Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Josquius]

Debatable we are at the liberal end. Maybe in the middle I'd say. Spain is easier I know for sure.
 I think Belgium tightened theirs up some years ago as they were the old football manager cheat.
A few others from what I gather are easier than Britain. The costs in the UK are very high and pretty sure 5 years is fairly common whilst we demand 6.

I don't think it's too big of a pull factor anyway.
There's a huge amount of ignorance about the system here. Lots of belief if a kid is born in Britain they're automatically British thus having a kid is a way to quickly gain permanent right to stay.

[The Brain]

Caerphilly Castle is lovely.

[Sheilbh]

What you have on both sides of the ocean is a engineered policy failure.

The underlying fundamentals are declining working age populations in the OECD world and mounting shortages in key areas of the labor market.  AI isn't going to pick strawberries or tend lawns or fill the construction trades or help care for grandma.

All the OECD countries are going to need a good deal more legal immigration if they want to keep their economies running in an orderly way.  We are seeing this in the US where the Trumpers are making quiet compromises on farm and hospitality labor. 

The legislatures aren't passing laws to allow the necessary expanded immigration in a rational controlled way, because of the nativist veto.  But the powerful push-pull forces remain, so people are going to come, proper documented or no.  Hence the resort to extra-legal measures.

In the US at least, I fear that the way this plays out is the economy tips over into severe recession once the AI bubble bursts, exposing the weak fundamentals underneath.  Maybe at that point the political cycle tips back left and coercive measures go away, but at that point immigration is controlled because the push-pull dynamic isn't there anymore. 

In Europe harder to say because different political and economic factors for each country.  But in much of Europe the demographic decline is even more severe.

I'm not sure that's the case in the UK.

I've mentioned it before but the immigration system was significantly liberalised under Johnson in 2020. They lowered the skills and salary thresholds, with even lower thresholds for shortage occupations or migrants with certain academic backgrounds (and no thresholds at all for the NHS or education sector). That government also got rid of any quotas/caps and removed all resident labour market tests. Lawful migration was significantly expanded.

Jonathan Portes an economist who is broadly supportive of these changes (and not an keen on either Brexit or Johnson) has estimated that approximately about half of all full-time jobs could qualify for a visa. This is a significant increase - again his estimate is probably a doubling compared to the previous system. Comparing immigration systems is difficult but his analysis is that it is "considerably more liberal with respect to non-European migrants than that of most EU member states" in particular because they normally have higher skill or salary thresholds and often have resident labour market tests.

Obviously at the same time Brexit happened, so again in his description: "it rebalances the system from one which was essentially laissez-faire for Europeans, while quite restrictionist for non-Europeans, to a uniform system that, on paper at least, has relatively simple and transparent criteria, and covers up to half the UK labour market."

The changes happened in 2020, but so did covid. So the impact of those changes were delayed until 2022 and there was a lot of exceptional covid migration, as well as the Ukrainian and Afghan settlement schemes and the Hong Kong route. But that liberalisation has had an impact:


While there are those exceptional aspects in those numbers, the overwhelming majority are actually a big increase in economic migrants through the expanded lawful routes. As Jos says costs are high in international comparisons but the system itself is fairly open.

Rates are falling - in part because those temporary factors (particularly covid and Ukraine scheme) stabilised. But also Sunak started tightening Johnson-era rules, Starmer is now tightening them further. I don't think that level of 1,000,000 net migration per year is sustainable (especially in a country that builds 150,000 homes a year and is contemplating water rationing because we've not built a reservoir in 30+ years).

But I think there is actually support or a higher level of migration than in the 2010s or 2000s. However it is hugely undermined by the very visible lack of control of the border presented by images of people getting off boats landing on beaches along the south coast. I also think more long term that if we're having net migration of higher than say 300,000 - then we probably need to increase house-building significantly from 150k per year, unless we're assuming a large proportion of migrants will enter into throuples.

We need the other infrastructure too.

