Perhaps the most striking feature of the academic literature about immigration and asylum in Britain is the high moral tone it adopts towards the policies of successive governments. One of the first sociological accounts about the determination and appeals process was Slamming the door by Moore and Wallace (1975), which was written at a time when most people in the country, and all the main political parties favoured immigration controls. Moore and Wallace had no illusions that their findings – mainly case studies, based on interviews with Asians who had experienced ill-treatment at the hands of the immigration service and Entry Clearance Officers – would lead to any change in public opinion. Instead, they wanted their book to ‘bear witness’ to the experience of migrants excluded from Britain, and divided families, so that future, more enlightened, generations could know what had taken place in their name.

Academics today, both in Britain and internationally, continue to write despairingly about what they view as the wickedness of controls. One recent book review concludes with a plea for readers to listen to those who are putting forward recommendations for change:

The editor of a journal that publishes ‘progressive’ or ‘critical’ research in discourse analysis invites contributions about this topic with a similar plea for academics to search their consciences: