First it was no to Polish plumbers, then Afghan refugees. Now the right doesn’t want any migrants at all

Few sights are as sad as someone who gets exactly what they want and hates it, yet that is exactly how the British right behaves.

Hacking back the state? They swung the axe for a decade, only to complain about the damage done. Boris Johnson? Once their surefire winner, he has made them all losers. And, of course, there’s Brexit – the summit towards which so many trudged, only to find the view from the top a dud. Every last one of the right’s grievances has been dealt with, and it drives them mad.

The best illustration of this paradox is the item forever at the top of the rage list: immigration. For days, the usual blimpish faces in Westminster and across the press have been mottling with fury at the prospect of official figures showing a record high in the net total of people coming to this country – through the proper channels, with the correct forms and often having paid thousands of pounds in fees. This is legal migration – the kind that, just a few weeks ago, Tory backbenchers, GB News presenters and Telegraph columnists claimed to welcome. It was the people coming over in small boats who had to be stopped. “Illegal migration is not fair on British taxpayers, it is not fair on those who come here legally,” said Rishi Sunak in March. But this week, he said that legal migration was creating “unmanageable pressure”. So now we know: the sticking point is no longer what kind of foreigner you are – it’s simply your foreignness.

“A population crisis,” Nigel Farage calls it. An “addiction to immigration,” says Theresa May’s former righthand man Nick Timothy. Yet the immigration system they and the rest of the right decry is the very one they installed.

During the EU referendum, Vote Leave’s trump card was the need to shut Britain’s “open borders”. One of Brexit’s virtues, Iain Duncan Smith told the BBC, was that it would stop “very low-value, low-skilled people coming through”. Careless words, especially from an MP judged by his own colleagues to be so low-value and low-skilled they booted him from the Tory leadership. Nevertheless, this was the reason why IDS, Farage and Johnson demanded an “Australian-style” points system, which focus group experts such as James Frayne found was “probably the most popular policy ever tested”.

And lo! The UK now has total control over its borders and those Aussie rules ensure we get some of the highest-value, highest-skilled people the world has to offer. The right won big – so, of course, it acts like a sore loser. Duncan Smith now pleads with his government to “get a grip” on immigration.

But the government has indeed got a grip. The UK defines exactly which foreigners cross its borders. It invites in Ukrainians and Hongkongers while refusing entry to many of those fleeing Afghanistan and Sudan. The government wants foreign students to come, because the billions they spend here help prop up a broken higher education system and lift depressed local economies. No 10, the Treasury and most of Whitehall – apart, perhaps, from Speedy Suella Braverman and her team – know that the students will go once their courses are finished and that the number of Ukrainian refugees to Britain has probably peaked. The government could most likely do nothing and the next migration figures would show a big drop.

But the right needs scapegoats. The men with greased hair and a plausible manner who occupy newspaper columns and squat on TV studio sofas blame migrants for Britain’s housing crisis, for taking jobs from British workers and for failing to integrate. It is at points like this, when the language around immigration gets especially Enoch, that I realise afresh just how many of the public debates on this issue feature neither migrants nor children of migrants. The media, the right often complains, is “too London”. If that were really true, then 37% of media workers would be migrants, since that is how much they make up of the capital’s population. Yet you and I both know that will never happen.

Instead, we get dehumanising language used by both major parties and the press. Immigration is a game of “whac-a-mole”, Westminster sources tell the Sunday Times – as if those born abroad should be hit with a hammer. This week, Labour’s Keir Starmer complained of “uncontrolled immigration”. No doubt he hopes to convey an idea of a government in chaos. But the most direct victims of such language are not the Tory frontbench. New research this week from Hope Not Hate reports a direct link between politicians’ use of inflammatory language around immigration and activity by the far right. Braverman hatches a Rwanda plan and the far right share the Mail’s front pages. Robert Jenrick bemoans “Hotel Britain” and the boys in bovver boots lap it up. This all amid a rise in far-right protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers. The violence of such language has a consequence – and it tends to be felt by a mum in a headscarf taking her kids home on the bus, or a grandad making his way out of Friday afternoon prayers.

The narrowness with which immigrants are discussed sits at such odds with the breadth of their experiences. For her recent book, The Migrants’ Paradox, LSE professor Suzanne Hall interviewed people from more than 500 migrant-run small businesses, from Bristol to Leicester to Manchester. In long, detailed surveys that took five years to collect, she found a richness and resilience that goes nearly unmentioned. On Rye Lane in Peckham, south London, 61% of migrant businesspeople spoke two or three languages; 28% spoke four or more. In Birmingham, she found a street of shops run by people from Cameroon to Kurdistan to Vietnam. These are communities working in deprived areas, often on the frontline of street racism and in the face of council incomprehension. Yet they plug on, despite “long working hours, falling wages and rising rents”. The reward for many is not prosperity but precariousness, not citizenship but what Hall calls “denizenship”. They are both the heart of the local high street and confined to the very periphery of national politics.

You don’t hear them whining. Indeed, you may not hear them at all. They’ve been drowned out by the men who got everything on their shopping list and now have a bad case of buyer’s remorse.

• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist