THERESA MAY’s decision to quit as British Prime Minister has brought joy to the immigrant community.

Her radical stance on migration did nothing to endear her to the already fed-up and over-worked public sector staff and the general immigrants.

May, first as home secretary and as Prime Minister, promised to ‘get tough’ on immigration. 

She was as good as her word – but this came at a substantial cost.

Her ‘hostile environment’ policies didn’t just impact thousands of immigrants, they turned lives upside down for British citizens from the Windrush generation and, crucially, they alienated public sector workers, just as the Prime Minister asked for their support.

These were the sort of people to whom May reached out first, with her heartfelt pledge to address injustice and toil.

May’s first words as Prime Minister from Downing Street appealed directly to those in Britain who were getting by but worried about what the future held.

However, her keynote immigration policies created an extra burden for the sort of hard-pressed workers May had promised to help. 

May introduced tough measures against immigrants. 

These abuses came under the mantra: ‘Protecting our borders’.

The new rules required public sector staff to collect and store even more data, thousands upon thousands of bits of information to gather and share with the Home Office.

It was an unpleasant policy as this affected both immigrants and civil servants. 

It was May who introduced the policy that immigrants should not be allowed to drive or even rent a house. 

Immigrants are not even allowed to open bank accounts.

Under May’s instructions, in January 2017, the Home Office told doctors, nurses and health officials to share data on patients. 

The formal deal struck between the Home Office and Department of Health allowed healthcare data to be used for ‘tracing immigration offenders’.

In practice, it was a stitch-up to make the NHS a more potent weapon in May’s immigration clampdown.

Then there were additional rules for schools. 

From June 2016, the month in which the country voted for Brexit, May’s campaign to be Prime Minister rolled into action – schools were told to spend time collecting more data on children, including their nationality and country of birth, for passing on to the Home Office and other institutions.

Schools duly shared details of more than 18 000 families with the Home Office in a single year, including names, addresses and even how often children turned up for lessons. 

Meanwhile, in higher education, administrators were being forced to run ever-more invasive document checks on international students, again to pass along to immigration officials.

May was cranking up the pressure on staff across public services, all in pursuit of greater immigration control.

May had made life more difficult for people working in the public sector, and had no real answer for why they should put up with it, let alone vote for her.

May’s election campaign exposed so many errors of judgment, including how hard-line immigration policies had heaped more work on people who were already fed-up and over-worked. 

Zimbabwe’s immigrants in the UK were not spared.

Most of May’s time in office centred on negotiating the UK’s exit from the European Union and plotting more suffering for Zimbabwean immigrants.

May crafted the immigration policy to match the slave trade era. Most immigrants were, and are being, exploited to date because of the policies May introduced.

Many petty crimes are being used to wage a brutal war against the immigrants in the UK. 

Never in a modern world can a human being torment another for being an immigrant. 

Such is the suffering May exerted on immigrants in the UK.

Those who practice effective human rights in the Conservative Party will be hoping to negotiate a different deal for immigrants but that idea has already been swiftly dismissed since May’s policies are now deep rooted.

Several rounds of demonstrations against immigration policies since January 2017 have failed to break the deadlock. 

It is believed when a Prime Minister leaves office, so does the entirety of his/her cabinet and the new office-holder picks his/her own team — which means we are likely to shortly see a new Home Office Secretary.

Zimbabweans in the UK are celebrating, hoping a new team will be more sympathetic to immigrants.

Immigrants now celebrate May’s end with great expectations.

Of course Brexit has brought mixed fortunes, but perhaps the greatest fortune is May’s exit.

For views and comments, email: vazet2000@yahoo.co.uk