MIGRANTS die in the Mediterranean, on European motorways or trying to hang onto Eurotunnel trains. For what? For the crime of leaving societies that are in chaos — Libya, Syria, Somalia — to look for a safe and secure life.

Politicians respond with cries for more controls on EU borders, even within the EU at Calais, and by creating internal “soft” border controls which treat migrants differently to British citizens.

Every year a different policy more intrusive than the previous ones is announced.

And the final weapon is demonisation: claiming migrants are responsible for the housing crisis, for overstretched schools and hospitals, and suggesting that British citizens feel threatened if they overhear foreign languages spoken on the high street.

A few years ago the panic was “foreign criminals,” painted as somehow more dangerous than good old-fashioned salt-of-the-earth British criminals.

Others will discuss the hard forms of border controls: police with machine guns patrolling barbed-wire-topped fences or the sheer difficulty of obtaining a visitor’s visa to come to Britain.

I want to focus on soft border controls: bringing immigration control into daily life by making employers, landlords, bank staff, the DVLA and clerics or registrars conducting marriage ceremonies de facto immigration policemen.

These controls have the effect of treating migrants — whether they have the right to reside in Britain or not — as different to the British population. Once different systems are applied to different people according to their origin, there is a vast potential for abuse or exploitation of vulnerable people and discrimination against others who may be perfectly lawful.

Politically, it started with the 1992-1997 Tory government treating asylum-seekers as a separate category of people. They were no longer permitted to work or to claim welfare benefit.

There was a prolonged struggle in the courts, which refused to accept that asylum-seekers could starve on our streets and so put the responsibility for support onto social services.

In 1999, Blair’s government set up the National Asylum Support Service (NASS), a parallel welfare system for asylum-seekers, who were still not permitted to work and had therefore to rely on state support rather than providing for themselves.

They were given lower levels of welfare benefits than British citizens were entitled to and had no choice in where they were accommodated.

Instead of asylum-seekers working, and supporting themselves while waiting for a decision on their refugee applications, they were shunted into ghettos and made to pay with vouchers rather than cash. Unsurprisingly, they were potentially victims of violent crime and “asylum-seeker” became a term of abuse.

After asylum-seekers, Eastern European migrants became the demonised community, when Britain fully opened its borders to them after their countries joined the European Union in 2004. This was followed by Bulgarians and Romanians in 2007. The different groups — asylum-seekers, EU citizens and migrants who come here under visas and then remain — all have very different statuses and rights under immigration law.

In 2006 the Labour government made it a criminal offence to knowingly employ someone who did not have the right to work here. It’s worth remembering what that means: EU citizens and their family members all have the right to work here (it’s fundamental to the EU).

Many other migrants receive visas precisely because they are highly skilled and have a job to go to. It will only be people who have usually overstayed a visitor’s visa and are living under the radar who might be working in breach of conditions.

Asking employers to investigate a person’s immigration status opens up a Pandora’s box of complexity, even with the Home Office Employers’ Checking Service on hand to give advice.

The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association (ILPA) has sent the government a host of cases where a potential employee did have the right to work, but the Home Office advised that he or she did not.

They include people who have the right to reside — and the right to work — under EU law. The upshot is that many people who actually do have the right to work, upon expert scrutiny of a complicated immigration status, are denied it.

The other side of the coin is that this gives immense power to unscrupulous employers exploiting vulnerable workers.

Criminalising working prevents workers from organising trade unions or from demanding their rights to the minimum wage, to holiday and sickness pay, to health and safety measures.

The response to any complaint will be a threat to shop them to the Home Office. Treating employers as border guards doesn’t stop so-called illegal working (working in breach of immigration conditions) — it simply drives it underground.

From 2014, the government has been trying to bring landlords into its circle of soft border policemen. The Immigration Act 2014 — which Labour supported — brought in the concept of “the right to rent.”

As yet, this is confined to a pilot area in the West Midlands. It requires landlords to satisfy themselves that a prospective tenant, or indeed any other adult who will live in the property, has an immigration status that allows them to rent. The dangers, as immigration campaigners and lawyers have warned, are threefold.

In case of doubt, landlords will discriminate. When faced with two potential tenants, one with a straightforward British passport and another with a foreign passport and a complicated (and perhaps blurred) stamp indicating immigration status, the easiest course of action will always be to let to the British citizen.

There is a danger, indeed, that migrants (or people who a landlord or letting agent think may be migrants) are simply turned away without even being asked to establish their immigration status and their “right to rent.”

As potential employers and workers have found, Home Office information on the complex provisions of immigration law may be inaccurate.

A prospective tenant and his or her family, who have every entitlement to rent, may be turned away or even, if already a tenant, wrongfully evicted because the Home Office gives the wrong information. It’s hard to see how there could be any legal redress available for that family in those circumstances.

The final problem is that the “right to rent” opens the door to unscrupulous landlords. There are those who are perfectly willing to take some risks on their account if they can turn a very tidy (and often untaxed) profit by letting out properties in squalid conditions, charging high rents, permitting overcrowding and generally ignoring the law.

As more migrants — some with the right to rent and some without — are turned away by law-abiding landlords, the unscrupulous landlords can clean up.

Any attempt by the tenants to enforce their rights will be met by eviction (unlawful but very unlikely to be challenged by the tenant) or a threat to bring in the Home Office.

In August, the government announced measures to toughen up the “right to rent.”

Once introduced, landlords who let to migrants without the right to rent will be committing a crime. And landlords will apparently be required to evict a tenant who loses the right to rent, immediately and without first going to court to obtain a possession order.

The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association said: “We consider it likely that to introduce such a crime would be to increase the risks of landlords or landladies illegally evicting or harassing a residential occupier.”

They highlight that turning employers into immigration officials has not prevented illegal working, simply driven it further underground, and fear that the same will happen in the area of housing.

Bringing in the possibility of eviction without a court order raises the prospect of a slippery slope. There are good reasons why a court order is normally required: so as to allow the tenant a measure of notice before eviction in case the landlord has the law wrong and actually the tenant is entitled to stay, and so that specialist bailiffs will carry out the eviction, rather than the landlord physically bundling someone out of his or her home.

It may sound innocuous enough: why should landlords have to bother with the inconvenience of a court order when renting to migrants who might not be permitted to rent?

But there is an obvious danger — once eviction without a court order applies to a certain group of tenants, why not to all private-sector tenants?

Plus, given the complexities of immigration law and immigration status, there is every possibility that a tenant could be wrongly evicted (and again, he or she is unlikely to have any redress).

Finally, it is hard to believe that eviction without a court order is a deterrent to migration.

I don’t believe that people risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean do so because they have heard that landlords need court orders before they can evict people in Britain.

All this will do is give unscrupulous, exploitative landlords yet more power over vulnerable migrants.

So what can be done?

We need a fair system of border controls, operated by immigration officers and not by a cast of private individuals (employers, landlords etc). We need EU ships patrolling the Mediterranean to rescue people, rather than deter them.

Politicians need to campaign to change public attitudes, so that migration is seen as positive (migrants contribute more to the economy in taxes, maintain our NHS etc). And — for the moment — individual acts of charity are inspiring.

I know institutions and individuals who house destitute migrants, who have fallen through the cracks and can neither work nor return to their home countries.

Without those private acts of charity, we would have more starving migrants on our streets. Others have raised money, food and toiletries to take to Calais. Progressives should be saying: “We are all in it together” and standing up for migrants. Most of us, or our ancestors, were migrants once.

Liz Davies is a barrister specialising in housing law, representing tenants and homeless people. She writes this column in a personal capacity.