Last week the Supreme Court found that a financing scheme to help individuals qualify for an Investor visa did not comply with the requirements of the immigration rules. The case is R (on the application of Wang) v Secretary of State for the Home Depa ...

It has become fashionable for government ministers to refer to “bespoke” humanitarian schemes and such like, referring to programmes like those for Ukrainians and Hong Kongers. The illusory scheme for Afghans was once trumpeted as a “bespoke” ...

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the disembarking of the passengers on board the ship the HMT Empire Windrush at Tilbury docks on 22 June 1948. Even now, five years after the Windrush scandal broke, many well-informed and well-intentioned journalis ...

Over and over again we hear that refugees should claim asylum in the first safe country the reach. There are variations on the theme. Genuine refugees claim asylum in the first safe country. Refugees should or even must claim asylum in the first safe ...

Lawyers do not own the word “refugee”. The term has been in use since the eighteenth century and has its own evocative, wider meaning in the public consciousness. Those fleeing Ukraine or relocating to the United Kingdom from Hong Kong can ...

The National Audit Office has this morning published a report on the Home Office’s asylum and protection transformation programme. It is not pretty reading. Asylum support costs have soared to an astonishing £3.6 billion this year, double last ...

This isn’t going to come as a surprise to many lawyers. The Court of Justice has concluded that The loss of the status of citizen of the European Union, and consequently the loss of the rights attached to that status, is an automatic consequence ...

The annual UNHCR global trends report was published today. It shows a marked increase in the global refugee population, to 29.4 million refugees internationally, excluding Palestinians. The equivalent figure in the 2021 report was 21.3 million. W ...

I don’t think Sonia and I have a great deal of competition in the “monthly immigration law update podcast” niche, strangely, but all the attention on net migration has caused a few podcast series to turn their attention to immigratio ...

The common travel area enables passport-free and legal travel between the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland), the Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands for British and Irish citizens and migrants with lawful status. Onc ...

Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick today announced that the government was dropping its “differentiated status” approach to refugees, introduced less than one year ago as the centrepiece of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022. The policy ...

This month Sonia and I start with the Big Free Movement News (spoiler: Sonia is joining the team as the new Editor) and then cover a bunch of visa news and updates, a load of case law and several policy developments. If you would like to claim CPD poi ...

Sunak gave a major speech this morning claiming that his “Stop The Boats” plan is working. Is it? There are some signs of success but it probably has nothing to do with the Illegal Migration Bill. Small boats It is true that small boat cro ...

The latest quarterly immigration statistics were published today. Most of the media focus is on net migration and the Office of National Statistics ONS report. Net migration turned out to be around 600,000 rather than the 700,000 or more that some had ...

Some big news at Free Movement. Two bits of big news, in fact. New Editor Firstly, I am delighted to announce that Sonia Lenegan is joining Free Movement as the new Editor in August. She will be replacing me, although I’ll still be lurking in th ...

This month we talk more about the Illegal Migration Bill and its potential consequences, the right way to go about tackling the asylum backlog, Colin’s suggestion of a new British Citizenship Act, the resumption of hostile environment bank accou ...

The immigration rules are full of harsh general rules accompanied by potential exceptions. These exceptions require a subjective judgment to be made and they make the rules complex. They also manufacture risk for applicants, making the outcome of immi ...

For this month’s roundup podcast, Sonia and I manage to rattle through a huge volume of updates in a mere 36 minutes. We cover a load of cases, some important asylum policy updates and then several developments in immigration law as well. WeR ...

We live in what some have called ‘multi-status Britain’, a country in which discrimination is baked into a social, economic and racial hierarchy based on different forms of legal status. With British citizenship, other forms of British nat ...

A new report by the international aid spending watchdog has revealed that the Home Office spent one third of the UK’s international aid budget on domestic asylum costs, leading to severe cuts to genuine international aid programmes. The Independent ...

