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The home office horrendously botched the Windrush issue - possibly maliciously - but a key factor is that Britain has historically had an unusually laissez-fai

The home office horrendously botched the Windrush issue - possibly maliciously - but a key factor is that Britain has historically had an unusually laissez-faire approach to immigration, residence and proof of identity. Windrush couldn't have happened in France or Germany, because they require people to register their residence and have an ID card or passport. It's really quite unusual to be able to move to a country, rent a house, get a job and use public services, all without identity documents or any real proof of your right to live in that country. We have only comparatively recently introduced a requirement to perform identity checks on prospective tenants or employees and it's still relatively straightforward to access most public services without any real proof of your identity. There are obvious risks and downsides to identity cards and other kinds of national databases, but Windrush highlighted the downsides of not having them; Britain's decentralised and ad-hoc approach to identity allowed a lot of people to slip into a kind of legal limbo.

arp242 3y ago
> Britain's decentralised and ad-hoc approach to identity allowed a lot of people to slip into a kind of legal limbo. That can definitely be a problem, but it's also a problem with more strict identity systems, where certainly in my experience slipping in "legal limbo" can be just as easy if not easier, albeit under different circumstances. Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37239713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37239713 – there's a lot more detail to that by the way I won't bore you with, but eventually the easiest "solution" was to just leave the country. While British-style systems are somewhat chaotic and messy and clearly imperfect, on balance I think they're profoundly better than strict registers. What was it again, "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero"? If you try to be air-tight about these sort of things you're going to end up excluding a lot of non-fraudulent people, and it's better to have a bit of fraud. Another important factor is that a lot of the Windrush generation weren't immigrating so much as British citizens moving from one part of the country to another part of the country. I believe that was more or less the situation legally, but that's also how many felt as they were raised to be British; if you listen to people talk about their childhood in Jamaica and whatnot then they were raised and always thought of themselves as British (whether the white people in Britain also saw them as such is a different matter – rivers of blood etc.). A bit of a pedantic point perhaps, but I do think it matters and is an important reason why people didn't have much documentation, because would you keep detailed documentation if you were moving from Glasgow to Bristol?

arp242 3y ago

> Britain's decentralised and ad-hoc approach to identity allowed a lot of people to slip into a kind of legal limbo. That can definitely be a problem, but it's also a problem with more strict identity systems, where certainly in my experience slipping in "legal limbo" can be just as easy if not easier, albeit under different circumstances. Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37239713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37239713 – there's a lot more detail to that by the way I won't bore you with, but eventually the easiest "solution" was to just leave the country. While British-style systems are somewhat chaotic and messy and clearly imperfect, on balance I think they're profoundly better than strict registers. What was it again, "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero"? If you try to be air-tight about these sort of things you're going to end up excluding a lot of non-fraudulent people, and it's better to have a bit of fraud. Another important factor is that a lot of the Windrush generation weren't immigrating so much as British citizens moving from one part of the country to another part of the country. I believe that was more or less the situation legally, but that's also how many felt as they were raised to be British; if you listen to people talk about their childhood in Jamaica and whatnot then they were raised and always thought of themselves as British (whether the white people in Britain also saw them as such is a different matter – rivers of blood etc.). A bit of a pedantic point perhaps, but I do think it matters and is an important reason why people didn't have much documentation, because would you keep detailed documentation if you were moving from Glasgow to Bristol?