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>The proposals are the government's latest bid to tackle illegal immigration, with the new ID being a form of proof of a citizen's right to live and work in the

>The proposals are the government's latest bid to tackle illegal immigration, with the new ID being a form of proof of a citizen's right to live and work in the UK. How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true? I don't live in the UK and have not visited in several years. If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here.

jesterson 1y ago
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Insanity 1y ago
In all fairness, the “immigration” story is likely just a convenient spin on a more realistic goal of state surveillance on it’s own citizens.
- Nursie 1y ago
  While there is almost guaranteed to be an aspect of this, the UK is going through a period where immigration is in the news constantly and the populist party "Reform UK" are on the rise. The Labour government has realised that whatever their own feelings are about people coming to the UK by irregular means and claiming asylum, they need to be seen to recognise the popular narrative right now that the boats must be stopped, and be seen to be taking action. So I don't think the immediate state goal right here is likely to be anything deeper than desperately trying to head off Nigel Farage, who is capturing a lot of public discourse about this 'crisis'.
  - pixxel 1y ago
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  - gmac 1y ago
    … except that trying to out-Farage Farage (by being bastards to asylum seekers) will lose them many of their traditional supporters (who are not big on being bastards to asylum seekers) and seems unlikely to gain them many Farage supporters (why would they take some half-hearted populist bastardry when they can have the real deal?). The ‘small boats’ narrative is ludicrously over-reported here. It’s such a clear case of those with most of the resources scapegoating those with none of the resources as the cause of everyone else’s problems.
    - Nursie 1y ago
      I don't think any of that matters any more, the issue is so firmly in the public eye that Labour need to show that they've solved it whether it's a 'real' problem or not. > unlikely to gain them many Farage supporters Farage is polling ahead of both major parties at the moment. That support came from somewhere. To characterise all of those supporters as only interested in populist bastardry seems a bit of a surface take on the issue. Why have they turned to someone like that? Most likely they feel their own lives and prospects getting worse and in their dissatisfaction have turned to an easy answer, someone who promises to change everything and blame the outsider. To put it starkly, reductively even, you don't get nazis when everyone feels like their life is on the up and up. Well not many anyway. The mainstream of UK politics needs to get to grips with (perceived?) worsening standards of living and failing services, and actually take action that makes people's lives better. Instead for decades now it has just tinkered at the edges, seemingly run by ambitionless accountants. Shuffling half a percent here, half a percent there, not really achieving very much but spewing vast volumes of hot air. It's not really a wonder to me that a sizeable minority are looking outside of that, or are getting frustrated that they can't get a doctor's appointment or the roads are falling apart. It's all too easy for Fartrage to say - look over there!
      - ryandrake 1y ago
        > Instead for decades now it has just tinkered at the edges, seemingly run by ambitionless accountants. Shuffling half a percent here, half a percent there, not really achieving very much but spewing vast volumes of hot air Speaking from the other side of the pond, we can say quite confidently that the solution is not electing someone who will make reckless, bold moves. The brain trust here voted against “ambitionless, measured improvements” and for that, we got a chaotic circus.
  - crote 1y ago
    The media are (mostly) just parrotting what the politicians are saying. Having both major parties talking about "stopping the boat" isn't going to quiet down that down, is it? It'll just shift the Overton window. What's Labour's plan when the boats are stopped and Reform progresses to "round up and deport all the brown people"? They are never going to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants, all they will achieve is losing the left-wing vote.
    - incone123 1y ago
      Recently the prime minister delivered a speech and then later walked the entire thing back saying that he hadn't read it before delivering it. A man who has declared that he is nothing more than a text to speech engine probably doesn't have a plan.
    - Nursie 1y ago
      I think that the boats thing stirs up ideas that migration is out of control, that the government is unable or unwilling to get a grip on the situation, that the system (even if they don't know what the system is, or even if there is a system) is being abused and somehow cheated. That's (IMHO) why it's so easy to get people riled up on irregular migration. I'm not sure if they end that route that they would need to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants any further, but in the current climate they will need to be able to make the case that the country can decide who comes in, and that migration is to the benefit of everyone, migrant or not. Again, it doesn't really matter if it's an actual problem, it is an important enough perceived problem that they need to be able to show they have a grip on it and are running the show in the interests of the average Brit on the street. Then to really put the issue to bed, they'll need to do something about the failing services and general feeling of decline in the UK. As I said in response to a sister comment - you don't get many nazis when people feel their lives are going well. It's not so concerning if some out group is getting a slice of the cake if you feel you're getting yours too. It's when your slice seems to get a little smaller every day that you start looking for scapegoats. Of course the other question is - will they actually lose the left wing vote? Or would they win it back? Opinion polls in UK politics (from what I've heard on the radio) put the politics of 'Reform' voters left of centre - they're keen on renationalising rail, water and electricity for a start. All solid left-wing ideas outside of immigration policy, that you'd usually expect to hear from Labour supporters.
- octo888 1y ago
  Never waste a good crisis
  - hn_throw2025 1y ago
    You are correct. The Identity Cards Act of 2006 was brought in by Blair’s Labour Government under the guise of preventing terrorism, the hot topic at the time. It was repealed by the incoming Tory/Liberal coalition under the Identity Documents Act 2010. Lobbying for Digital ID cards continued by the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change” amongst others.
