I didn't respond because the experiences you described weren't really relevant: You were talking about Spanish citizens in Abbey National, who clearly, being EU citizens, have not had to go through the Home Office's immigration processes or been subject to immigration control - they are protected by EU rules, so they are not going to be able to tell you much about the UK Government's treatment of immigrants who don't have EU protection.
How we not treat migrants as human beings? Well I still remember the time some years ago when my then (non-EU) fiancee applied to remain in the UK so she could remain living with me, and the Home Office's response was not only to decline the application, but to then confiscate her passport, preventing her from returning home, and then tell her that, because she hadn't returned home (because she couldn't leave without her passport), she probably might not be allowed back in the country for 10 years. I spent about a month having to comfort her every day when she was basically stuck in limbo, unable to do anything about her status except wait until more than a month later the Home Office wrote to tell her to go to a certain office and queue for a couple of hours to get her passport back - but they'd only give it to her if she could show them a pre-paid for one-way flight ticket out of the UK. My fiancee whom I'd been living with for quite a few months, remember. So please don't tell me that wanting to treat people like human beings is 'student debating society': I've seen first hand what happens when you allow an attitude that immigrants are just things to be exploited economically to infect the entire immigration system - which, frankly, is what has happened, and is the attitude that the Tories are continuing to encourage. And I've had enough contact with other non-EU migrants to be very confident that what I and my then fiancee encountered is not at all atypical.
Because of my experiences, I spent quite a bit of time talking to other people who were going through the immigration system, as well as going through it myself. And believe me, unless you have experienced it for yourself, you wouldn't believe what it's like. You pay a fee of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pounds, basically for a home office clerk to spend 15 minutes or so looking to see if there's some minor flaw with your documentation that they can use to justify denying your application for a visa. No matter that for you, this could mean, whether or not you're going to be allowed to finally meet your 6 month old daughter whom - because of immigration rules, you've not yet met - or finally see your husband for the first time in a year. In most cases, if they deny your visa application, whether it's because of a serious problem or just because of a technicality, there is no right of appeal. Even if they have clearly made a mistake, the only thing you can really do is accept the loss of what you've paid and pay the Home Office some more hundreds of pounds to apply again.
Imagine if you went to a shop to buy a laptop, and AFTER you've paid the shop for your laptop, the shop will decide whether they will let you have the laptop you've paid for, or whether they'll just keep your money. (Oh, and to add to this: Imagine that the shop waits for anything up to 6 months before it tells you of its decision, and during that time they will tell you absolutely nothing). Well that's what the UK's immigration system is like. The fees go up by way more than inflation, year after year, completely out of proportion to what it actually costs to process a visa application. The Home Office also appear to have had wheeze (this was a couple of years ago, I don't know if it's still the case) whereby they would insist on payment in the currency of the applicant's home country, but then use an exchange rate that bore very little relationship to the actual exchange rate, thus effectively making people pay substantially above the visa fees that the Home Office were publicly advertising.
During their time in office, the Conservatives have repeatedly changed the rules in ways that give the impression of allowing certain categories of people into the country, while in practice making it almost impossible (Example: Specifying that if you want your husband/wife to come to the UK to live with you, you have to be earning at least a certain amount of money, but then in the 'small print' specifically excluding lots of sources of income from consideration, so that many people who actually earn more than enough still fall foul of the rules and therefore are not allowed to have their husbands/wives with them).
From all my experience and from others I've spoken to with experience of the system, I am very confident this kind of thing is not a series of coincidences. It's precisely because there really is no consideration in the immigration rules or in their implementation that foreigners are actually human beings. It's all about, how can the Home Office extract the maximum amount of money from potential immigrants before discarding them (unless they are sufficiently useful to the economy to be allowed in). That's simply morally wrong and it's leading to immense human suffering. And dismissing concerns about this or the desire for a more humane approach to immigration as 'student debating society' seems utterly appalling to me.
