All eyes were on Birmingham yesterday for the launch of the Labour Party’s manifesto. Billed as “radical” by Jeremy Corbyn, its stated purpose is to offer “real change” and to build a fairer Britain. But this sense of radicalism does not wholly extend to Labour’s immigration policy. Those who were...
This is overall a good manifesto on immigration from the Liberal Democrats. There are some choices that niggle, but often in areas where there is no perfect answer. It is still nowhere near forward-thinking or ambitious enough, and it will be interesting to compare to Labour’s. The aspirational benchmark, of...
Bureaucrats are not generally known for their creative thinking. But show a Home Office immigration official an application for asylum or a visa and watch their imagination run riot. All these are real excuses, communicated in official government letters, for declining a visa, refusing asylum or disbelieving some aspect of...
Ian Macdonald QC has passed away. He was the founder and father of immigration law in this country. He literally wrote the book when in 1983 he published the first edition of the now legendary Macdonald’s Immigration Law & Practice. It is now in its ninth edition. Ian Alexander Macdonald was...
A post by a young Cambridge academic refused indefinite leave to remain after spending a year abroad has triggered a viral Twitter outpouring of indignation and support – but did the Home Office get it wrong? Today I’ve been in the UK for 10 years, 1 month, 2 weeks, 3...
Following on from my McGill & Co. colleague Darren’s recent post on the consequences of overstaying, I thought I would illustrate his point with a few case studies. The following examples are all derived from real cases that I have recently dealt with. Names and other identifying details have been...
The Home Office has issued new policy guidance on when it will refuse applications on the grounds of deception or dishonesty, i.e. where an applicant has made a false representation. The guidance follows a serious defeat in the Court of Appeal earlier this year. In Balajigari v Secretary of State for...
You’ve just had a fantastic summer holiday in, let’s say, Greece — away from the daily grind, the misery of Brexit and British summertime weather. Sunshine every day, beach swimming, late nights, great wine, even better food. You’re basically 90% gyros by this point, but it’s all right, it’s a...
An important Office for National Statistics (ONS) report released this week provides revised figures for EU and non-EU net migration since 2009. Here’s my take on what the key points of the report are. It has been clear for some time that something wasn’t quite right in the headline net...
Boris Johnson is the new leader of the Conservative Party, and our next Prime Minister. How might he change the UK government’s policy on immigration? An important question, and when it comes to Johnson potentially a Sisyphean task, given his reputation as someone who will say whatever he thinks will...
Boris Johnson’s suggestion of an “amnesty for tens of thousands of illegal immigrants”, as the Daily Mail puts it, has ruffled some right-wing feathers, but would it really revolutionise UK immigration policy? Johnson, who looks set to secure victory in the Conservative leadership race, told the paper he supported the...
An immigration lawyer has been struck off after being caught on camera four years ago advising an undercover reporter about a sham marriage. The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal made the decision in the case of Syed Mazaher Naqvi, a sole practitioner based in London. The tribunal found that Naqvi had failed...
Two solicitors have been fined for pursuing “spurious” immigration cases — many of which they knew were hopeless because they had advised the client as much. Nurgus Malik and Jusna Begum Miah, who at the time worked for M-R Solicitors in London, admitted several counts of professional misconduct at the...
It’s not often these days that we see a positive result from the Court of Appeal, but just before the bank holiday two out of three Lord Justices declared that Home Office policy on assessing the age of asylum seekers is unlawful. The case is BF (Eritrea) v Secretary of...
Theresa May has just announced her resignation. She will leave office on 7 June 2019, leaving a legacy indelibly associated with two things: Brexit and immigration. The gridlock on the former being, infamously, a function of her obsession with the latter, let us look at what May’s many years of...
The National Audit Office, a government watchdog, has released an authoritative report on the long-running English language testing scandal. The discovery in 2014 that there was widespread cheating on the English tests required for UK visas led to a Home Office crackdown affecting tens of thousands of people, many of...
Last week the Home Office announced the establishment of its compensation scheme for those affected by the Windrush scandal (the Scheme). We have published a briefing on how the Scheme will work, who is entitled to compensation, and the key documents involved. There are a number of issues in the...
Almost a year after it first broke, the Home Office has opened a compensation scheme for those affected by the Windrush scandal (the Scheme). It expects to pay out up to £310 million to victims. We provide in this post a brief outline of how the Scheme works, who can...
Consistently the most popular article on Free Movement, somewhat depressingly, is the list of immigration and nationality fees. The fees charged by the Home Office for processing visa, settlement and nationality applications are high, set far above the actual administrative cost to the department. Fees constitute a significant source of...
On 14 March the High Court suspended the Home Office’s removals policy. The decision means that the system of giving migrants “removal windows” within which they can be removed from the UK without warning will be halted for the time being. Mr Justice Walker, in a case brought by the...
