When the PM confirmed the great reopening on 19 July, he should have announced a relaxation of the borders

Immigrants living in Britain haven’t had the best time recently. Granted, few people have had a pleasant time over the past year and a half; still, we have arguably had it worse. First there were the Brexit years, in which politicians tripped over themselves to tell voters how little they liked us.

Then, as things were starting to – finally, cautiously – calm down, the pandemic hit. Suddenly, we got stuck in this country, with no way of seeing our friends or families. You may be tempted to produce the world’s smallest violin at this point: after all, we chose to make this place our home, and no one forced us to move.

I have come to think of it as a marriage – you can love someone very much and decide to spend the vast majority of your time with them, but that does not mean that you never want to socialise with anyone else. If you can sympathise with friends being sick to death of the sight of their spouse by the fourth month of lockdown, surely you can sympathise with us?

The problem is that British-born citizens have now been able to see their friends and families for several weeks, and there is no indication that this privilege will be extended to us anytime soon. It really should be; when Boris Johnson announced that the great reopening would take place on 19 July last night, he should have also announced a relaxation of the borders.

No-one is asking for everything to go back to normal in one go, of course; as Delta has shown us, variants are still circulating and can wreak havoc on our own domestic plans. This does not mean there is no middle ground.

For example, the government could make travelling abroad cheaper; in order to come back from green and amber countries, one must currently pay for several private PCR tests, totalling several hundreds of pounds. Though lateral flow tests are somewhat less accurate, they are cheap and abundant, and could be a better alternative.

Similarly, it seems absurd that people who have received both doses of their vaccines do not have any more freedoms than those who haven’t. If the jab is as effective as we believe it is, shouldn’t it make life at least a tad easier?

What feels especially frustrating is how few people are currently making these arguments in Westminster. Theresa May gave an astute speech on the topic in the Commons last week, but there has been little else.

In fact, it is quite striking that the Labour party is asking for tougher rules on international travel instead. The government’s failure to put India on the red list in time was infuriating, but the opposition should be going for a more nuanced position.

It may well be a cynical view to take, but it is hard not to view the current rules on international travel with suspicion. The home secretary, Priti Patel, appears openly hostile to immigration – doesn’t it seem convenient that people from other countries can now be treated as inherently suspicious, and that immigrants living here can be safely ignored?

Isn’t it jarring that people who would usually stand up for a more open world are now calling on her to be even harsher?

Call it paranoia if you must, but there is no reason to believe that policies from the Covid era won’t cast a long shadow over the politics of the next few years. We still do not know what a post-Brexit and post-pandemic Britain will look like, but it is a country we have started building already, knowingly or not.

We immigrants have not had the best time recently, and we do not want it to get any worse; we are happy your lives are getting better, but please don’t forget about us.