This book argues throughout for a whole-system approach to legal aid, in any category of law. That approach means there is a need to develop frameworks for understanding demand and supply, the conflict between quality, financial viability and client access, and the system factors which drive those. Within such frameworks, rising demand (if unaffordable) can be addressed not by reducing the scope of legal aid (or any other service), but by changing the system to create less need. Building those frameworks requires an understanding of the context and history of the bodies and actors involved. The ‘memory’ of that history is stored throughout an organisation or system (Cilliers, 2000), so that everyone in a system can act ‘dutifully and rationally’, yet still experience a bad result (Meadows & Wright, 2008: p5). When history is ignored, there is a risk of developing and attempting to impose solutions and reforms that cannot succeed.

This chapter offers that framework of context, history and politics, beginning with the development of immigration law and the legal profession, then introducing the key stages of legal aid development. The next chapter fills out the framework with the micro-level introduction to individual provider organisations and practitioners.

Emergence of the immigration legal profession

In the late 1800s, as poor Jewish refugees fled persecution in the pogroms of Eastern Europe, the UK Parliament passed the Aliens Act 1905, aiming to stop them entering Britain. That began the development of both the modern system of immigration control in the UK and the right of appeal against immigration decisions. The Act created the Aliens Inspectorate, which was given the power to inspect ships carrying immigrants and refuse entry to those deemed undesirable, generally by reason of poverty, disability or sickness (Clayton, 2016). It gave overall responsibility for the scheme to the Home Secretary. It was augmented with new war-related restrictions in 1914 and 1919, but it was not until after World War II, as the British Empire shrank and migration from the colonies and the new Commonwealth grew, that immigration law began to proliferate and drive the development of an immigration legal profession.