A major government review of legal aid proposes no significant changes in the immigration and asylum field. Despite evidence of the impact of cuts over the past five years, and the role that legal aid would have played in preventing the Windrush scandal, the Ministry of Justice has refused to...
The Immigration Rules should be redrafted and restructured in order to cut down on complexity, the Law Commission says. Launching a consultation on Simplifying the Immigration Rules today, the influential law reform body proposes major revisions to “provide a more logical structure, remove unnecessary repetitions and improve the drafting”. The regulations...
Page contentsWindrushDeaths at seaEU citizens rightsImmigration lawHere on Free MovementFuture migration Windrush The defining event of 2018 in the world of immigration law was without doubt the exposure of what has become known as the Windrush scandal. The way the scandal was eventually picked up by all news outlets caught...
When Sergei and Yulia Skripal were near-fatally poisoned with Novichok in Salisbury in March 2018, suspicion immediately fell upon the Russian state. The British government released footage of the men said to be responsible and the aliases under which they secured UK visit visas. But it took a website called...
This is a collection of statistics on the UK immigration system. The Office for National Statistics, Home Office and Courts & Tribunals Service publish regular quarterly data on the number of migrants coming to the UK, how immigration applications are processed and how appeals are disposed of. We use these to regularly update the...
The toxic wasteland of the Daily Mail’s back catalogue on the topic of immigration needs no introduction. It is perhaps no great surprise that, asked to spend some time at Taylor House immigration tribunal recently, the pithy headline for Mail reporter Sue Reid’s subsequent splash read as follows: Can it...
The Home Office will have no idea how many EU residents are left undocumented by Brexit because it does not collect or release the necessary data, a leading immigration policy expert has warned. Madeleine Sumption said yesterday that the government has no plans to find out how many of the...
Sajid Javid delivered a speech today at the Conservative party conference that is likely to generate headlines for what he had to say on immigration, integration and citizenship. Upon closer inspection, there is less substance to these pronouncements than meets the eye and nothing on serious issues like child registration...
The unmarried partner of a British citizen who returns to the UK having resided in another EU country does have rights under EU law, the Court of Justice of the European Union has today held in the case of C‑89/17 Banger v UK. The court also finds that if such a person...
When asked why the fees for visa applications are so expensive, the Home Office traditionally responds that the immigration system should be “funded by those who benefit from it”, in order to reduce taxpayer expense. This is a convenient political argument. It has justified enormous increases in application and other...
Almost half the recommendations made by the independent immigration inspector over the last three years have not been followed by the Home Office, the inspector’s annual report shows. David Bolt’s survey of the 2017/18 financial year says that while only a small minority (4%) of his recommendations since May 2015...
Back in January, we wrote about the case of Dr Syed Kazmi, a foreign doctor due to be removed from the UK because of a “HMRC tax issue” disqualifying him from settlement. Since then, many more refusals of settlement applications by highly skilled migrants — declined because of discrepancies between immigration...
An individual’s right to access information held about them under the Data Protection Act 1998 is arguably one of the greatest legacies of the New Labour government. In immigration law, where complexity abounds and cases often roll on for years through changes in rules and regulatory frameworks, this right is...
Yesterday afternoon, the Home Affairs committee of MPs had before it a selection of the nation’s newspaper editors. The subject of questioning: “whether there is an issue with treatment of minority groups in the print media”. Anyone who has glanced at the headlines about immigration over the past decade or...
A high-profile firm of immigration solicitors has been shut down by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA). The regulator announced the closure on 18 April of Malik Law Chambers, which has two offices in London and one in Birmingham. Giving reasons for its decision, the SRA said: There is reason to suspect...
The Home Affairs Committee of MPs today published its report on whether or not the Home Office has the capacity to deliver effective immigration services once the UK leaves the European Union next March. No, is the short answer. Not a lot of love from @CommonsHomeAffs Valentine's Day report on...
Here’s your round-up of the immigration and asylum stories that made national headlines this week. “De-risking” closes migrant accounts The Guardian‘s business section raises concerns about immigrants’ bank accounts being closed down, with some financial institutions accused of “dumping customers and organisations with links to countries about which they have...
Around 1.3 million British citizens are currently settled in other EU member states, but do not have citizenship of those countries. Just like EU citizens living in the UK, they can do this by relying on free movement rights granted by the EU. Speaking precisely, Article 20 of the Treaty...
Another bumper week – but then, immigration and asylum are hardly ever out of the headlines these days. EU citizens in immigration detention The number of EEA nationals held in immigration detention has increased sharply in recent years, from 768 in 2009 to 4,701 in 2016, according to figures secured by the...
