Britain’s borders are changing. John Reid gave a glimpse of their new contours yesterday. In this brave new world, visitors to these shores will be screened before they arrive, monitored while they stay and counted out when they leave. Those who unfairly want benefits will be kept out while the honest who want to pay taxes will be let in, along with the genuinely desperate. It is a fine vision. The problem is that it is light years away from current reality. And there are sufficient doubts that Mr Reid can transform today’s shambles into a “fit for purpose” immigration department.

Not for nothing was the document he published yesterday titled Rebuilding confidence in the immigration system, though there was no apparent irony in the use of the word “system”. A system that fails to deport foreign criminals even when requested by the courts, and which has not the faintest idea how many illegal immigrants are in the country is no system at all. When it is easier for an illegal immigrant to obtain a national insurance number and all the benefits that that brings than it is for an indigenous Briton, there are fundamental problems with the “system”.

Given the woeful starting point, many of Mr Reid’s proposed actions are obvious. Monitoring visitors when they leave is the best way of checking who is overstaying their welcome. Compulsory identity cards for those staying longer than six months will enable employers, health providers and authorities to check an individual’s bona fides. Putting officials on border duty in uniform is cheap but useful symbolism that Britain is mindful and not careless about who it allows in.

The fine print is more telling. By 2009 only 60 per cent of asylum decisions will be “fast-tracked”, or decided within six months. Uniforms will not be universal for three years. It will be 2014 before all visitors are checked on exit as well as entry. The Home Office behemoth may be on the move, but nimble it is not.

There are legitimate concerns that, in requiring employers to verify the paperwork of employees, ministers are asking too much of a group that is not, after all, a branch of the immigration department. And threats to get tough with “rogue” bosses who employ illegal immigrants wilfully sounds more like wishful thinking than substance: in 2004 there were only eight such successful prosecutions, although that was a significant rise from the sole success of the year before.

Mapping the road ahead is the easy part. The trickier issue relates to older, unresolved cases. Mr Reid made a point of ruling out an amnesty. But in clearing the backlog, ministers should be sensitive to the merits of each case. As long as everything in their lives is legal apart from immigration status, those of longstanding residence who work, pay taxes and otherwise enrich their community have a good case for being allowed to stay, perhaps initially on temporary work permits.

The Government has begun to make progress in dealing with asylum applications, but the biggest impediment to significant progress on immigration is less the vision or the plan than the Home Office itself. Its record, particularly with IT systems, is abysmal. Without an influx of management talent, little will change. Mr Reid, as much a Whitehall butterfly as he is a bruiser, will have to stick to his task manfully if we are to see meaningful change.