The short answer is that we do not know. But it is possible to make some informed guesses. In this post I try to do just that, based on a Twitter thread from a few days ago and some feedback from that. Evidence on refugee decision-making The evidence ...

In case you missed it, you can watch me and Sonia discussing the Illegal Migration Bill over the course of an hour. We recorded this as a live session on Monday 13 March. We explain what is in it, what will it do, how is it intended to work, whether i ...

This month Sonia and I talk a bit about denaturalisation generally and the case of Shamima Begum specifically, we cover the new streamlined asylum process and a few other asylum-related blog posts and then we run through a few cases. We manage to keep ...

The Illegal Migration Bill was published yesterday. You can access the Bill here and the Explanatory Notes here. While it remains a Bill, the individual provisions are referred to as clauses and once it becomes an Act — as it surely will — ...

The latest quarterly immigration statistics are out. I’m focussing here on what the figures reveal about the system, including the backlog, arrivals, resettlement, grant rate, modern slavery referrals, detention and removals. Backlog The asylum ...

Shamima Begum has lost the latest round in her legal battle against the decision to strip her of her British citizenship and exile her abroad. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission that heard her case concluded that she was a victim of traffickin ...

If you want to learn about the history if nationality and immigration law, there are few options available to you. Even if you have access to a really good library, Ann Dummett and Andy Nichol’s classic Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others date ...

In this blog post I am going to take a look at the second main way that the British state strips some citizens of their citizenship status. In a previous blog post I looked at behaviour-based denaturalisation. Here I’m looking at fraud-based den ...

One of the changes to immigration law made by the government in response to the sharp increase in small boat crossings was the creation of a ten year route to settlement for refugees. This followed the commencement of the Nationality and Borders ...

The Financial Times is reporting today that “around 141,000” EU citizens had their digital status updated to “refused” last month. Their applications were previously refused by the Home Office but for some reason their online s ...

This month Sonia and I talk through various government policies all about being horrible to migrants. It’s a seemingly inexhaustible vein. Indeed, there aren’t many (any?) government immigration policies NOT about being horrible to migrant ...

The power to denaturalise a British subject on the basis of their behaviour was first introduced by legislation in 1918. With some adjustments, the power remained broadly the same until as late as 2002. Essentially, only a person who had naturalised a ...

The Home Office is not beloved as an institution. Some consider it necessary. But no-one likes it. That seems to include not just migrants and their families but also many of the civil servants at the Home Office itself, the lawyers and judges who int ...

In a judgment handed down last Friday, the High Court has cast doubt on the British citizenship status of children born in the United Kingdom before 2 October 2000 to EU citizens who did not at that time possess indefinite leave to remain. The case is ...

Colin and Sonia take a look back at 2022 and ahead to 2023 as well as covering the immigration updates from December 2022. Looking back, they talk about small boat crossings, the Ukraine and Hong Kong schemes, the impact (or lack of) the Nationality a ...

Every year I try to take stock and look ahead to the coming year. Last year I picked out delays in the asylum system, historically low figures for the removal of failed asylum seekers, low levels of asylum support and small boat crossings as majo ...

The High Court has concluded in the case of AAA and others v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] EWHC 3230 (Admin) that the UK government’s Rwanda plan is lawful. The individual decisions in the case were inadequate and will need t ...

One of the measures announced by Rishi Sunak in his asylum statement on 13 December 2022 was the re-starting of hostile environment immigration checks on bank accounts. These checks were introduced by the Immigration Act 2016 but were paused by Sajid ...

Rishi Sunak announced yesterday a number of measures to address the government’s self-made asylum backlog. The tone of Sunak’s statement was more measured than the sometimes rather unhinged rhetoric to which we have become accustomed, alth ...

This month, Colin and Sonia mainly talk about an avalanche of asylum-related news, law and updates. It’s not all asylum, though, there’s also some blog posts to go over on Comprehensive Sickness Insurance, third party support in spouse app ...