IT is good that you reported the shock of the restaurant customer (‘Taking On the Illegal Staff’, September 2) and the protests of the managers of two restaurants that the people arrested in raids by the Local Immigration Team (LIT) were in the country legally.

These actions, like the dawn raids on people’s homes by the Border Agency (Home Office), are a shocking use of state power – and they are on the increase.

The actions of the LIT encourage the idea that people who are here without the documents required by the state are criminal and dangerous.

They are not.

You quote the head of the Oxon LIT as saying: “These raids show we have stepped up action to tackle serious and organised abuse of our immigration system.”

Violence, tax evasion by big companies, drug smuggling, exploitation of the weak – these are serious.

But working without ‘proper’ documents is not ‘serious abuse’ (and it certainly does not deserve the 18-month prison sentences that can currently be meted out by judges).

The policy of deporting people for these minor infringements is nonsense: it is harsh and disproportionate and there is not the remotest possibility of carrying it out.

It’s been said that, at current rates of deportations, it would take 50-100 years to deport all undocumented migrants (and that would have to be with no new arrivals).

If I may make a criticism of your coverage, to use the phrases ‘illegals’ and ‘illegal staff’ is to accept the language of the Home Office and should be avoided. A restaurant worker cannot be illegal any more than can a doctor or a bishop.

In accompanying UK Border staff on such raids, you run the risk of being used by the government for PR.

On such an occasion, it might be appropriate to seek a reaction from a body such as the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, or, on employment matters, the local Trades Union Council.

BILL MACKEITH, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford