4 ms·

Those are all valid concerns. Then, the digital passport's ship has already sailed for better or for worse, and all these questions are solved in other ways.

Those are all valid concerns. Then, the digital passport's ship has already sailed for better or for worse, and all these questions are solved in other ways. > when the Home Office messes up and accidentally deletes your immigration status You're toast either way, because it will be checked at the airport. You'll have to deal with the immigration officer and have them do something, because you won't go very far with just a paper that will be checked against the backend. In my experience it has already been the case for a while now. You still better have the reference paper that will help identify your visa procedure, dates etc. But it's already just a key to the info in the DB. > you will no longer be in possession of any records Print out the papers and keep track of the important pieces. It's the same for everything else in your life, including tax documents, birth certificates etc. Even in the olden days, the papers you had only had value against the agency's record that could prove their validity. If you had to prove residency in some specific period, having a stamp on your passport would mean very little if the agency denied having any records of it. So it's exactly the same weight as if you printed out a certificate while the DB blew out and no data about it are left. PS: I think in previous time people were also so much more lenient. It wasn't much a question of physical papers or not, and more on how much few people cared if your info was valid or not. I had an error in my name in many official documents, and while people noticed it, a simple "they typed it wrong" explanation was enough in 99% situations.

lathiat 2y ago
It's getting hard to even take printing stuff for granted. It's getting harder and harder on iOS just to arbitrarily copy and paste text from many apps - can't even copy the title of a YouTube video last time I tried. This mostly just worked on PC. It hurts me. Everything going so far backwards. At least once a week I have to screenshot something on iOS and use the new Photo OCR feature to copy and paste it out of the image. I wish I was joking.
noodlesUK 2y ago
If you have records of your own and pointers to other organizations contemporaneous records, you may have an opportunity to appeal if your DB record is lost. The home office rather notoriously destroyed/never kept its own records of arrivals of commonwealth citizens, which was one of the steps leading to the Windrush scandal. Many older records only exist in paper form, and often the receipts are good enough. This is especially true when you’re dealing with 3rd party governments. A foreign government is going to put a lot more stock (rightly or wrongly) on a birth certificate that is printed on fancy paper covered in security features than it is to a printout of an email.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  I second both points. You absolutely need to keep your own papers and records and it's fully expected as well. Also yes fancy paper is more valued than junky ones when nothing else remains, but random printouts are also provided everyday, and they're fine with it. At the crux of it, the foreign gov usually doesn't actually care that much about your birth certificate: they want due diligence at most, even if they'll have a more strict public facing facade. It's cross referenced only when it really matters (e.g. you're trying to get citizenship or a background check for security clearance ?)
crabbone 2y ago
> Even in the olden days, the papers you had only had value against the agency's record that could prove their validity. That's not true. For example, Jews (or people who wouldn't be always considered Jews, but those who would still fall under the Law of Return) have to produce some kind of document which states that their ancestor was Jewish. Often these documents were issued by authorities that no longer exist. And it was up to immigration authorities to decide whether they trust such a paper or not. Basically, anything coming from Western Ukraine prior to Soviet occupation would be issued by such authorities, same with Baltics. Unrelated to above: a lot of databases are only required to store their records for so long. For instance, the transcripts from most colleges can be produced within 10 or so years after graduation. Then it's like they've never existed. So, if for whatever reason you need to show your grades later, you better have a paper version.
- xqt40 2y ago
  I'm kinda baffled what you mean by authorities prior Soviet occupation, as Baltics an Ukraine/Poland have archives and power to acknowledge Jewish ancestry. It was not a question on decision to trust but requirement of the process by Israel for those that wanted to migrate to Israel.
  - crabbone 2y ago
    What power are we talking about? That's completely new to me (and I had to go through this process). Just to give an example of a document that I know had been submitted in this situation. A graduation certificate from a Jewish girls gymnasium in Vilno. The city has changed name since then, there's no such street address, there aren't any girl schools, definitely not gymnasiums, let alone Jewish. The building that used to be the school was destroyed in WW2. So, there's nobody who can vouch for the document. Maaaybe you could somehow find an index of all such schools that exited in the year of graduation, but even this info might not be available. During WW2 a lot of civil records have been lost, especially in smaller towns / villages. Sometimes it was deliberate, especially if it was a Jewish settlement. It was common for Jews in the military to try to erase any trace of their ancestry, as regardless of how poorly the Red Army PoWs were treated, Jews and Communists would've been executed immediately. So, destroying records indicating such connections and forging personal documents was a common case. Now that people try to recover any traces tying them to their ancestors, they often have very little to rely on. Like, receipts from donating to a synagogue, or permits to start a particular business (typically associated with being a Jew) etc. * * * Another funny memory I have in this respect: in the 90's I was queuing in a bakery in some central part of Lviv. A man behind me overhead me speaking Russian (which wasn't very common at the time, since Lviv citizens frowned upon it, and mostly spoke Ukrainian), and decided to ask me if I know where Adolf Hitler street was. My jaw dropped. But, the man pulled out from a pocket a triangular letter (the kind soldiers used to send during the war) with the address specifying exactly that. Apparently, the carrier of the letter was looking for his long-lost friend whose last known address was in Lviv, on that unfortunately named street. And since Lviv was seen as being quite radical in their way to dedicate streets to questionable historical figures, the old man believed that they might just have such a street... Anyways, some locals overheard our conversation, and soon we discovered that the street in question was indeed named after Hitler during the German occupation, after Soviet occupation was renamed the Lenin street, but historically was called Lychakivska (and that was its current name, restored in the recent years). * * * Another similar story involves my dad's friend who was born in the 30's when the Soviets and the Nazis had a love affair. So, this guy was named Adolf, yes you guessed it, after the Austrian painter. He was Jewish. So, after the love affair ended, he sought to change his name. But you cannot change the name on the birth certificate. Also, his school graduation papers etc. all had him as Adolf, and that's how his family called him. Sort of. (I knew him as "uncle Dolik".) Not surprisingly, there wasn't much of a record of him changing his name to Alexei :) and he'd routinely get in trouble with all kinds of authorities, police when checking his driver's license, paying electricity bills etc. Similarly, in Western Ukraine, prior to Soviet occupation, it was customary to give two names to children. Eg. my grandmother was Daria Anna. But the Soviet system didn't acknowledge this, and only one name could go into the passport / city records. So, she became Daria. At first. Then Dariana. And after having all sorts of documents, she was in a very tough spot proving ownership of her apartment, because it wasn't possible to tell (from the authorities perspective) whether Daria Anna, Daria and Dariana were the same person. Add to this that in order to preserve some of the family property she and her remaining relatives tried to mud the waters around these documents. Eg. to avoid partitioning the apartment she'd claim to have a sister Anna, who lived at the same address... I'm quite sure that this wasn't an isolated incident. There would've been a lot of attempts to manipulate the system by creating fake people, trying to wipe out one's own records etc. Paper documents help in detective work to untangle such manipulations. If there was ever a single central source of this information, such manipulations would've been a lot more successful.

