A non-white face on a racist asylum policy is just a mask for cruelty

It has become the great political hack of our era: European governments have discovered a magical shield that allows them to advance the most draconian, racist and dehumanising anti-immigrant policies, without being accused of racism.

The secret is disarmingly simple: put a non-white face on the cruelty.

Appoint a brown or Black minister, ideally with a refugee story in the family tree, and let them deliver the policies a white politician fears to articulate. 

The modern state has merely perfected what colonial administrations mastered long ago: ruling through intermediaries. Only now, the stage is domestic rather than imperial - and the intermediaries are drawn from minority communities themselves, the children of immigrants enlisted to police the borders their parents once crossed.

No country has deployed this cynical tactic more shamelessly than the UK. The list is as long as it is depressing.

First came Priti Patel, the daughter of Ugandan-Indian refugees, who spent her time at the Home Office criminalising the very pathways her own family once relied upon - all while conducting her own private foreign policy with Israel behind her prime minister’s back.

Then it was Suella Braverman, born to immigrants from Kenya and Mauritius, who spoke of asylum seekers as though they were an incoming plague, and displayed a near-theatrical enthusiasm for deportation flights to Rwanda. Her tenure was a crusade against protest, civil liberties, multiculturalism and, above all, Muslims; every assault was neatly wrapped in the rhetoric of “security” and “antisemitism”.

Under former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, himself the son of immigrants, Braverman became the perfect political instrument: brown enough to deflect accusations of racism, right-wing enough to thrill the Tory grassroots, and ambitious enough to broadcast openly what older white Conservatives only muttered privately.

Legitimising optics

And now, under Labour, the same script is performed with softer diction but the same cold heart. Shabana Mahmood, Britain’s first female Muslim home secretary, fronts proposals so punitive and morally obscene that even conservative legal scholars have balked.

Her reforms would remove the state’s legal duty to provide housing or basic supports to asylum seekers - leaving thousands, including families with children, at the mercy of a discretionary system with no guarantee of shelter or survival.

Imagine risking your life crossing the Channel only to have your watch confiscated, your wedding ring seized, your clothing stripped because it is deemed too “expensive”, your children barred from school, your shelter withdrawn.

Forget who stands at the podium - Michael or Mohammed, Shirley or Shabana. The only thing that matters is whether the policies themselves are just

Such measures violate not only international conventions, but the most basic instincts of decency. Yet they are delivered with the legitimising optics of a Muslim woman with immigrant roots; a face that shields the government from accusations of Islamophobia, while implementing policies that disproportionately harm Muslims and refugees.

This trend is not confined to the mainstream. Even far-right parties now launder their image through carefully selected minority figures. 

Reform UK - a home for anti-immigrant hysteria and dog-whistle Islamophobia - has built its most prominent public persona after leader Nigel Farage around a Muslim figure: Zia Yusuf, a polished frontman who speaks loudly against immigrants and proudly in favour of Israel. 

His appearances, including on BBC Question Time, show exactly why the party prizes him - a Muslim face delivering white nationalist arguments; a brown shield for a movement rooted in hostility towards migrants.

Farage and his deputy, Richard Tice, understand perfectly well the value of a Muslim surname condemning “illegal migration” or warning of “Islamism”: it makes the far right’s message palatable to those who might otherwise recoil.

Human shields

As far-right agendas rise across Europe - with immigration and asylum dominating political discourse - centre-left parties, in Britain and beyond, have begun dancing to the same tune. They now compete with the far right by moving steadily rightwards themselves, following the old rule: if you can’t beat them, join them.

In this landscape, minority recruits are not symbols of inclusion, but instruments of absolution; human shields behind which racist policy proceeds unchallenged. 

Figures like Tory leader Kemi Badenoch have built a clear public profile by championing strict immigration controls, cultural assimilation, and the supposed failures of multiculturalism. Others, such as former home secretary James Cleverly, have echoed securitised migration rhetoric, aligning themselves with restrictive policies that sit uneasily beside their own family histories - as though immigration began with other people’s parents, and not their own.

Their presence makes it harder to confront the racism embedded in policy, because the government can dismiss criticism with one glib line: how can it be racist if the spokesperson is brown or Black? 

This is precisely the logic relied upon by colonial authorities when they appointed local chiefs to enforce the empire’s will.

The European officer could stand at a distance - polished, paternal, insulated - while local intermediaries enacted the violence. In India, Nigeria, Kenya and beyond, the empire ruled through appointed chiefs who collected taxes, enforced labour, and delivered punishment, sparing the British officer the moral stain.

These intermediaries often became more zealous than their masters, driven by the need to prove loyalty and secure favour. But their prominence never obscured the colonial machinery behind them: the state that held the real power, wielded the weapons, and pulled the strings.

Multicultural window-dressing

And it should not deceive us today. However prominently they appear before the cameras, these modern intermediaries do not alter the foundational state apparatus directing them.

Now, the structure is inverted but identical. Instead of colonised majorities abroad, western governments use minority figures at home as political armour. They absorb the criticism, deflect the outrage, and allow policies of exclusion and cruelty to proceed uncontested.

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Representation has been hollowed out and repurposed as camouflage. Diversity without justice is decoration. A brown face does not sanitise a cruel policy. A Muslim home secretary can still enact Islamophobic measures. A child of immigrants can still slam the door on a family fleeing for their lives. 

The pathetic spectacle of “look who we’ve appointed” has replaced the moral substance of “look what we are doing”.

Strip away the theatrics and the skin tones, the surnames and the symbols. Forget who stands at the podium - Michael or Mohammed, Shirley or Shabana. The only thing that matters is whether the policies themselves are just, humane, lawful, and protective of the vulnerable. 

If they are not, no amount of multicultural window-dressing can disguise their harshness. 

The real question is disarmingly simple: is the policy just? If not, then its author - whatever their colour, creed or family history - is simply another functionary in a machine of exclusion. 

Cruelty does not become moral simply because it is delivered by a brown or Black hand.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.