"Immigration controls are inherently racist in that they are based on the crudest of all nationalisms — namely the assertion that the British have a franchise on Britain."

Immigration controls, according to Steve Cohen,

“are inherently racist in that they are based on the crudest of all nationalisms, namely the assertion that the British have a franchise on Britain."

You may want to read that again slowly.

Steve Cohen was described on as 

"one of the giants of immigration law"

and wrote a book called No One Is Illegal. 

He sounds like he was invented by Michael Wharton (Peter Simple long ago in the Daily Telegraph) but he was real. 

He is not someone you have heard of and died in 2009, but is representative of an important element of left-wing and liberal thinking. 

No doubt his books still are influential in the Labour Party, NGOs and among people who are concerned about migrants. 

According to his obituary on a left-wing site, he

dedicated his life to anti-racism and anti-Semitism, particularly the welfare of immigrants and refugees and those seeking the right to remain in the UK. Educated at Oxford University, Steve became a human-rights lawyer in Manchester, founding a Law Centre and creating the Immigration Aid Unit. He was politically opposed to immigration controls in their totality and took part in many anti-deportation and immigration campaigns both as a lawyer and a campaigner.

He was a Trotskyite, as are Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, who probably share his views on open borders. I wonder if they share his views on antisemitism.

In 1984 he wrote a book called That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Antisemitic, on the subject of left-wing antisemitism. The online version was tweeted in January of this year from the official Twitter account of Momentum, the hard left group that backs Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and their gang.