Becoming British: UK Citizenship Examined

By Thom Brooks

From Syrian asylum seekers to super-rich foreign investors, immigration is one of the most controversial issues facing Britain today. Politicians kick the subject from one election to the next with energetic but ineffectual promises to 'crack down', while newspaper editors plaster it across front pages.
But few know the truth behind the headlines; indeed, the almost daily changes to our complex immigration laws pile up so quickly that even the officials in charge struggle to keep up.
In this clear, concise guide, Thom Brooks, one of the UK's leading experts on British citizenship - and a newly initiated British citizen himself - deftly navigates the perennially thorny path, exploding myths and exposing absurdities along the way. Ranging from how to test for 'Britishness' to how to tackle EU 'free movement', Becoming British explores how UK immigration really works - and sparks a long-overdue debate about how it should work.
Combining expert analysis with a blistering critique of the failings of successive governments, this is the definitive guide to one of the most hotly disputed issues in the UK today. Wherever you stand on the immigration debate, Brooks's wryly observed account is the essential road map.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Release date: May 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785900150

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Citizenship matters. Only a country’s citizens can enjoy the full rights of their shared political membership. To be a citizen is to have the most fundamental rights – or, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt said, ‘a right to have rights’. The right to live in a state permanently, the right to vote and the right to run for elected office are a small handful of wide-ranging privileges that individuals have as citizens. But it is even more than that. Being a citizen is about belonging to a community.

It can be easy to overlook how important our citizenship is to us. Emily is a young woman living in London and building a successful career in the media industry. I asked her what being British meant to her and she said, ‘I’m afraid I take British citizenship very much for granted.’ Emily understood its significance and she is ‘hugely grateful’ for it. However, it is not something you merely think about; it is just something you are.

Her reply to my question is what most citizens born British say to me. Becoming British is something that just happens – and something we might not notice about ourselves. It’s an achievement of birth to British parents on native soil. No application, no tests and nothing more – and easy to take for granted. Emily’s path to becoming British is a simple one. A journey made by no more than showing up. Being British requires little effort for the great majority of British citizens.

Not everyone is this lucky. Tracy is a solicitor in the south-west and came to the UK from the United States. Tracy faced several hurdles in her path. She told me that British lawyers at her firm didn’t know the answers to the British citizenship test she was required to pass. Tracy thought some of the obstacles she confronted served no purpose other than to make the process of her becoming British look legitimate and it was ‘a relief to get it over with’.

Migrants like Tracy are part of a growing number of people who become British through naturalisation. But don’t let the name fool you – there’s little ‘natural’ about it. Naturalisation is a process where migrants are forced to jump through increasingly difficult hoops. These can change so quickly they challenge the most learned lawyer and politician. And the only thing growing as fast as the hurdles is the application costs. Naturalising is becoming British the hard way, where some of the rules may seem ‘unnatural’ and maybe a touch un-British as some migrants find they have more hurdles to jump than others to become fellow citizens.

Citizens are equals. But how they become citizens can vary enormously. The UK is made up of many citizens like Emily who are British from birth and a growing number like Tracy who had to pass several tests as a migrant. This means there can be no avoiding the significance of immigration, and different ideas about who should and who should not – or must not – be able to become a British citizen are central to any discussion.

British citizenship is no less controversial for the fact that defining what ‘Britishness’ is has proved so difficult. You need only turn on your telly or see tabloid headlines to confirm that how citizens are becoming British is a crucial issue of our time. Migration is about crossing territorial borders, but British citizenship is about crossing civic boundaries, recognising others as equals. This raises some fundamental questions about being British. What is Britishness? Can it be tested? Should new citizens integrate with current citizens? How important is knowing English? Does any of this matter?

This book explores the big questions the public often asks but which are rarely answered by politicians, their special advisors or anyone else. UK citizenship has undergone substantial changes, and a clear, up-to-date examination of what it involves, of who can become British and on what terms, is long overdue.

I explain the immigration problems that modern UK citizenship law and policy were meant to solve, what the major challenges are today and how they should be met. While immigration of both temporary and permanent residents receives widespread attention, much less time is devoted to the major increase in the number of British citizens and how this might be managed better. This book fills this crucial gap and redresses the balance.

I know about becoming British for a simple reason – I did it. I became British. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Like Tracy, I am also an immigrant to the UK. Originally from the US state of Connecticut, I spent two years in Ireland before moving to the UK in 2001. I’ve called Britain my home for fifteen years and became a UK citizen in 2011. I do not merely know how Britain’s complex immigration system and citizenship rules work; I experienced them first-hand from applicant to citizen. I know about becoming British because I became British – with a lot of paperwork and receipts to prove it.

