On Monday, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood unveiled a raft of yet more anti-migrant measures, as this Government is intent on appeasing Reform and the far-right. What has followed are racist assumptions hidden behind the excuse of a racialised Home Secretary – again – making migrants, including people seeking asylum and refugees, more precarious through appeals to her family’s own migration journey.
Some of these changes relate to proposals under the Immigration White Paper (IWP), with updates to the Government’s vision of ‘earned settlement’ announced today, with the same aim of making migrants more precarious by drastically limiting access to settlement.
It is important to note that these are proposals, meaning they are not yet law.
What are the proposed changes?
These reforms are modelled on the Danish asylum system, which is incredibly harsh and restricts people’s rights, making migrants more precarious. While the Government has been using the phrase ‘illegal immigrants’, they are primarily referring to people who enter the UK without the required documentation in order to claim asylum. The changes to settlement develop on proposals in the IWP.
Asylum
The main headline from the proposals is making asylum temporary. The Government has proposed that people who are granted asylum have their refugee status reviewed every two and a half years, allowing the Government to deport them once they have judged their country of origin to be “safe”. Additionally, refugees will have to wait twenty years to qualify for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), quadrupling the current qualifying period of five years and doubling the proposal of ten years for other migrant groups as part of the IWP changes.
Together with the ban on immediate family reunification for refugees, these measures seek to restrict the right to meaningful asylum and make some of the most at risk migrants even more precarious.
There has also been reporting that the UK will follow the controversial Danish “jewellery law”, where any valuables retained by people seeking asylum are taken by the State to contribute towards costs of supporting them. The Government has used such a tiny minority of examples of people seeking asylum having a car or an expensive watch to demonise all people seeking asylum, echoing portrayals from the far-right that these people are all living lavish lifestyles. It is a conscious choice from the Home Secretary to echo this.
The Government will be aware of the long, dangerous and expensive journeys that many people unable to get a visa take to get to the UK to seek safety. In measures to target so-called ‘organised immigration crime’, the Government acknowledges that people are often forced to pay significant sums of money to intermediaries in order to get to the UK. The suggestion, the suggestion, therefore, that anyone is carrying jewellery that doesn’t have a primarily sentimental value on these journeys is ridiculous.
Settlement
Today, further changes to settlement (Indefinite Leave to Remain, or ILR) were announced, developing on the concept of “earned settlement” laid out as part of the IWP. These develop on Government plans to double baseline qualifying period for settlement to ten years, and make it conditional on:
- Not receiving benefits
- Paying National Insurance contributions, which is reliant on earning a certain amount of money
- Having a clear criminal record
- Speaking a higher level of English
- Volunteering in the community
There are a number of factors that can reduce or extend the qualifying period for ILR:
- Speaking English to a degree level (as opposed to an A-level standard) would put someone on a nine-year qualifying path
- Those on the higher tax rate would qualify after five years, while those on the top rate would after three years
- Those working in public service would qualify after five years
- People who volunteer in their communities could qualify after five to seven years
- People who have claimed benefits for under twelve months would qualify after fifteen years, while those who have claimed for over twelve months will have to wait twenty years
- People who arrived in the UK by a criminalised route, without immigration documentation will only qualify after thirty years
- Recognised refugees will wait twenty years to qualify
- Those who go transition into a work or study visa will be able to qualify earlier
- Those who are able to arrive under a “safe and legal” route will qualify after ten years
These above changes will all be subject to consultation. Partners of British citizens will not be subject to changes, nor will overseas British citizens in Hong Kong, remaining at five years residence to qualify for settlement. These changes will not be subject to consultation.
People who migrated as part of the so-called “Boriswave” of migration (low-paid workers on Health and Care visas and their dependents) will also be subject to more stringent checks after a fifteen-year qualifying period. Changes to settlement, when approved, will be applied retrospectively, meaning people who have already been granted refugee status will still be subject to them.
The ILR changes will impact refugees in particular, as many rely to some degree on benefits, council-assisted housing, and have low levels of English language ability when they arrive in the UK. They are also largely forced into undertaking criminalised migration routes to the UK, as a result of the extremely limited, nationality-based so-called “safe” routes, as well as by the Government revoking visa exemptions from certain nationalities, where there is an uptick in people needing to seek asylum. These settlement changes, alongside the suspension of refugee family reunion earlier in the year, are all moves to keep refugees more precarious, punishing them for the audacity to seek safety.