But I agree I think how it works in Europe does vary by country but there are common threads in the politics. And I actually think it gets to one of the challenges for the EU which is the common border/Schengen area - I think that is coming under increasing pressure. This is only anecdotal but in the last year I've crossed into Germany by train twice (from France and Poland) in both cases the train was delayed for almost an hour as we had to stop at the first town after the Germany border while police checked the passports/travel documents of everyone on the train. That is new in recent years. At the same time Frontex is the fastest growing bit of the EU (and the first uniformed service at a European level) and there are challenges for the border countries - so I think there is an inherent tension of various national immigration and citizenship policies, with a European citizenship and common border.

Debatable we are at the liberal end. Maybe in the middle I'd say. Spain is easier I know for sure.
 I think Belgium tightened theirs up some years ago as they were the old football manager cheat.
A few others from what I gather are easier than Britain. The costs in the UK are very high and pretty sure 5 years is fairly common whilst we demand 6.

All of what I'm saying here is about standard settled in a country and acquiring citizenship via naturalistion. There are lots of exceptions and easier routes (including in the UK) for if you marry or have partner or child with citizenship, lots of European countries also have passports by descent which the UK doesn't really do (my understanding is that the countries with the most open rules for citizenship by descent tend to be those who experienced mass emigration in the 19th and 20th century like Ireland and Italy, which makes sense).

Spain is not more liberal it requires ten years of residence which is at the top end of Europe.

We are five years of permanent residence, which is as low  as anyone else in Europe (France, Portugal, Bulgaria, Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium - and, for now, Germany but Scholz introduced that and I understand Merz is now returning it to the previous system). The only country with a more open system is Malta where you can acquire citizenship after just one year and for a small donation of one million Euros - but I think the CJEU has ruled that is illegal and basically selling citizenship (which it is). Aside from that the rules for most of those countries are broadly pretty similar - some have tests on assimilation (we don't), some have language tests (we do), some have some form of test on "living in x country" (we do). I think we're closest to France.

And while our immigration fees are high by international comparisons, the citizenship stuff actually isn't. So all told I think the test and administrative process (including the ceremony) is around £1,800 - that's not a million miles from France which is about €1,500 for administration and the appropriate tests.

I think all of that is reflected by the fact that the UK grants new citizenship to more people than any other European country.

I don't think it's too big of a pull factor anyway.
There's a huge amount of ignorance about the system here. Lots of belief if a kid is born in Britain they're automatically British thus having a kid is a way to quickly gain permanent right to stay.

Yeah the rules on this have changed a lot over the years. Although I'd flag that right to abode and citizenship aren't necessarily the same thing. A child may have the right to abode in the UK but not citizenship automatically (I think it's normally 5 years) - and there's a lot of case law on this that is pretty favourable to acquiring a permanent right to stay if there's any children (this is often the source of cases bigged up by Home Secretaries and tabloids - I'm 90% sure Theresa May's story of someone's deportation being blocked by the courts because they had a pet cat was an Article 8 right to family life case where the court cited the pet cat as an indicative factor of someone's settled family life).

Kemi Badenoch is an example of the confusion because of the changes over the years - she was born in the UK when we did have birthright citizenship but then moved to Nigeria as a baby and only returned to the UK as a teenager as the family were apparently not aware that she had British citizenship until they investigated it as the economic and political situation in Nigeria went south.

[garbon]

Minor quibble but it is 5 years of permanent residence to get ILR. Unless you have a special dispensation such as a British partner, you then need to wait a full year after getting that status to become a citizen. So I'd say Jos's 6 years is accurate.

After fees for visas (including the ever increasing NHS surcharge) and ILR, one has paid a pretty penny. Feels slightly odd to set those aside when looking at the overall cost to acquire citizenship.

[Josquius]

Spain is also only 2 years for their main immigrant group - Latin Americans.

You say French citizenship is pretty expensive.... From what I've seen many others aren't.