A few words about the chapters that follow. Becoming British covers the main issues – from the background to Britishness and the citizenship test, to the EU, family life, asylum and much more. This book begins with the crucial background so often neglected concerning where we are today and how we got there. Chapter 1 looks at rising immigration to the United Kingdom, providing an overview for the growing numbers becoming British and the challenges successive governments have faced to manage access to citizenship. Chapter 2 examines the shift from subject to citizen that has revolutionised how becoming British works, with lasting – and surprising – effects as a once global power began to shrink. Chapter 3 considers the question of Britishness and the many frustrated attempts at defining what it is. These chapters set the scene for the rest of the book.

Next, the book reveals the facts behind the myths and misunderstandings. Chapter 4 discusses how to test for ‘Britishness’ and focuses on the UK’s citizenship test – which I liken to a bad pub quiz. Sample questions and answers are provided that will make you the envy of any dinner party or social gathering. Chapter 5 is about the English question, or, more exactly, the question of how much English new citizens are expected to know and why. Chapter 6 addresses the free movement myth regarding Britain’s membership of the EU, and how the UK could restrict the movement of EU nationals better if only the government knew how. Chapter 7 is about marriage and the right to family life as pathways to British citizenship. Chapter 8 concerns asylum seekers and refugees and their experience of becoming British. Chapter 9 considers the powers of the Home Secretary to end the citizenship of British nationals and deport them. The final, tenth chapter sets out my recommendations for how British citizenship can be improved and how we can begin the kind of national conversation we need urgently.

This book is informed throughout by the latest research, the current immigration rules and my observations through personal experiences. Immigration is a complex topic and the official guidance can change daily. But this doesn’t mean a book about it must be unreadable or outdated as soon as it is printed. I believe that British citizens deserve a clear guide that lets everyone see the challenges of British citizenship for what they are in a way most readers can understand – especially if they have not thought much about these issues before. This goes too for people thinking about becoming British: this book is for you both.

I have benefited enormously from speaking to people – hundreds of British citizens past, present and future – across the United Kingdom over the past decade. They come from all walks of life, a myriad of backgrounds. Their stories are messages of the hope, aspiration and belonging as well as the confusion, discrimination and alienation that citizenship in modern Britain means for everyday people. They say much about the Britain we want to be and how we want to get there. Unless otherwise stated, I have disguised the identities of people interviewed out of respect for their privacy. Many of their stories raise deep concerns about the problems current immigration policy brings to bear on real people. I am thankful to them for sharing these often painful stories with me so that they might get the attention of ministers and the wider public about what is actually happening in our country.

I am also very grateful to the ministers, elected MPs, peers and policy advisors who gave their time generously to share insights into key decisions and events that have shaped the evolution of current policy. They have helped broaden and deepen the discussion here by helping to flesh out the thinking behind many of the policies we have today. References for each chapter can be found in the ‘Further reading’ section at the end of the book, where supporting evidence for claims made can be found. Those wanting to look into the details should look there.

I began by saying citizenship matters. It does – citizenship is hugely important to everyone from the British citizen wanting to welcome new members to those in favour of tighter restrictions, as well as to those hoping to become British citizens in the future. It’s now time to start our journey to see why this is, how it all works and what we can do to improve the system – before it is beyond repair.

CHAPTER 1

IMMIGRATION RISING

It was like any other spring day in Rochdale. But a general election was on the horizon that morning in 2010, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown had come to Rochdale to speak to voters and help promote local Labour Party candidate Simon Danczuk. It was an ordinary day that became extraordinary for a chance encounter with a local grandmother named Gillian Duffy.

Gillian was selected by one of Brown’s aides to speak with the Prime Minister. The aim of his campaign team was to show Brown engaging with local citizens and win positive coverage in the media. But that’s not how things turned out. In front of the cameras, Gillian voiced her concerns about the economy, but it was what she said about immigrants – and how Brown reacted to what she told him – that made the headlines.

Gillian briefly mentioned her worry that immigration was too high. Brown replied by changing the subject of their conversation. He reminded her that the three big issues she had raised with him – education, the NHS and helping people – were his priorities, too. They parted with a handshake and a smile, but the laughs were soon over.

Brown hadn’t removed a microphone used for the cameras when he spoke with Gillian. Oops. As his chauffeur drove him away, taking him off camera, Brown’s voice remained audible and every word was recorded. ‘That was a disaster,’ Brown says, before criticising his aide for choosing Gillian. ‘She’s just a sort of bigoted woman.’ For many people, these seven words neatly summed up the problem: political elites were taking too little notice of important issues like immigration. To raise a worry was to be branded bigoted and racist.

