Settlement and citizenship in Labour's white paper

The proposals will make it harder, not easier, for migrants to integrate, with negative consequences for productivity, growth and the public purse

Photo by Jay Mullings on Unsplash

Ahead of Yvette Cooper’s evidence session at the Home Affairs Committee tomorrow (Tuesday 3 June) I thought I’d take a look at a particular aspect of Labour’s white paper on the future of the immigration system. There’s a lot we don’t know about the proposals. And what we do know looks pretty bad for social cohesion and economic growth.

This is based on a talk I prepared for a Legal Action Group conference a couple of weeks ago. My write up is a bit rushed as (a) I was away last week and (b) I’ve been struggling to write anything at all recently. So please forgive me if there are even worse typos etc than normal.

Also, if you are a Free Movement member (or become one before Wednesday!) then Jo Hunt and I are running a free one hour webinar on the white paper this Wednesday at 11am, for which this post is part of my preparation…

Earned settlement

What are the proposals?

The white paper starts by stating that settlement is necessary to be a citizen, that it brings lifelong benefits and that it is an important step in integrating and contributing to local communities and the wider country. So far, so uncontroversial. That’s not quite the framing I’d choose but it is unobjectionable.

The white paper then goes on to note a substantial recent increase in settlement, with more to come over future years. This is the inevitable result of substantial increases in inward migration since Brexit.

Interestingly, only 18% of work visa holders had settlement after five years compared to 75% of family visa holders. The white paper doesn’t say this, but that 18% is likely to change because a lot of previous work visas were intra-company transfers, which did not lead to settlement. That is not true of more recent post-Brexit work visa holders.

We are told that settlement is “a privilege not a right” and that the current criteria are not adequate. Those criteria are basically:

• Spend five years in UK (or ten years sometimes)

• Pass the knowledge of life in UK test

• Good behaviour

In future, “individuals should earn their right to privileged immigration status in the UK through the long-term contribution they bring to our country.” In practice, this means:

• A standard qualifying period for citizenship of 10 years for those on work visas

• An opportunity to reduce the qualifying period based on “contributions to the UK economy and society”.

Importantly, the white paper states (paragraph 265) that the five year settlement period will stay as it is for those on family routes.

There will also be a new bereaved parent route enabling immediate settlement where a parent’s child dies and better pathways for children who turn 18 and find they do not have status, including care leavers.

Analysis

Anti-integration

The white paper emphasises the importance of integration but proposes to make it very considerably harder to integrate in two ways. Firstly, it will take twice as long as before. Secondly, it will impose huge financial costs on migrants.

A time-limited immigration status is off-putting to employers and landlords. When an employer or landlord conducts the required immigration checks on the central Home Office database, they will be informed when the migrant’s permission to be in the UK expires. The employer or landlord has no real way of knowing whether the person’s permission will be renewed or not. From their perspective, there is clearly some level of risk that the person’s permission will not be renewed. So it is better to employ, train, invest in or rent to someone else, basically.

The huge financial cost comes from the Home Office application fees combined with the cost of legal help with making applications that could be simple but in reality are complex and very high-stakes.

Both of these factors make the lives of migrants and their families harder and very different to those in the society around them.

The white paper therefore fails on its own terms. It will make integration harder, not better. Once migrants finally do qualify for settlement, the prolonged period of temporary status and financial handicap compared to their peers will likely cause a permanent drag on their social and economic prospects and therefore on the wider economy.

And there will also be other impacts which exacerbate this issue.

Increased exploitation and reduced productivity

A migrant on a skilled worker visa is on what we call a tied visa. The migrant’s visa — and therefore the migrant — is “tied” to the employer, meaning the migrant cannot change employer nor even change job for the employer. If the migrant is sacked or made redundant, they lose their visa as well as their job.

That is a lot of power for an employer to hold.

And ten years is a LONG time to be tied to a specific job for a specific employer. Side effects include limiting the migrant worker’s earnings (because being able to move job and employer obviously increases one’s earning potential) and increasing the risks of hard or soft exploitation.

It is remarkable that a Labour government proposes measures which harm workers’ rights and increase the risks of worker exploitation.

There are some hints earlier in the white paper, at paragraph 176, that skilled workers might have enhanced rights to change between licensed employers. This would be a small step forward set against a huge leap backwards. It noticeably only refers to employers with sponsor licenses, which would sharply limit the range of employers for which a migrant could potentially work. Particularly as it seems likely the pool of licensed employers will shrink quite drastically with all these reforms.

If the government really is set on this ten year period, which seems likely, the least they could do is break it into two five year periods. The first five years would, as now, be a sponsored period with a tied visa. The second five years would be unsponsored, with the migrant free to work for any employer before becoming eligible for settlement after 10 years in total.

Settlement criteria

When applying for settlement at the 10 year point of this new regime, what will the default criteria be? Will the migrant need to show a salary level at that point? Or just that they have not been and will not be a charge on public funds or something like that, as for UK ancestry visa?

