Last week’s Queen’s Speech announced that there would be yet another Immigration Bill, even though the Immigration Act 2014 is still bedding down.

The Bill’s contents are based on a speech made by David Cameron on May 21.

In the speech, Cameron said that Britain will not “pull up the drawbridge” on immigration — an unfortunate metaphor as north Africans drown in the Mediterranean moat.

The language is very revealing. He claimed that migrants put pressure on public services, supported by an anecdotal list of people who are, apparently, worried — “the mum worrying about her child getting a school … the pensioner fearing he won’t get the hospital appointment he needs … the Asian family whose business is being undercut by illegal traders.”

Only the Asian family is identified by ethnicity, running a business, presumably a small business, probably a local newsagency — a fascinating glimpse into the mind of an Old Etonian millionaire Tory.

Bizarrely Cameron also complained about “illegal immigrants driving on our roads.” Perhaps they use up the roads, too.

The reality is that it’s already damn hard to get into Britain. A friend applying for a British visa once wrote to me that “getting into the UK was harder than getting into heaven.”

It’s been noticeable to me in recent months that friends from abroad trying to obtain visitors’ visas have found it increasingly difficult, sometimes impossible.

Once in Britain, life for migrants is hard. Migrants from outside the EU can rarely claim benefits and migrants from the EU are restricted from claiming jobseeker’s allowance.

Cameron’s negotiations with other EU leaders are over plans to stop EU workers from claiming in-work benefits (tax credits).

A cornerstone of EU law is freedom of movement for businesses and workers. Freedom of movement means, if you are working, the right to equal treatment on the same terms as indigenous workers.

Freedom of movement for workers benefits capital, which is why it is a principle of EU law.

Of course, if Britain did not operate a low-wage economy, no-one in work would need to claim top-up benefits.

Migrants already have very little access to social housing and overwhelmingly live in the private rented sector.

The Immigration Act 2014 requires private landlords to carry out immigration checks, an unbelievably complex process with the clear risk that landlords will simply refuse to let to anyone who is not a British citizen, or perhaps has a certain skin colour.

Now Cameron says that migrants are exploited by unscrupulous landlords.

The new Bill will allow landlords to “evict illegal immigrants more quickly.”

This will simply provide unscrupulous landlords with another opportunity to threaten to evict their tenants, and thus prevent tenants enforcing rights to repair, not to be harassed etc. Tenants will be in an even more vulnerable position.

The Bill will create a new criminal offence of “illegal working.” Self-evidently it is already illegal to work illegally. This measure will allow courts to confiscate workers’ wages as part of the sentence.

This is not, apparently, designed as a revenue-raising mechanism but instead as a deterrent against “illegal working.” You might think that if something is already illegal, then those who break the law are unlikely to be deterred by additional penalties.

I would imagine that most workers who are working “illegally” already believe that if they are caught, their wages will be confiscated.

More to the point, it is employers who should be punished for employing workers illegally, not least because those workers can be easily exploited and threatened.

Employers can already be fined for hiring people who do not have permission to work. The government has no plans to increase penalties on employers.

The insidious undercurrent is the scaremongering. It’s nonsense that migrants consume more than their fair share of public services — actually they contribute more than British taxpayers and use public services less. Not least because many of them are young, healthy adults without children, who are in work.

Nearly half of all new nurses come from overseas. More than a quarter of NHS doctors are non-British nationals.

The NHS would collapse without migrants, not just on the medical side but also in cleaning, catering, portering and other work so necessary to keep a hospital running.

What is so shocking is the frequency with which these myths about migrants are trotted out and then become entrenched as apparently common sense.

The more these myths are peddled, the more unwelcome and hostile the environment towards migrants becomes.

Ukip’s success is not winning one parliamentary seat or even gaining 12.6 per cent of the vote, frightening though that figure is.

Ukip’s great achievement is having dragged the mainstream political parties to the right on migration issues. Cameron’s speech unashamedly plays to the Ukip vote. The Liberal Democrats are trying to appeal to the progressive vote, but no-one is going to take any of their promises seriously. 

The contestants for the Labour Party leadership seem determined to junk any remaining social democratic concepts of fairness or equality and are keen to denounce the Blair and Brown governments as soft on immigration.

Way back in 2001, I was so disgusted by New Labour’s demonisation of asylum-seekers that I left the Labour Party. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown didn’t seem soft on immigration at the time.

During the general election leadership debates, it fell to the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party to take on Ukip. Leanne Wood achieved the only spontaneous applause of the night when she told Nigel Farage that he should be ashamed of himself.

And the Movement Against Xenophobia should be congratulated for its eye-catching, creative poster campaign during the general election, featuring the slogan “I am an immigrant.”

We need to bring all those forces together with the labour movement, the anti-racism movement and all the public services campaigns.

We need a movement that stands up for migrants, not only making the economic case for migration but also the moral case.

A society that turns its back on those fleeing persecution, that treats people who live and work here with suspicion and downright hostility and that scapegoats individuals should be ashamed of itself.

• Liz Davies is a barrister specialising in housing rights. She writes this column in a personal capacity.