Sometimes it can feel like we're living in Groundhog Day, except instead of Bill Murray waking

up to, I got you babe every morning, we're living in a nearer of cyclical and repetitive

moral panics about asylum seekers coming to our shores to game the system, motivated

apparently by our generous benefit system, and I don't know, quality daytime TV.

No matter what you do to try and push back against this stuff, like talk about the fact

that three quarters of asylum applications are successfully granted, or the awful conditions

they're forced to live in when they get here, or the fact that many of them come from

countries we literally invaded, pundits the commentary at journalists, they go, ah, you're

falling into the rights clever trap because they're with the public, you're siding with

illegal immigrants. Mainstream politics and political media are incapable of having

a serious and fact-based and humane conversation about immigration. And for me, the final

straw came last week when Andrew Marce said this on LBC.

In the old days, the left didn't much like talking about immigration. Immigration

was for right wingers and closet racists and xenophobes. Well, how times change?

It's like he's completely forgotten about the Blair years, or the legislation passed

by Harold Wilson and Clemen Atley. I mean, these people have the memories of concussed

goldfish and yet we trust them to lead the public conversation on asylum seeking and

immigration. So how did we get to the point where the public conversation about immigration

is solely about the threat posed to our sovereignty and the need for more crackdowns? To talk

me through it, I'm joined by Maya Goodfellow, the author of Hostile Environment, How Immigrants

became scapegoats and a literal expert in the field.

A different, stupid journalism story was the other day, a producer for a show where the

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