Human rights
The expansion of migrant precarity is amplified by restricting the application of human rights protections under Articles 8 and 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Modern Slavery Act. This was another change mentioned in the IWP, as the Government alleged that too many human rights-based challenges to immigration rules were taking place, with little legal reasoning other than to frustrate the courts.
The number of successful challenges, however, should indicate that the Government is acting in a way contravenous to international and domestic law when it comes to migrants. It is troubling, although not unexpected, that the route taken is now to restrict what rights can be invoked.
Additionally, restrictions on the Modern Slavery Act go counter to a key part of the Government’s justification for record number of immigration raids – countering exploitation. This exposes what has always been known about immigration, that they further harm against migrants and migratised communities, rather than genuinely protecting people.
On top of these rollbacks on rights, the Government also wants to reduce the ability for people seeking asylum to appeal negative decisions. The proposal is for people to only be allowed a single appeal. If they’re not successful, they will then be deported.
In efforts from successive governments to reduce the backlog of asylum decisions, fewer positive decisions have been made (76% in 2022 to 47% in 2024) and decision quality has gone down, which has resulted in a significant increase in appeals. The difficulties people have with accessing legal representation exacerbates the risk to people in the asylum system.
Visas and fast-track deportations
The final proposals relate to visas, with visas to be denied from countries if their governments don’t improve co-operation on deporting undocumented migrants. The current targets of this are Angola, Namibia and DR Congo, the latter of which is particularly concerning given the violence from militias that is causing people to flee.
The Government is also seeking to fast-track deportations of people deemed to be non-citizens convicted of a crime, and cases with little prospect of success through the appeals system.
Altogether, the Government is targeting migrants who it sees as disposable and least palatable, particularly by framing people seeking safety as “illegal immigrants”.
What is the Government saying?
It is wrong to say that migrants without the right documents are “dividing communities” – racism, stoked by this Government, is. These policies are so clearly an appeal to the far-right that Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the Home Secretary “sounds like a Reform supporter”. Tommy Robinson even declared a victory for “patriots” at getting the Labour Government to shift so far rightward.
The Government is targeting two main groups of people: those who enter the UK without the required immigration documentation, the vast majority of the time doing so to claim asylum, and those who previously had these documents but lost them. To make people seeking safety significantly more precarious is unconscionable, particularly when this Government is engaged in supporting many of the conditions that push people to move without documentation, such as revoking visa-free status from a country where more people are claiming asylum.
Secondly, the Government is pushing more people to lose their status as a result of their policies. Expensive fees for visa renewal and the Immigration Health Surcharge leave people unable to afford to retain their immigration status. EVisa mistakes and digital exclusion can mean that people lose proof of their immigration status and become undocumented. The Government has repeatedly ignored how easy it is for people to lose their status and become criminalised, including as a result of their own policies.
The Government has repeatedly used language of safeguarding when justifying even more harmful actions against migrants. Before they said that increased immigration raids are essential to protecting exploited workers, while retaining the sponsorship system as a form of state-sanctioned slavery and now proposing restrictions to the Modern Slavery Act. Now, they couch the violence of removing key protections for people seeking asylum in compassion, linking basic rights to a ‘pull factor’ for ‘people-smuggling’, all the while ignoring why people are forced to use intermediaries.
For a Prime Minister who was a human rights lawyer, the stripping back of human rights protections is laughable. For the Home Secretary to rely on her race and her family’s history of migration to excuse the racism in her rhetoric and proposals is outrageous and offensive.
In 2018, Mahmood spoke in a debate about the Windrush Scandal, describing the Hostile Environment as having a core belief that racialised people cannot be British citizens, and instead are seen as migrants without status, leading it to target all People of Colour in Britain. She spoke of the lack of legal aid provision for people seeking to regularise their status and the need for humanity and compassion to be at the heart of the immigration system. How, then, can she proceed now with policies that speak to the exact opposite of this?
Our communities are not made safer by making migrants more vulnerable, whether that be from constant reviewing of the status of people seeking asylum, restricting Modern Slavery Act protections, or by the highest level of immigration raids in British history.
While the Government may wish to blame “dark forces” who are making people angry about immigration and people arriving in small boats who ‘strain…our wider social contract’, really it’s them. Through the changes to the good citizenship guidance, the IWP, further criminalisation of people seeking asylum through the Border Security Bill, and increasing the glorifying raids and deportations, the Government has targeted migrants relentlessly. They’ve taken every opportunity to other, exclude and vilify migrants, all the while providing cover for racist attacks on our streets. It’s not migrants who divide our communities, it’s government-sanctioned racism.