lathiat 2y ago

It's getting hard to even take printing stuff for granted. It's getting harder and harder on iOS just to arbitrarily copy and paste text from many apps - can't even copy the title of a YouTube video last time I tried. This mostly just worked on PC. It hurts me. Everything going so far backwards. At least once a week I have to screenshot something on iOS and use the new Photo OCR feature to copy and paste it out of the image. I wish I was joking.

noodlesUK 2y ago

If you have records of your own and pointers to other organizations contemporaneous records, you may have an opportunity to appeal if your DB record is lost. The home office rather notoriously destroyed/never kept its own records of arrivals of commonwealth citizens, which was one of the steps leading to the Windrush scandal. Many older records only exist in paper form, and often the receipts are good enough. This is especially true when you’re dealing with 3rd party governments. A foreign government is going to put a lot more stock (rightly or wrongly) on a birth certificate that is printed on fancy paper covered in security features than it is to a printout of an email.

makeitdouble 2y ago
I second both points. You absolutely need to keep your own papers and records and it's fully expected as well. Also yes fancy paper is more valued than junky ones when nothing else remains, but random printouts are also provided everyday, and they're fine with it. At the crux of it, the foreign gov usually doesn't actually care that much about your birth certificate: they want due diligence at most, even if they'll have a more strict public facing facade. It's cross referenced only when it really matters (e.g. you're trying to get citizenship or a background check for security clearance ?)

