The raids are over. The vans have retreated from the Minnesota suburbs, and the headlines have moved on. But for the British Home Office, studying the aftermath of that febrile week in the American Midwest, the question remains: what did we learn? The answer, I suspect, is nothing we want to hear.
Let us dispense with the comforting fiction that this was a uniquely American story. The dystopian imagery of dawn raids, of children separated from parents, of a community living in a state of suspended terror—this is the raw material of border enforcement everywhere, including ours. The Home Office's review of 'security lessons' is a polite way of saying: we are watching. And we are taking notes.
The parallels to the late Roman Empire are, as always, instructive. When the barbarians pressed at the gates, the Romans did not merely fortify Hadrian's Wall. They created a zone of militarised suspicion, a no-man's-land where legal niceties gave way to expediency. The Minnesota raids, conducted under the aegis of an administration obsessed with a border wall of its own, were a similar exercise in performative control. The aim was not to catch every undocumented migrant. It was to remind those who remained that the state could reach them.
And so to Britain. Our own border apparatus is less theatrical, more bureaucratic. We do not send armed men in balaclavas to school car parks. Instead, we ask for biometric data. We threaten landlords and employers with fines. We create a hostile environment, a phrase that the then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd once used with unmistakable pride. The Windrush scandal was our own mini-raids, a reminder that the machinery of state can grind down even the most settled of populations.
What the Home Office will learn from Minnesota is not a lesson in humanity. It is a lesson in optics. The American raids were too visible, too dramatic. They generated images that could be weaponised by activists. A more subtle approach, the British way, is to make the hostile environment so pervasive that fear becomes a kind of self-enforcing law. No need for dawn raids when the threat of them hangs in the air like smog.
But there is a deeper rot here, one that the Victorians would have recognised. They, too, were obsessed with the purity of the national stock, with the need to separate the deserving from the undeserving poor. The workhouse was their immigration detention centre. The difference is that today we dress our anxieties in the language of security. We speak not of paupers but of 'illegals'. The vocabulary changes; the instinct does not.
So the Home Office will review and refine. It will note that the American raids failed because they were too blunt. It will invest in more drones, more data-sharing, more algorithmic predictions. It will craft a border that is less a wall and more a spider's web, invisible until you touch it. And the intellectuals, myself included, will write columns about the decline of liberal values. But we will do so from the comfort of our own fortress, the door bolted, the lights on, the fear kept firmly outside.
