Free Movement Weekly Immigration Newsletter #75

Welcome to the weekly Free Movement newsletter!

Another week, another newly surfaced problem with eVisas. Today it was reported that the Security Industry Authority (“an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Home Office”) is not accepting eVisas as official ID for its licence application process. To state the obvious, issues like this should have been resolved before the Home Office stopped issuing biometric residence permits. And if agencies this closely connected to the Home Office are not getting it right then it doesn’t exactly bode well for everywhere else. 

The risk of dying and the threat of being sent to Rwanda has done nothing to deter people from coming to the UK across the Channel. But the government thinks that the threat of possibly being returned to France will do it. Let’s wait and see!

In the meantime, the strategy seems to be to just declare all of the countries to be safe. We have already seen this with Afghanistan, and now Ukraine is apparently also safe. I covered the story of Ukrainians being refused protection last week after being contacted by a Ukrainian here in the UK. It was good to then see the story also picked up by the Guardian later in the week where it was the top viewed story on the site on Friday. Given what we have seen with Ukraine and Afghanistan, whenever the new Syrian country policy and information notes are published it will be crucial that they are scrutinised as thoroughly and quickly as possible. 

On Free Movement, we had a statement of changes to the immigration rules drop out of nowhere last week, prompting momentary heart failure from all those who thought it was the skilled worker changes to the qualification thresholds, as set out in the recent immigration white paper. It was not, and we still have no idea when those changes will happen.

We also had a couple of trafficking posts on the blog – an update to our briefing on the support system for victims of trafficking and a write up of a recent case where a Home Office decision maker, despite accepting the claimant’s account, applied an overly restrictive definition of forced labour and refused his trafficking case. Other cases last week included this unreported judicial review where a settlement application was rejected as invalid due to lawyer error, which was not rectified after the Home Office got in touch with them.

Today’s post is an updated reminder of the variously named regulatory schemes that immigration lawyers must comply with to maintain their skills and knowledge every year, and we have explained how Free Movement can make meeting the requirements easier. For everything else on Free Movement and elsewhere, read on.

 Cheers, Sonia

What we’re reading

Desert Island Discs – Lord Alf Dubs, BBC Radio 4, 20 June

Home Office worker granted asylum applications for cash – BBC News, 23 June

Man criticises Home Office for keeping visa fee of wife who died before reaching UK – The Guardian, 30 June

Third-country asylum plan shows UK is in ‘a very dark place’, says Albanian PM – The Guardian, 26 June

Denmark’s Supreme Court stops illegal sentencing of refugees for entering with false documents – Border Criminologies, 25 June

Migration Policy through a Glass, Darkly – Political Calculus, 27 June

Explainer: Does the European Convention on Human Rights stop foreign criminals being removed from the UK? – UK in a changing Europe, 26 June

Supporting Access to Justice in Immigration Tribunals: Identifying Communication Needs Beyond a Language Barrier – ILPA blog, 26 June

Visa income rules discriminate against working-class people, British father says – The Guardian, 26 June

New Roots, New Futures: the need for a national refugee integration strategy – Refugee Council, 25 June