crabbone 2y ago

> Even in the olden days, the papers you had only had value against the agency's record that could prove their validity. That's not true. For example, Jews (or people who wouldn't be always considered Jews, but those who would still fall under the Law of Return) have to produce some kind of document which states that their ancestor was Jewish. Often these documents were issued by authorities that no longer exist. And it was up to immigration authorities to decide whether they trust such a paper or not. Basically, anything coming from Western Ukraine prior to Soviet occupation would be issued by such authorities, same with Baltics. Unrelated to above: a lot of databases are only required to store their records for so long. For instance, the transcripts from most colleges can be produced within 10 or so years after graduation. Then it's like they've never existed. So, if for whatever reason you need to show your grades later, you better have a paper version.

xqt40 2y ago
I'm kinda baffled what you mean by authorities prior Soviet occupation, as Baltics an Ukraine/Poland have archives and power to acknowledge Jewish ancestry. It was not a question on decision to trust but requirement of the process by Israel for those that wanted to migrate to Israel.
- crabbone 2y ago
  What power are we talking about? That's completely new to me (and I had to go through this process). Just to give an example of a document that I know had been submitted in this situation. A graduation certificate from a Jewish girls gymnasium in Vilno. The city has changed name since then, there's no such street address, there aren't any girl schools, definitely not gymnasiums, let alone Jewish. The building that used to be the school was destroyed in WW2. So, there's nobody who can vouch for the document. Maaaybe you could somehow find an index of all such schools that exited in the year of graduation, but even this info might not be available. During WW2 a lot of civil records have been lost, especially in smaller towns / villages. Sometimes it was deliberate, especially if it was a Jewish settlement. It was common for Jews in the military to try to erase any trace of their ancestry, as regardless of how poorly the Red Army PoWs were treated, Jews and Communists would've been executed immediately. So, destroying records indicating such connections and forging personal documents was a common case. Now that people try to recover any traces tying them to their ancestors, they often have very little to rely on. Like, receipts from donating to a synagogue, or permits to start a particular business (typically associated with being a Jew) etc. * * * Another funny memory I have in this respect: in the 90's I was queuing in a bakery in some central part of Lviv. A man behind me overhead me speaking Russian (which wasn't very common at the time, since Lviv citizens frowned upon it, and mostly spoke Ukrainian), and decided to ask me if I know where Adolf Hitler street was. My jaw dropped. But, the man pulled out from a pocket a triangular letter (the kind soldiers used to send during the war) with the address specifying exactly that. Apparently, the carrier of the letter was looking for his long-lost friend whose last known address was in Lviv, on that unfortunately named street. And since Lviv was seen as being quite radical in their way to dedicate streets to questionable historical figures, the old man believed that they might just have such a street... Anyways, some locals overheard our conversation, and soon we discovered that the street in question was indeed named after Hitler during the German occupation, after Soviet occupation was renamed the Lenin street, but historically was called Lychakivska (and that was its current name, restored in the recent years). * * * Another similar story involves my dad's friend who was born in the 30's when the Soviets and the Nazis had a love affair. So, this guy was named Adolf, yes you guessed it, after the Austrian painter. He was Jewish. So, after the love affair ended, he sought to change his name. But you cannot change the name on the birth certificate. Also, his school graduation papers etc. all had him as Adolf, and that's how his family called him. Sort of. (I knew him as "uncle Dolik".) Not surprisingly, there wasn't much of a record of him changing his name to Alexei :) and he'd routinely get in trouble with all kinds of authorities, police when checking his driver's license, paying electricity bills etc. Similarly, in Western Ukraine, prior to Soviet occupation, it was customary to give two names to children. Eg. my grandmother was Daria Anna. But the Soviet system didn't acknowledge this, and only one name could go into the passport / city records. So, she became Daria. At first. Then Dariana. And after having all sorts of documents, she was in a very tough spot proving ownership of her apartment, because it wasn't possible to tell (from the authorities perspective) whether Daria Anna, Daria and Dariana were the same person. Add to this that in order to preserve some of the family property she and her remaining relatives tried to mud the waters around these documents. Eg. to avoid partitioning the apartment she'd claim to have a sister Anna, who lived at the same address... I'm quite sure that this wasn't an isolated incident. There would've been a lot of attempts to manipulate the system by creating fake people, trying to wipe out one's own records etc. Paper documents help in detective work to untangle such manipulations. If there was ever a single central source of this information, such manipulations would've been a lot more successful.