Brown had his words played back to him soon afterwards during an interview with the radio host Jeremy Vine and was understandably quick to apologise for his comments. He promptly went back to Rochdale to apologise in person to Gillian – and to make clear that he understood her concerns about immigration. I’m sure he did after that second meeting. But the damage was done.

This was more than an interview that went badly wrong. It touched a nerve. The public had concerns about immigration that they dared not express for fear they would become demonised. Voice worries about immigration and others may wrongly suspect it is based on mere prejudice. Should anyone want to discuss this with their elected leaders, the conversation would be moved on to some other issue. Better to bury any talk of immigration concerns and avoid awkward moments than discuss the worries on people’s minds. Or so it went in 2010. Not much has changed since.

* * *

A year before sweeping to power as Britain’s first and, to date, only female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher said something that still resonates with many people:

If we went on as we are then, by the end of the century, there would be four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.

Swamped. Floods. Tsunami. Besieged. Marauding. And worse – you get the idea. It’s raining immigrants. A shower without end. This is the alarmist language that is used regularly to describe immigration. People who come to live in Britain are not seen as neighbours or potential citizens, but like hordes of locusts that are not merely different but dangerous, which must be curbed before they destroy everything in their path. Immigration is not an opportunity, but a threat – and it must be stopped.

In 2004, one in eleven people normally resident in the UK were born abroad. Only ten years later this had risen to one in eight. Over a quarter of all births in 2014 were to mothers born outside the country. The most common non-British countries of birth for UK residents are Poland, Pakistan and India. Between 2001 and 2011, migration accounted for 56 per cent of the population change in England and Wales. Britain has a population of about 64 million – and five million were born abroad. These are important demographic changes that some understandably find to be increasingly a problem.

It comes as no surprise that immigration is the number one issue of concern for voters today, overtaking the NHS and the economy. A recent poll run jointly by The Economist and Ipsos MORI concluded that ‘we have never seen concern about immigration this high’, and it shows no signs of letting up. Pensioners and the skilled working class are most strongly concerned, but far from alone. Worries about immigration outstrip concerns about schools, housing and terrorism combined. What the public want – or say they want – is less of it. Much less of it. And they don’t have much faith in politicians to deliver, either.

It’s not difficult to uncover statistics that fuel deep concerns about immigration by the public. The problem is knowing which numbers to count – and this is where the government is getting itself into trouble.

The government has responded to public fears over immigration by playing the numbers game, committing itself to reducing net migration to fewer than 100,000 people annually. Despite their best efforts, they are achieving the opposite result. Rather than falling, net migration has risen to 323,000 – only slightly off the record high of 336,000 reached in the year up to June 2015. The 100,000 target has more recently been downgraded to an ‘aspiration’, but it remains a goal despite the government’s inability to come close to it. I have spoken to several former ministers – including former Home Secretaries like Charles Clarke and Jacqui Smith – and have not met anyone who thinks a net migration cap is a satisfactory policy.

Net migration is a crude way to measure people leaving or coming to live in Britain, bringing together different things. Net migration is about outflows and inflows without regard to their composition. We count the total number of people leaving the country and contrast it with the total number coming in. Net migration is calculated by subtracting the roughly 294,000 people who left the country from the circa 617,000 who entered it. Together this gives us a net migration total of 323,000. That’s roughly the population of Coventry in one year.

The numbers certainly sound like a lot – although it amounts to about half of 1 per cent of the total UK population of 64 million people. But the story of net migration is about more than the numbers of people who come to Britain – it’s also about those who leave. In fact, it might surprise a lot of people to know that when it comes to immigrating, Britain does it best. A recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found Britain has a greater proportion of its citizens living abroad than any other European country. If high numbers of people leave each year, this can bring down net migration overall. British citizens leaving the country to work elsewhere may help the government get closer to its 100,000 net migration target.

The big problem for the government is that fewer people are choosing to leave the UK as its economy slowly improves. According to the Office for National Statistics, this slowdown is to blame for high net migration today. About 87,000 British citizens returned to the UK last year. Roughly half came for work-related reasons. Nearly 10 per cent came back for formal study. Net migration might appear to be a measure of non-British migrants, but it includes British citizens too, a fact which is rarely noticed. If you’re looking to assess the numbers of non-UK citizens, net migration isn’t it.

As one former immigration minister told me, net migration is not a target: ‘It’s a nonsense.’ Net migration figures can vary sharply not only in the numbers that come to the UK, but in the numbers that leave – whoever they might be. Net migration takes no notice of nationality. Each person counts the same whether from Britain, Europe or North Korea. Nor does it matter whether people have come to the UK for work, study or an extended visit.

