It’s a funny thing, language. Writing in the Guardian, Nesrine Malik claims that: “There is no automatic route to citizenship in the UK for foreigners”. She then proceeds to write about the Government’s changes to Indefinite Leave to Remain, an automatic route to citizenship of the UK for foreigners.
Perhaps we simply mean different things by ‘automatic’; personally, I suspect Malik really means ‘immediate’. Attaining ILR is certainly time-consuming, and about to become moreso. But if they’re prepared to stick it out, anyone with residency will eventually qualify for citizenship, the gate kept only by a few fees.
What Malik’s examples of hypothetical ‘automatic’ routes to citizenship – “through marriage to a British citizen or even birth on British soil to non-British parents” – have in common, on the other hand, is immediacy.
And there is language being funny again: what is that “even” doing before “birth on British soil to non-British parents”?
Birthright citizenship, as it is called, is a highly unusual arrangement globally: of the 33 nations on Earth that have it, the only three this side of the Atlantic are the Gambia, Lesotho, and – if we take that definition very literally – Tuvalu.
Jus soli may have been a workable principle in a less mobile world. It is today merely an easily-exploitable invitation to passport tourism, which is why the United Kingdom abolished birthright citizenship via the British Nationality Act 1981. But even if you support it, there’s nothing obvious about the case for it.
The same goes for marriage. Any policy which granted immediate citizenship to spouses would obviously be ripe for abuse. But even absent that, such an unqualified right would be problematic if, for example, the spouse was an immediate or, arguably, even lifetime-net drawer on public funds. That’s a cost imposed on the rest of the taxpaying public – why shouldn’t it be qualified?
Is it a ‘lie’ when politicians say that it is all to easy to immigrate to the UK? Of course not; nor is Malik lying when she claims it is too difficult. She and the politicians she is talking about (not to mention many voters) simply have very, very different ideas about where the bar should be set.
Ditto the concept of ‘integration’. Setting aside for a moment the question of whether it is a high enough standard (Sam Bidwell argued on this site in February that it is not), what counts as integrating? One might argue that extending ILR requirements harm integration because immigrants “can’t vote” and “cannot have recourse to public funds if needed”; others might say that integrating is the bare minimum we should demand of someone before extending them the highest privileges of citizenship.
There’s a political fight to be had between those positions, and have it we surely will. But the price of entry is recognising that its a fight between value systems at least as much as a dispute over facts. There is no objectively correct answer to the question of whether immigration is ‘too high’; it depends entirely on what someone thinks it ought to be.
It is always more comforting, of course, to imagine one’s opponents are simply wrong about facts. But on immigration, such lines of thinking seem often to lead to what looks like book-cooking.
Take the fact that we count foreign students towards the net immigration figures. Malik, echoing other campaigners, dubs this a ‘category error’; these students leave at the end of their course, the argument runs, and so should not count.
Yet whilst there is a prima facie logic to the idea, it is by no means an unarguable case. In 2020/21, the foreign student population stood at 680,000, equivalent to a city the size of Glasgow. Whatever their long-term intentions, those people are physically present and putting pressure on public services, especially housing – and the university sector’s current funding model depends on importing ever more of them. I’m sure it would love to see foreign students taken off the books, but it would be deceitful.
As such, there would be a perfectly solid case for including students in the numbers even before we consider the very real problem of people exploiting student visas to bypass the immigration system, as Neil O’Brien explored in ‘The Deliveroo Visa Scandal’ and about which we wrote after the Times investigation into systemic fraud in March.
It’s the same with Malik’s other ‘category error’, the “assumption that all those who enter on long-term visas with a potential for settlement will remain”. The implication seems to be that only four-in-ten people on work visas (plus their families) remaining long enough to apply for citizenship defeats the restrictionist case. But which case? Who is making it?
Moreover, not only does that statistic (from this government report) apply people who arrived in 2018 – i.e. before the Boriswave – but it also says nothing about the long-term net fiscal contribution of those who do remain (because the state doesn’t currently collate that data).
You may or may not agree that importing workers (and their families) to fill short-term labour shortages who end up being a net drain on the Exchequer once they (and their families) qualify for public funds is bad immigration policy, no matter how many other people are leaving. But it is no ‘category error’ to think so.
Ultimately, the reason Labour is now lurching off in a direction which dismays many progressives no different to the one that led successive Conservative governments to pursue their self-destructive practice of lying about their immigration policy: because nobody reaches the top who cannot recognise, deep in their political lizard-brain, that no matter how personally relaxed or enthusiastic about immigration they happen to be, there is no future whatsoever in declaring the public to be wrong.
Such tactics can be effective at shoring up a robust intra-elite consensus; they are of no use whatsoever when the dam starts cracking. And start cracking it well and truly has.
