Lord Goldsmith QC Citizenship Review

Hi all-

I hadn't been planning on posting any longer, as I figured I'd exhausted every possible angle of my own immigration drama. However, I recently came across this high-profile review on citizenship being supervised by Lord Goldsmith. Basically he is laying the groundwork for Gordon Brown's revamping of the citizenship application process over the next few years.

I would highly suggest that you explore the website. Every month, a new publication is submitted by an academic or interested party on one aspect of the proposed changes. Many of the articles so far are rather abstract in scope, but they will nonetheless be the stuff of which future policy is made. So have a look. All the publications may be found at the following link from which you may explore the rest of the site:

http://www.justice.gov.uk/reviews/publications.htm

This is not a formal consultation in a vein similar to those issued by the Home Office. There are no formal questions to respond to. Nonetheless, you can submit feedback to the review committee. In fact, this is something that I would suggest should you be sufficiently moved to do so:

http://www.justice.gov.uk/reviews/contact.htm

I wrote a draft this morning of my first comments to the committee. Please let me know what you think, if you'd like. I was intending to review each of the individual publications in more detail and submit feedback to the committee as I do. But I just wanted to get a general statement written first before I bore down on more specific points.

So here is my first submission. Best wishes to all for a happy and productive 2008.

**********

Dear Sir or Madam,

I have been observing the citizenship review with great interest since it was first launched in October last year. But to be honest, I tend to follow such policy debates and announcements with rapt attention. Rather than having a strictly academic interest in it however, I'm curious about the process because it affects me directly. I'm a Canadian citizen who has been a resident in this country most recently since 2003. Since that time, I have come to distrust the rhetoric about how each new fee and requirement will ultimately lead to greater social cohesion and integration. Instead it has developed, at least in me, the opposite result.

My grandfather was English, and I now live less than a mile from where he grew up in South London. As a Commonwealth citizen with a UK-born grandparent, I am permitted under the current Immigration Rules to work in the UK without any restriction. However there is a time limit on my stay. When I first received a UK Ancestry visa in 1998, the rules stated that someone holding such an entry clearance would be eligible for Indefinite Leave to Remain ("ILR") after four years of continuous residency in this country. Whilst in hindsight now clearly a disadvantage, I interrupted my first stay to accept a position in Germany in 2001. I did return in 2003, but this time under a new application. Thus I effectively "reset" my clock for ILR.

In February 2005, the then Home Secretary Charles Clarke made an announcement that the immigration system was going to shift predominantly to a new "points-based" system. At that time I wrote to Mr Clarke though my MP, Tessa Jowell, and requested more information as to how this was going to affect the UK Ancestry route to settlement. In a June 2005 letter, Mr Clarke confirmed to me that the points-based system would have no bearing on the UK Ancestry route. He also explicitly told me that there were no plans to increase my qualification time for settlement and that I would be allowed to apply for ILR in July 2007.

Since then there have been a series of changes introduced by this Government that have had a costly and detrimental effect upon me. Firstly, and in contradiction to his earlier letter, the Home Secretary did in fact increase the qualifying period for settlement to five years from four for UK Ancestry and other "employment" visa holders in April 2006. This required me to spend an additional £335 to extend my visa for a further year in 2007, something that I had been promised in writing that I shouldn't have to do. Besides that cost, this extra year has required me to put off matriculating for a postgraduate course at the University College London in September 2007. Because I had not been awarded ILR as anticipated, I would have been subject to overseas fees of £16,000 for this course instead of the £4,000 that I had been budgeting for. As a result, I have had to defer a year until I satisfy the new five-year qualifying period for ILR in July 2008. Unfortunately however, I will soon be hit again by Home Office. The price for ILR has increased by 484% since 2003 to a cost of £750 for a postal application. And even then it doesn't stop. Fees for naturalisation have also increased by 244% to £655. Altogether this means that my (financial) path to citizenship in this country (assuming no further price rises) will cost nearly £2,000.