Consider a few examples that show why net migration targets don’t work. If 300,000 people enter the UK, the government has failed its target – even if every one of them is a British citizen. Should 250,000 people want to leave the UK to find work and pay their taxes elsewhere, this would then satisfy the target and it would not matter whether everyone who left was British, French or Chinese. While you could have a target for managing immigrants coming to the UK, a net migration ‘target’ makes little sense when it can be met or missed almost entirely by chance. And it takes no notice of the potential harm to the economy or our society, either.

Michael Howard demonstrated this point when he was leading the Conservative Party during the 2005 election against Tony Blair. Howard stood by manifesto pledges to reduce immigration and to ensure cleaner hospitals, among other policies. But the obvious question, which caused enormous damage to his campaign, was simple: who is going to keep our hospitals clean if migrants are kept out?

Cutting migration has consequences. The Migration Advisory Committee is an independent group of five economists who advise the government. They found that one way to reduce net migration would be to set a salary threshold of £18,600 for anyone wanting to sponsor a family member coming to the UK who was not a European citizen. But the consequences are that these income hurdles can create new problems by hitting hardest people working in the public sector and others in less well-paid work – in addition to the likelihood that it would split families up. Most migrants to the UK come for work: 167,000 have a job offer in hand and another 104,000 come looking to find employment. About 31 per cent of migrants come to the UK to study and 14 per cent either accompany or join their family. These examples reveal a gap between what the public expects from reducing net migration and the reality of how the measurement is used – and that gap risks further undermining public trust in politicians to control immigration.

Dr Scott Blinder, the former director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, suggests that we should ‘mind the gap’ between popular perceptions about migrants and who they actually are. His research confirms that most people thought of migrants as asylum seekers rather than fellow British citizens or international university students – in fact, asylum seekers account for about 10 per cent of net migration, far fewer than the public believes. This gap between perception and reality is a problem for citizens and policy makers alike. Even the controversial Tory MP Enoch Powell, who described British immigration in the 1960s as ‘like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre’, believed that students ‘are not, and never have been, immigrants’.

It is difficult to fathom a modern government taking a harsher line on international students than a politician like Powell. But then again we live in interesting times when it comes to immigration. Clear thinking can be hard to find and in short supply.

I regularly give lectures and interviews at universities. I visited one university campus recently and spoke briefly to the porter at the security gate named Brian. He was a white British man who lived locally and appeared to be in his early sixties. Brian seemed curious to learn a bit more about this stranger with an American accent. He asked me about what kind of research I was working on at the moment. My reply was easy – immigration policy – and I explained that I was writing this book.

With a puzzled look on his face, Brian asked, ‘So do you know any immigrants?’ A long pause followed. He seemed genuine. Couldn’t he hear my voice, my clear New England accent? Somewhat stunned, I said, ‘Yes, I am one!’ ‘No,’ Brian replied promptly, ‘you are not an immigrant – you are an American.’

There’s a serious point in this story. I’m not the only person born in the US and living in Britain who has experienced similar treatment. My American friend Tracy, introduced earlier in this book, told me that often people would start sharing their very negative views about immigrants with her. Taxi drivers were notorious for this in her view, but work colleagues little better – and it would happen frequently, even casually. Tracy made a point of challenging this behaviour, and rightly so. She would remind them that – ahem! – she is an immigrant and hope this would at least temper the awful comments about immigrants she often heard. But this rarely worked. A common response was, ‘But you’re not that type of immigrant.’ Graham, another American who recently became a British citizen, told me that ‘people see us as less foreign than the French’. How right that is; it perfectly sums the American exceptionalism in the eyes of some British citizens.

Brian the porter would probably agree with this too. When I found myself having to convince him that Americans who live in the UK are immigrants, Brian replied with perfect sincerity, ‘Yes, but you look just like us.’ No doubt he had a specific idea in mind about what British citizens look like – probably referring more to my being white than my being bald.

It’s common for people to have flawed views about how many migrants there are in Britain and why they are here, such as believing most migrants are asylum seekers when they are actually a minority. It doesn’t mean that an immigration problem doesn’t exist. When Ed Miliband’s campaign team produced Labour-branded coffee mugs with the pledge ‘controls on immigration’ ahead of the 2015 election, it sparked angry criticisms from the left, who viewed it as reactionary, right wing-style campaigning.

But Miliband’s critics got this one wrong. Immigration controls are necessary. Recognising this fact does not make someone bigoted or racist. This is not to say that no one who supports immigration control harbours such views – there are plenty of people who think anyone British must ‘look just like us’. The issue is not that controls exist, because we must have them; the issue is their fairness and their purpose.

In his autobiography, former Prime Minister Tony Blair gets right what many get wrong: ‘When people in Britain used to say they were against immigration, a goodly proportion would really be against a particular type