Citizenship – More Than Just a Word?

On Tuesday, October 21^st, the High Sheriff of West Glamorgan, Diana Stroia, represented the Home Office at a Citizenship Ceremony at Swansea Registry Office. These ceremonies take place at regular intervals and for Diana, who has personally navigated the journey to British citizenship since arriving from her native Romania, they are particularly meaningful. The people awarded citizenship have proved their value to our way of life.

When we welcomed them into our communities, we opened the door to them becoming community leaders.

The October 21^st ceremony was also attended by Shaz Abedean, a Welsh-Bangladeshi Muslim who has been a beacon of public service and community cohesion for many years, and who was appointed as a Deputy to the Lord Lieutenant for West Glamorgan earlier this year. Together, Diana and Shaz have made, and are making, a major contribution to Swansea’s cultural life.

The High Sheriff’s representation of the Home Office on October 21^st was entirely positive. For many of us, the Home Office’s representation of itself in the weeks that followed has been more problematic. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced sweeping changes to the way Britain will treat new arrivals. Permanent protection for refugees is to be brought to an end, with the intention of reducing asylum claims. Under these new plans, people granted asylum will only be allowed to stay in the country temporarily, with their status reviewed every 30 months, and they will be returned to their home country when it is deemed safe. The government plans to start exploring forced returns to countries which people have not routinely been removed to in recent years.

Refugees will now need to be resident in the UK for 20 years before they can apply for permanent residence or indefinite leave to remain – a dramatic rise from the current five years. When the measures were announced, the BBC reported that:

“The Home Secretary believes that unless Labour takes these decisions then “darker forces” could thrive in the UK.”

The People’s Library believes that in taking these decisions, the government is giving in to those darker forces. We also believe that the people shouting loudest about Britain’s “immigration crisis” and seeking to demonise asylum seekers and refugees are the people whose actions over the past decade have done the most to destabilise the immigration system in this country.

Cast your mind back to 2016 and the Brexit referendum. Many promises were made of the riches and opportunities that awaited a newly-free Britain, unshackled from the EU and its tyranny of red tape. You can judge for yourself how many of those promises have been kept, but here are some of the effects Brexit has had on unlawful immigration.

·      As an EU member, the UK was part of the Dublin III regulation, allowing us to request that fellow EU countries take back asylum seekers who had previously entered or claimed asylum there. Since we ripped up this agreement on January 1^st 2021 and failed to negotiate a replacement, it’s far more difficult to return migrants to the EU.

·      With no returns agreement, migrants know that if they reach the UK, they are less likely to be sent back to the EU. This has made the UK a more appealing final destination. 

·      When we left the EU, we lost access to the Eurodac fingerprint database, which enables swift and accurate checks on whether an asylum seeker has already made a claim in another EU country. Without this efficiency and accuracy, asylum claims are harder to process and eligibility is harder to prove or disprove.  

The people who shouted loudest for Brexit are, coincidentally the people now shouting loudest against its consequences. And how much of an immigration crisis do we really have?

In 2024, 36,816 people arrived in this country on small boats. The average cost of housing and feeding a person in this country today has been estimated at £8,593 (£7,260 for housing and £1,333 for food). So if every person arriving on a small boat had been welcomed, housed and fed, the annual cost would have been £316,359,888. That’s a lot of money, but does it represent as big a problem as the £18.6 billion that Britain lost in unpaid corporate tax in 2023-24? Or the £30 billion lost through Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget of September 2022? Or the £32 billion that the Conservative government’s own analysts calculated Brexit would cost the country every year?

If 3.7 million asylum seekers arrived in this country, and each of them was housed and fed at the state’s expense, then the annual cost would still be lower than the amount of money that leaving the EU costs the British economy every year. The actual number of small boat arrivals is less than 1% of that. So perhaps talk of an immigration crisis is misdirection? And if it is, why pander to it?

We can sympathise with a government that sees opponents surging in the polls and wants to regain popularity, but there are more honest, more humane and more effective ways to do it.

You don’t defeat a bully by slapping their victims instead of punching them.

You don’t guard your home against a storm by knocking down a wall.

You don’t outflank an opponent you deplore by cosplaying in their ugly clothes.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the word refugee derives from the word refuge. Sometimes we all need shelter from the storm. Even those of us lucky enough to have been born in a country that’s relatively wealthy and relatively peaceful.

The act of offering shelter, of being a good citizen, is a worthwhile end in itself. If we’re looking for other tangible outcomes, there’s solid economic data to draw on. A 2023 report found that 39% of the UK's 100 fastest-growing companies have a foreign-born founder. British natives who’ve spent the past decade babbling about wanting to take their country back are intent on taking it back from the very people whose hard work and initiative have been driving our collective prosperity.

When we close our doors to new arrivals seeking shelter, we’re sending away the people most likely to help us protect ourselves when the storm comes our way.

That’s not good citizenship. It’s not good sense. It’s not good.

It’s time to do better.