I haven't presented this litany of fees to complain about the costs of immigration. I'm not a scrounger. I never anticipated that this process would be free, and I was more than willing to pay my fair share to make this country, with which I share ancestral ties, my home. My irritation is that the process has been managed in a thoroughly cynical manner. On the one hand, this Government has been quite eager to stress that they are keen to develop social cohesion. They want to ensure that immigrants are integrated and that they develop "British values". Yet on the other hand, the Home Office engaged a patently economic approach that is more appropriate to a dispassionate business scenario. Employing market research to calculate the price elasticity of demand, they set their new fees at the highest possible level to maximise the potential revenue that they could extract from every single applicant. Not surprisingly, these maximum fees considerably exceed an application's actual administrative costs. For thousands of migrants like me who had already put down roots in this country, there was little that we could do. We couldn't very well just leave. We would have to pay to extend our visas for that additional year, and we would then have to pay to settle at a much higher cost.

My point is this: This Government cannot honestly state that they are committed to building a relationship with new citizens when it feels so blatantly arbitrary and punitive to even the legal migrant. I appreciate the values of community-building, group involvement and neighbourhood participation. I joined both the Metropolitan Police and a local park association as a volunteer for precisely those reasons. However, citizenship reviews such as this now ring hollow to me. I do appreciate the sentiment, but my own experience belies the reality that the Government's priority is revenue generation and political point-making first, social cohesion second. Not only have I been misled by the Home Office in terms of promises made and not delivered, but I have been subject to increasing fees and requirements that I'm powerless to do anything about. I'm sorry, but that doesn't feel like a relationship to me. It feels like a one-sided business arrangement. I'm an honest, ethical person with gainful employment, fluent English-language skills, excellent credit and a strong commitment to my community. I'm someone who I would have thought would be an ideal addition to this country. But I feel used. Gouged, manipulated and used. I fear that the most significant source of joy that I'll experience should I ever be awarded British citizenship will not be the thrill of joining the British nation. Rather it will likely be elation over finally being free of the Home Office's whims.

I must say that I feel a bit reticent in sending in this e-mail to the review committee. On the one hand, I'm doubtful as to whether or not this e-mail will attract any attention, let alone have an actual effect. But more importantly, I'm sincerely afraid of the Home Office. I don't know what more this Government will ask of me along this path to citizenship. Additional waiting periods? Conditional, probational citizenship? That all puts me gravely ill at ease. But to be honest, I also worry that by daring to raise my voice to those in power, I will effectively be blacklisted from successfully completing this journey.

So much in politics hearkens back to the truism of "if you want to gauge the future, just look at the record". It is for this reason that I'm not looking forward to the outcomes of this review nor to how it will be implemented upon people like me. My experience has just been too fraught, too negative. And it's funny because I'm an educated, liberal-minded, native English-speaking migrant who simply returned to the birthplace of his forefathers. I can't imagine what the process must be like for someone who may be less advantaged than I am. I share this country's goal of building a safe, just and tolerant society. But at some point I have to wonder whether or not it has or will come at too great a cost to myself.

Yours sincerely,

XXX

RobinLondon,

I've to say your comments clearly and truly reflects every legal, honest, hard working and law abiding immigrant's fear, anxiety and helplesness towards home office's insane and unjust behaviour towards the legal immigrants society at large.
And as you have already mentioned, the real cause of concern and frustration is that no matter how much anyone affected by this inhuman conduct of the Home Office raises his/her voice of protest, Home Office is for sure going to turn a deaf ear and blind eye to all the grievances and suffering that it has enforced on a large proportion of legal immigrants.
To any sensible and straight thinking person it should be very clear by now that the current Government's policy towards immigrants is very much a money making gimmick. The government simply wants to utilise the brains of young and talented immigrants, rip them off as much as posible of their hard earned money in the form of taxes, NI, ludicrously increased fees for visa extensions and ILR (for a few of them who are fortunate enough to reach that stage) and then when it comes to delivering on the promises made, the Home Office shamelessly kicks out the hard working and innocent class of immigrants.

This to me is sheer modern time slavery imposed by the so called progressive and coherent modern britain.

Moreover, when the fees were first introduced,

The Minister for Citizenship and Immigration (Beverley Hughes) wrote:The fees are set in accordance with Treasury rules to cover the full administrative costs and no more.

Nice letter, and thank you for the links.

I, too, have wondered what sort of 'British' values migrants are meant to adopt from a country whose immigration agency is so committed to cost-recovery and, as you've highlighted, revenue and profit maximisation, even as service delivery and policy consistency remain spotty. Alice Miles in The Times recently wrote about how Gatwick's dirty loos give a poor first impression of Britain; the same might be said of the immigration process, although the adverse impression would likely be confirmed on multiple occasions for years thereafter, lest migrants have any doubt that the state of immigration policy and service-delivery is indeed on a par with the state of Gatwick's loos.

