At the moment the UK government is persecuting the "Windrush generation". People who legally migrated to the UK and have a legal right to remain are being thrown out of their jobs and threatened with deportation unless they can prove that fact. But it turns out that before they started this persecution, the UK government destroyed all the evidence that they were legal migrants:
Proof that could have spared members of the Windrush generation from the threat of deportation was destroyed by the Home Office under Theresa May, it has been revealed.
Thousands of landing cards – recording dates of arrival in the UK – were thrown away, despite staff warnings that it would be harder for Caribbean-born residents to establish their right to be in the UK.
The files were discarded in October 2010, when the current prime minister was home secretary, a former Home Office employee revealed.
Having destroyed that evidence, May then established a "hostile environment for illegal immigrants", requiring people to arbitrarily prove their residency in order to do pretty much anything. Naturally, this has provided cover for racists to discriminate against anyone who looks or sounds "foreign" because they might be an illegal immigrant. As for what it means in practice, here's a UK immigration lawyer's take on what would happen to Paddington Bear under May - and its not pretty.
While supposedly justified under data protection laws, retaining the information was obviously necessary, since people were regularly requesting it to prove their migration status. But I'm sure its just a complete coincidence that it was all destroyed right before a crackdown, and not part of a plan to engage in the mass deportation of people the Tories have always hated and think "don't belong" in the UK.