Meanwhile, the route to shortening of qualifying period is a logistical nightmare as well as being objectionable in principle. What measure will be adopted of “contributions to the UK economy and society”? It is hard to see how objective and workable criteria could be drawn up. For example, if volunteering will help accelerate settlement, must it be for a charity or can it also be for a non-charity? What proof will be accepted? What investigation will be conducted into whether the required number of hours was really volunteered? The issues with English language testing show the potential for problems with these sorts of measures.

Ironically, the white paper elsewhere laments the work officials have to put into interpreting family immigration rules and applications:

“…the system is not working as intended; it is operationally costly, inefficient and too open to abuse.” (Para 146)

Judging whether early settlement has been “earned” may well end up being a lot worse than that.

Finally, imagine being a highly skilled migrant and being faced with the prospect of making a very expensive application against unclear criteria with an apparently degree of unpredictability. It’s not worth it. This sort of stuff sounds great to a certain type of person in a government policy document but it is not going to have the (apparently) intended impact of accelerating or improving integration for some migrants.

Reducing the benefits bill

Jonathan Thomas of the Social Market Foundation has written an interesting blog post on the policy background to the white paper. He argues that the proposals on lengthening the qualifying period for settlement (and citizenship) are driven by a desire to reduce the benefits bill. This is based on the assumption that migrants from certain backgrounds represent a net cost to the taxpayer over the course of their lifetimes. The assumption apparently derives from a single study from the Netherlands published in 2020.

I suspect Jonathan is right. But that’s not to say the research or the proposals are right.

The Netherlands and the UK are not the same; the UK may well be more effective in integrating migrants. The research is contested in any event; home-grown figures show that on average migrants make a positive lifetime contribution. And as far as many of us are concerned the whole premise is wrong anyway. Admission of skilled, necessary workers for relatively low paid employment is not a bad thing of itself. A lot depends on how one judges “skilled” and “necessary”, though.

The problem with the white paper proposals is that they will not reduce immigration but they will make it harder for migrants to make a positive lifetime contribution. By increasing their precarity, imposing massive financial penalties and preventing career progression, the proposals would harm productivity, inhibit growth and potentially have the opposite intended effect on the public purse.

Earned citizenship

Settlement is one of the gateways to citizenship under the British Nationality Act 1981. Residence for at least one year free from any “restriction on the period for which he might remain in the United Kingdom” is one of the mandatory criteria for naturalisation.

What are the proposals?

There is a separate section to the white paper on earned citizenship. It is not clear whether this is really additional to or in parallel with the earned settlement proposals.

There seem to be four strands to the proposals.

Firstly, it is suggested that citizenship rules should in future be more exclusionary of those deemed to have behaved badly:

“We do not want to offer citizenship and the life-long benefits it brings to those who have circumvented our rules or those who have not demonstrated that they have contributed to the UK”

Secondly, citizenship will take longer to get. The white paper says “we will expand the standard qualifying period” but also offer shorter route for those “with greater contributions”.

Thirdly, the life in the UK test and how it operates will be refreshed. This isn’t the sort of thing that lawyers like me get very excited about but it is important for every single person who naturalises, given they have to learn the very flawed materials in the set text and pass a test based on those materials.

Fourthly, the white paper states the government is going to “consider” reducing financial barriers for young adults who have lived here through their childhood.

Analysis

It is not clear whether the proposed longer qualifying period for citizenship is additional to or the same as the proposed longer period for settlement. Could it be that the government is proposing to extend the one year period of holding settlement before a person qualifies to apply for naturalisation?

The same question applies to the potential shortening of the period based on contributions.

If either of these is so, the government is going to need primary legislation. It is easy for the government to change the criteria on qualifying for settlement because these are set out in the immigration rules, which the Home Secretary can change at will. The criteria for naturalisation as a British citizen are set out in the British Nationality Act 1981 and cannot be changed without primary legislation.

The whole idea of “earned citizenship” derives from the ill-fated and ill-considered Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009. This legislation would have introduced significant changes to naturalisation criteria. It was never brought into effect because the criteria were a complete nightmare and the Labour government ran out of time to come with a way to make it work before the 2010 election. The incoming Conservative government announced the legislation would never be implemented and eventually deleted it from the statute book.

Some bad ideas never really die, it seems.

The fundamental flaw in the whole concept is that everyone qualifies for settlement or citizenship in the end anyway. Postponing the inevitable harms integration, it does not help it. It imposes what are likely to be lifetime costs on those affected, for the reasons explored earlier.

And there is no real world policy “gain” or benefit. None of these measures will reduce immigration or the numbers of new citizens. It might change the profile of people willing to come to the UK, though.

Imagine you are a highly skilled and highly qualified person in, say, France, Nigeria or India. Your skills and qualifications are much sought after by a range of countries. Perhaps you are a particularly well-qualified AI researcher, biosciences researcher, doctor, nurse, engineer. You can choose which country to move to. Why would you choose the UK over another country if the terms of entry and residence are so unattractive?

This does not mean no-one will want to come. It just rules out the well-informed, highest-ranked migrants for whom there is most international competition. Others will no doubt want to come anyway because life in the UK, despite the poorer terms of admission, is still a clear material improvement on life in their home country.

But when they come, they and their families will be financially, socially and economically handicapped compared to their resident peers. And then they will become citizens in due course anyway.

What the hell is the point of that?