First they were anomalies: the reports of European citizens legally living in the UK, but caught in some dystopian drama with the Home Office after the Brexit vote. Perhaps they were just administrative mix-ups, we might have reasoned: straightforward cases that ran into misinformed, computer-says-no immigration officials. Now the stories are becoming regular. We hear tales of Europeans – some of whom were even born in the UK and have lived here all their lives, or are married to British citizens and have children born in Britain – being forced to regularise their status, appealing to the Home Office for some stability and reassurance via naturalisation.
What they face is not a machinery that seeks to understand their plight or has regard to the sensitivities. Instead, they are confronted by a dysfunctional instrument made blunt and crude by historically inconsistent government policy on immigration – and that, since the EU referendum, has been rendered even more incomprehensible and inhumane by the lack of any coherent government plan for Brexit.
Not only is the Home Office understaffed and under-resourced as the result of public sector cuts, it is also under pressure to deliver whatever results the government needs to stand any chance of meeting its immigration targets. The result is that, for up to 3 million EU nationals worried by the political hiatus, seeking reassurance from the Home Office is like running towards a cliff to flee a predator.
Hitherto, the focus has been on non-EU citizens: on efforts to keep their numbers down both in terms of the right to remain and naturalisation. That has been behind the spasmodic witch-hunts of certain groups regardless of how much they contribute to the British economy. NHS doctors one day, overseas students the next – anyone who is above the radar and good for a headline. The guiding Home Office principle seems to be reject first, ask questions later, and in the meantime hope the applicant does not have the connections or resources to appeal. Immigration lawyers have told me that officials were at one point being incentivised, on the basis of how many applications they rejected, with Marks & Spencer vouchers.
But immigration targets and Brexit are a toxic mix that changes everything: how else to explain yesterday’s baldly expressed admission from the Home Office that it now sees EU citizens in Britain, previously exempt from having to prove residency rights, as “negotiating capital”?
The stories of how officials have already started to behave towards EU nationals speaks to a particular mindset, a bureaucracy infected perhaps by the same ill will, nastiness and recklessness that defined the referendum campaign.
But the Home Office in particular, and the immigration system in general, has long made decisions not on the basis of merit or reason, but as a way of filtering out as many applicants as possible – either via exhaustion of resources or impossibly high barriers. This is why EU citizens who have lived here for decades, and are now applying for UK citizenship but neglect to include their passports (not actually a requirement, but a handy excuse familiar to anyone who has dealt with the Home Office), are not only having their applications rejected, they’re being told to prepare to leave the UK, despite already being entitled to permanent residency.
One such applicant likened her treatment to a Monty Python sketch. That is true in terms of farce, but not levity. If the waiting or the rejections or the appeals don’t exhaust the anxious applicant, the costs involved in protecting themselves from the relentless machine surely will.
Nothing demonstrates this absurdity more than the case of Dom Wolf, born to German parents in London, who applied for a British passport after the Brexit vote and now has to take the UK citizenship test because officials say he cannot prove his mother was legally in the UK when she gave birth. His incredulity echoes that of many shunted into a newly perilous position. “Holding a British birth certificate and having had my parents live, work and raise four boys in the UK for over 42 years, I made the devastating assumption that this would be an easy process,” he said in a letter to the prime minister. “Oh boy was I wrong.”
At this point it is really tempting, for those born outside Europe, to say: welcome to our lives. If your worst-case scenario is a strongly worded letter that is later apologised for, or the inconvenience of having to take a test, don’t expect too much surprise from those of us who have long battled with this mighty bureaucracy.
But Brexit lays bare the brutal way in which decisions about peoples’ lives and families are taken, and how facts they thought immutable – like nationality or the holding of a passport – can be withdrawn by a sudden change in public mood and a reckless government cowering in whatever direction the winds of xenophobia are blowing. Already there are reports of EU citizens being questioned about their right to use the NHS, and concerns about poor and elderly people who may struggle to fortify themselves against whatever ultimate decision will be made about their status.
Brexit has revealed the unpreparedness of politicians, and these deficiencies yield great consequences for ordinary people who suffer when a bureaucracy turns brutal. It has also revealed the extent to which immigration law is damaged by populist thinking and underfunding. The hysterical view that Britain is a soft touch for migrants helped deliver the leave vote. The new plight of EU citizens is exposing the disjuncture between the immigration system we have, and the one we think we have.
