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A user below, hkt, has a comment complaining about the culture at the Home Office. It has been modded down, and fairly so, as this comment is not helpful in its

A user below, hkt, has a comment complaining about the culture at the Home Office. It has been modded down, and fairly so, as this comment is not helpful in its current form. Nevertheless I feel it has an important point, so allow me to talk about the Home Office, which, after all, is the reason this 101-year-old was filing paperwork to begin with. The Home Office presently maintains a "hostile environment" policy. Wikipedia summarizes its goal: "to make staying in the United Kingdom as difficult as possible for people without leave to remain". Here are some examples of how this works in practice. Once upon a time the BBC did a little investigative journalism and discovered that some international students were faking their English proficiency exams (the TOEIC). The Home Office, quite reasonably, said that they'd do something about it. What they ended up doing specifically was make the environment as hostile as possible; they: - looked at 58,458 test results - declared that 34,000 of them were obviously definitely cheaters - declared that 22,600 of them were probably cheaters - declared only about 2000 as probably legit - sent letters to the 34,000 students denouncing them as frauds and demanding they leave the country Needless to say these numbers are completely bunk. Nevertheless thousands of the students were scared away, or detained, or deported. Here is some coverage of the Toeic scandal: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/27/home-office-investigated-over-english-test-cheating-claims https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/27/home-office-... An astute reader will note that the coverage I have specifically linked describes this as potentially "bigger than Windrush", a separate scandal in which refugees were admitted to the UK, decades later various records of their admission destroyed, and then the government demanded they demonstrate evidence they were allowed to be present in the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal Now, personal anecdote time: I got a job in London the same day they voted for Brexit. I later found out that as family of a European citizen, the form to get a proper residence card was 97+ pages. This is basically as a way to make the environment more hostile. (Rather than deal with that and the economic uncertainties of Brexit, including its impact on the tech sector and general political uncertainty from subsequent governments, I instead moved to New York and literally doubled my salary, thanks in no small part to the low pound). In summary: This particular story is just the latest insult in a parade of injuries. Fear not, though! The behavior of the Home Office has not gone unnoticed. For instance, the USCIS has recently been taking a page from the same book: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administrations-kafkaesque-new-way-to-thwart-visa-applications/2020/02/13/190a3862-4ea3-11ea-bf44-f5043eb3918a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administra... > The American Immigration Lawyers Association has collected [over 140] examples of allegedly "incomplete" forms: an 8-year-old child who listed "none" for employment history but left the dates of employment field blank. An applicant who entered names of three siblings, but the form has spaces for four. Further links (with only minimal libertarian commentary) at https://reason.com/2020/02/14/how-the-government-is-using-nonsense-rules-to-keep-out-immigrants/ https://reason.com/2020/02/14/how-the-government-is-using-no... Thank you for your time.

toyg 7y ago
Not to detract from the rest of the comment, which is broadly correct (speaking as somebody who actually had to go through those 97 pages to get indefinite leave to remain, pre-2016), but the description of Windrush as "refugees [who] were admitted to the UK" is just wrong. The Windrush migrants were not refugees - they were explicitly invited by the UK government, through a policy that promoted migration from "old colonies" (particularly the Caribbeans), in order to kickstart a postwar British economy dramatically short of manpower. The policy was so lax that there were no controls of any sort; on landing, people were barely handed a piece of paper that certified they had disembarked from a certain ship on that day. For all intents and purposes, these migrants were then treated like British citizens, but were not issued passports or other documents unless they demanded them (which was often a complex procedure). This was not seen as unusual, in a country that famously has no national ID scheme and where identification is still largely achieved through utility bills. The Home Office kept a copy of the landing records for 50 years, which helped whenever someone from the Windrush years had to make his or her position official. In 2010, the HO decided these records took up too much space and just destroyed them, without even trying to digitize them. This happened a few months after the Tory-LibDem coalition government was installed, in October 2010, with Theresa May as Home Secretary. Anybody from Windrush subsequently found themselves unable to prove their citizenship status, resulting in deportations, lack of health assistance, and massive discrimination. For the record, Mrs. May was also the inventor of the "hostile environment" policy, which was supposed to deliver on the Tory manifesto promise of pushing net migration under 100,000 a year. That indicator was around 250,000 at the time. After 10 years of "hostile environment", it's now around 280,000.
- fennecfoxen 7y ago
  Thank you: a useful correction. I would edit the comment, if it were still within the editing window.

toyg 7y ago

Not to detract from the rest of the comment, which is broadly correct (speaking as somebody who actually had to go through those 97 pages to get indefinite leave to remain, pre-2016), but the description of Windrush as "refugees [who] were admitted to the UK" is just wrong. The Windrush migrants were not refugees - they were explicitly invited by the UK government, through a policy that promoted migration from "old colonies" (particularly the Caribbeans), in order to kickstart a postwar British economy dramatically short of manpower. The policy was so lax that there were no controls of any sort; on landing, people were barely handed a piece of paper that certified they had disembarked from a certain ship on that day. For all intents and purposes, these migrants were then treated like British citizens, but were not issued passports or other documents unless they demanded them (which was often a complex procedure). This was not seen as unusual, in a country that famously has no national ID scheme and where identification is still largely achieved through utility bills. The Home Office kept a copy of the landing records for 50 years, which helped whenever someone from the Windrush years had to make his or her position official. In 2010, the HO decided these records took up too much space and just destroyed them, without even trying to digitize them. This happened a few months after the Tory-LibDem coalition government was installed, in October 2010, with Theresa May as Home Secretary. Anybody from Windrush subsequently found themselves unable to prove their citizenship status, resulting in deportations, lack of health assistance, and massive discrimination. For the record, Mrs. May was also the inventor of the "hostile environment" policy, which was supposed to deliver on the Tory manifesto promise of pushing net migration under 100,000 a year. That indicator was around 250,000 at the time. After 10 years of "hostile environment", it's now around 280,000.

fennecfoxen 7y ago
Thank you: a useful correction. I would edit the comment, if it were still within the editing window.