He assumed I regretted going back. No, I assured him, I had been holidaying in Britain, and was glad to be returning home. We need visitors like you, he said, and seizing my hand, pumped it vigorously. We were sharing a couch in the scandal-ridden, now-disappearing British Home Stores, waiting for our spouses. 

He pushed a trolley in a North London supermarket and his reasoning reflected the attitude of British and American immigration officers, as Zia Haider Rahman’s monumental 2014 novel, In the Light of What We Know, makes clear. I discovered in 1968 when I represented my newspaper in London that the late Lord David Ennals, the Labour politician who was then parliamentary under-secretary of state for home affairs, also thought like them. I described to Ennals the hassles I had to face in entering the country because the British still pretended the Commonwealth was one happy family whose citizens didn’t need a visa. Britain’s representative in Calcutta had given me an utterly meaningless “entry certificate” which warned it didn’t guarantee entry. Heathrow officials took no notice of it. Indeed, judging by their prolonged and searching questions, they seemed to view it with the deepest suspicion.

Ennals wasn’t discomfited. Now, I could stay in Britain for the rest of my life, he declared as if conferring a favour. I could not, I retorted, showing him the six-month permission stamped in my passport. Nor did I want to. Had I intended to settle in Britain, I could have done so many years earlier after university or, later, after my first reporting jobs in British newspapers. A British passport could then be had virtually over the counter. But while I enjoy travel, especially to and in Britain, it’s on my own terms. The immigrant’s rootlessness has never attracted me. That was something Ennals, like the North London trolleyman and Britain’s Border Force, couldn’t understand. They were convinced good foreigners hope to go to London before they die. Given Mamata Banerjee’s effusions, the stereotype may not be too far off the mark.

Not surprisingly, that assessment of Third World yearning breeds a certain contempt that was evident in the two comments quoted above. It prompted the recent demonstration in Newcastle upon Tyne with placards reading “Stop Immigration. Start Repatriation”. Nearby Hartlepool indicated the connection between leaving the European Union and anti-foreigner sentiment. Hartlepool recorded one of the biggest margins of victory for the Leave campaign. It’s also one of the country’s most deprived regions. When ordinary people in such places are asked to identify the most important issues in their lives, they seldom mention Europe, sovereignty or multiculturalism. They speak of immigration, the National Health Service and the economy. 

It is assumed such areas think the solution to poverty lies in reducing the number of outsiders who eat into the welfare and employment cakes. Even if the answer lies in injecting more funds to revitalize industry, create more jobs and upgrade the infrastructure, the obvious first step seems to be to cut numbers on a last-in-first-out basis. Hence the recorded rise in hate crimes, the “go back to your country” graffiti, the praise for  China, Japan and South Korea whose high growth is attributed to excluding foreigners, and the campaign to ban veils and sharia courts and keep out Muslims. Incidents of anti-Semitism went up by 11 per cent in the first six months of this year. Jeremy Corbyn’s recommendation of a peerage for the distinguished human rights lawyer, Shami Chakrabarti, has drawn criticism because her report on Semitism in the Labour Party is thought to whitewash the problem. David Cameron’s target of rehabilitating 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020 is unlikely to be realized. 

Rahman makes the American-born ethnic Pakistani in his novel say the closest he comes to feeling American “is when a US immigration officer snaps the navy blue passport shut and hands it back with a smile and with the greeting, ‘Welcome home.’” British immigration officers can also smile. When my wife’s fingerprint proved elusive — all that housework, she maintains — on our return from Oslo, the bearded Asian immigration officer at Heathrow told us of a 95-year-old Chinese woman whose fingers were also smooth as silk. “She was hardly a terrorist but I had to keep her until I got a print!” But as Rahman’s narrator, who also has British and Pakistani passports, says, “If an immigration officer at Heathrow had ever said ‘Welcome home’ to me, I would have given my life for England, for my country, there and then. I could kill for an England like that.” 

Immigration officials, members of Britain’s Border Force, are not important in themselves. Their significance lies in reflecting lower middle class prejudices and also perhaps in providing a clue to aspects of official thinking that cannot be articulated, certainly not at a time when India is reportedly eager to conclude deals with non-EU Britain. Rahman didn’t take that into account. He is also blissfully unaware of the alleged vulnerability of immigration officials who need protection from violently aggressive passengers. A prominently displayed notice warns that “Abuse Will Not Be Tolerated”. Under it is the solemn reminder that Her Majesty’s government takes “extremely seriously” any attempt to “intimidate” the staff “by verbal or physical abuse”. Passengers who run amok are threatened with prosecution, imprisonment or fines. Another official communication “We Welcome Your Feedback: Border Force Complaints and Compliments” allows passengers to pour out their thoughts in a generous 16 lines across two columns. But can dumb insolence or the unnerving effect of loaded questions, innuendoes, intrusiveness and sarcasm be so neatly capsuled? It’s ironical that a sour or surly reception by a Border Force that seems unwilling to accept that not every Afro-Asian visitor is potentially an illegal immigrant or that Britain needs the money foreigners spend — should contrast so sharply with the warmth beyond the airport. I use a cane sometimes and am overwhelmed by the offers of help from complete strangers on buses and trains.  

It was enjoyable, therefore, to find immigration officials out of their depth when they were forced to deal with Asians in an atypical situation when my wife and I landed at Southampton from a cruise ship we had boarded in Lisbon. The other passengers being all British or American, there were no landing cards, fingerprinting machines or computers to call up history. No wonder the immigration official looked uncomfortable. As unprepared for us as Britain is about leaving the EU, he had to accept what we said and let us through. It must have been galling for a tribe that once marched in support of Enoch Powell chanting “Six, seven, eight, We shall not integrate!” Our driver had a pragmatic explanation.

Immigration knows only the rich go on cruises. So they take it easy in Southampton.” If so, it was a battle between instinct and reason. Sir Owain Jenkins, who spent 29 years in Calcutta with Balmer Lawrie, quotes a former colleague of mine, Shree Krishna, telling him after visiting London in 1956, “Far too many coloured people, far too many.” Shree Krishna “went on to talk about empires in decline and Imperial Rome crowded with barbarians — ‘the Forum blue with Britons’. Then he turned to me as the only Englishman present: ‘All right now with full employment. But when jobs are scarce there will be trouble. It won’t be good for us — and it won’t be good for you. You must stop it’”. 

Nobody did, Jenkins laments, “the more’s the pity, and today — in 1986 — Shree Krishna’s prediction is all too well fulfilled”. That was 30 years ago. EU membership hadn’t yet intensified anti-foreigner feeling. Nor had withdrawal from the union focussed baleful attention on non-EU immigration.