions of British people from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds tend to be marginalised in current debates about immigration, which focus mainly on alleged white anxieties. The Runneymede Trust recently commissioned some research on this matter, which was published in December 2015. The authors of ‘This is still about us’ used focus groups with samples of British people from BME backgrounds in a number of UK locations to explore their views about the immigration debate today.
Significantly, almost all the BME participants — even those born and raised in the UK — felt that today’s immigration debate was still about them. Longer-term settled migrants, and even their adult children born in Britain, considered themselves to be the immigrants or migrants at the centre of these debates. They were both anxious and angry about the hostility often promoted around immigration by commentators, politicians and policymakers. Even those British BME people who generally agreed with policies on restricting immigration were also likely to highlight what they viewed as unfair or arbitrary practices within the immigration system.
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