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
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