I understand that British citizenship is meant to be something to be valued, a privilege, but the path to that end seems more likely to engender resentment and, more detrimentally, a sense that British citizenship is little more than a good that is to be purchased with one's time and effort and paid for on an installment plan with an extortionate rate of interest (at current prices, the path to naturalisation for an HSMP migrant tops £2500). If this were represented in a MasterCard commercial, after all the expense and headache, what comes to be priceless at the end would not be the British citizenship, but rather the peace of mind, convenience, and sense of achievement from having navigated through a labyrinthine and vaguely capricious process. Intrinisically, those signify neither pride in the British citizenship itself nor affectionate internalisation of so-called 'British values' (however defined).

What I think is more crucially problematic is that the implicitly economic model that has been adopted presumes that all the benefit or utility of migration accrues to migrants, when the reality is that both sides derive considerable benefit from migration, as the Government's own recent report has confirmed. But if the Government's actions and policies give migrants the distinct impression that they are considered inferior partners, scroungeing off Britain's largesse, merely tolerated on great sufferance, soft targets justifiably subject to political and bureaucratic whim, is it any wonder that social cohesion is lacking ? Should one be surprised if migrants concentrate on their own profit-maximisation, and push integration and 'contribution to UK society' far down the priority list, except where it might serve their own purposes ? How unreasonable is it, then, for migrants to demand accountability and ask what value they get for the fees they pay ? More broadly, however, while I fully recognise that immigration has created distortions in society and the economy, I don't see that the current approach has done much to foster any social cohesion or to smooth the distribution of immigration-related externalities (positive and negative) across the whole of society. It is painfully difficult to see how so-called values are meant to be superimposed onto a model that is fundamentally economic in nature.

Ultimately, the rhetoric of citizenship must correspond to the functional reality of the nation's interactions with its immigrants. Raising costs and changing rules and goalposts (cf the increased residency requirement for ILR, and the failure to include grandfather clauses for pre-Nov06 HSMP migrants) contribute to the perception that citizenship is merely a market transaction not entirely governed by basic notions of good faith and fair play. If migrants are meant to think that citizenship embodies such values as cost-recovery, monopoly price-fixing, arbitrariness, extortion of funds from those with limited protections, and economic Darwinism (all currently shaping the path to that citizenship) so be it. But I suspect that the term 'British values' is not meant to be a slur.

In a country so deeply shaped by its long history, Lord Goldsmith's review should no doubt recognise that, on the level of the individual, the meaning of naturalisation is shaped as much by migrants' own personal historical experience with their adopted country (not least with its immigration agency, on their path to settlement and citizenship) as it is by the Government's dictats as to what that citizenship is meant to signify. The review can hardly be meaningful if it is merely a citizenship fig-leaf, decorated with a range of imagined values, being used to cover a multitude of sins inherent in the broader immigration framework. At the rate the Government are going, they are creating a whole class of articulate and/or embittered cynics who will no doubt, as newly naturalised stakeholders, have a few caustic things to say at the next election. I, for one, would ask why 'good faith' and 'fair play' were dropped from the Government's working list of 'British values'.

AG

[sorry, I deleted an earlier version of this soon after I posted it, thinking my comments untoward - I've reconsidered, but my apologies in advance if they are]

Wow, RobinLondon and Gordon - well put! I hope you will send this letter to the authorities because I am not sure how many people aware of what is happening. I find it astonishing that the government will not even acknowledge a report by their own joint committee on Human Rights. There seems to be absolutely no checks and balances when it comes to immigration law. The Home Office can keep changing rules in an arbitrary way and there is nothing anyone can do about it. It is absolutely impossible to settle into society and concentrate on cohesion when you have sword hanging over your head: What rule will they change next? Will you be allowed to stay?

I am one of those affected by the HSMP changes and will have to leave the country. My "journey to settlement" has been the most stressful time of my life and yet I was prepared to put up with whatever was thrown my way, only to end up in a position where I now have to leave and try to pick up the pieces. I can't begin to express how sad I am, not only that I have to go, but also that my firm belief in the underlying fairness of British society has been destroyed.