EXAMINING the history of immigration legislation from 1905 onwards, law lecturer Nadine El-Enany argues in this book that immigration controls are primarily designed to “maintain Britain as a racially and colonially configured space,” where non-white people are subjected to unspecified “state racial terror.”

Extending the argument, El-Enany maintains that non-white former subjects of the empire and their descendants have had the door shut on them by immigration controls in a way that prevents them from sharing in the wealth that colonialism helped to bring to Britain.

As a result, British immigration law serves primarily to legitimise ongoing theft of colonial wealth and, says the author, must therefore be understood as “being on a continuum of colonialism.”