- sunshine-o 1y ago
  Yes and keep in mind that while the common law abiding citizen feels like he is living in the 1984 novel, most governments have no idea who is actually walking around, a resident or citizen in their countries. It is now anywhere between a 5% to 20% error margin in "the west". Worst I knew for sure of a specific country which had no databases of who was currently imprisoned, with inmates just walking out. Yes, it is that bad. At the end it can just be viewed as an IT problem, the same way most corporations have multiple CRM and have been working on "a 360 view of their customers" for decades. Even most licensed, audited banks have those types of error margins if you really asked them to provide a clean list of their clients. So all we hear about Digital IDs is a marketing term for the new version of that database they are working on. A lot of countries were already collecting fingerprints when issuing IDs decades ago. But those projects fails like most CRMs. So now the UK and others are arresting people for Facebook posts because it is actually a good database. Probably way better than their actual fingerprints or criminals databases. I am not sure if you should be terrified or just not care about those announcements.
jufger 1y ago
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Nursie 1y ago
I can think of several, which problem were you thinking of? In lots of countries you need a specific right to work, and people who are on holiday visas or who are making asylum applications, or have simply entered the country without the right to do so, are not allowed to work. Some consider these restrictions themselves to be a problem. Currently, employers in the UK are legally required to check the right-to-work status of people they employ. This is usually done with a random assortment of ID documents and visa status checks. The proposal (I think) is to replace this and other functions with "Britcard", a digital ID system. So another problem might be that government security schemes are usually pretty bad. And a further one could be that there's little to stop (say) an asylum applicant from 'borrowing' someone else's britcard-enabled phone to sign on and work Uber Eats illegally, which is one of the issues that they are allegedly trying to tackle. Beyond that ... sure there's massive privacy implications etc etc. So yeah, which problem did you have in mind?
wakawaka28 1y ago
It doesn't solve any immigration problem at all. It's just a dumb excuse for a bunch of bullshit.
mrtksn 1y ago
The banks and service providers can ask for your digital ID, the employers can ask for your digital ID and when that becomes the standart you will have very hard time to have a life in UK without having all the permissions. Most of EU and many other countries have something like that, at least you have a citizenship or resident number that they can check against to see what's your situation. In UK though, everything is run over proof of address and it's quite annoying for new immigrants(legal or not) because its circular. You can't have anything that can be used as proof of address without having proof of address already. At some point you manage to break circle by first having something that doesn't require proof of address but it is serious enough to be accepted as one, i.e. I know people who were riding the tube without tapping in so that when they are caught the government will send them a letter about their fine and they can use the letter to open a bank account. The Turkish version is both great, annoying and terrible.Great because you can do all your government stuff and some other stuff like see your full medical history, make an appointment etc or managing your service subscription(water, electricity, cable. GSM etc) from the government portal. Annoying because whatever you buy beyond groceries now they are asking for your ID number and all purchases are becoming a chore. Terrible because these systems are regularly hacked and all your private data is online for sale and some even run an API to access your govt stuff live. It works fine to manage legal immigration, you give the immigrants the ID so the can have their subscriptions etc. Once they are no longer wanted you know where to find them and make providers cut them off. It doesn't work for illegal immigrants because since they can't register to anything they end up just asking a friend to start them a subscription or pay extra to have some employee start them a subscription that in the records look like its for the employee.
- wsc981 1y ago
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  - mrtksn 1y ago
    That's just propaganda. It does matter if you are legal or not a lot. It's extremely hard for an illegal immigrant to have a life in EU. Free housing is some shithole where you have to stay all the time until you are processed and that can take years, healthcare is something very basic if you get injured and welfare is some very basic food or money to buy food. Some countries with enough resources may provide something slightly better or use you as a method to transfer money to local businesses by putting you in a hotel room and giving you pocket change instead of running proper immigration camps. If you think that its so great being immigrant burn you documentation and enjoy the experience. You understand that you can too claim that you lost your ID, right? I don't understand why people are this gullible, its widespread to believe that its a lifehack to be an illegal immigrant. If you like it that much, just become one.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents? Not saying it's a good tradeoff. But executed competently, it makes sense in theory.
- monerozcash 1y ago
  But it's not very hard to forge the application papers. Passport fraud is already not uncommon in Britain, people are getting authentic passports with cryptographic signatures using dishonest applications every single day.
  - hdgvhicv 1y ago
    So a forged or stolen id card will be impossible?
    - incone123 1y ago
      Can't say until the implementation is revealed, but the person you replied to pointed out that fraud at the application stage is a problem.
    - monerozcash 1y ago
      That depends on the actual implementation of the checking. For example despite passports having chips, essentially no passport control is going to deny you entry if your genuine passport has a broken chip. So currently at least, a good forged passport will work everywhere except on e-gates. Although on the other hand actually procuring for example a decent forged polycarbonate passport (which most new EU passports are) is next to impossible, the printing techniques used require such expensive machinery that criminals simply don't have access to them. I've held probably thousands of forged passports, never seen a decent polycarbonate one. Perfect EU id cards you can find everywhere, a lot of them still printed on Teslin.
- logifail 1y ago
  > It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents? Unless there is both serious pressure from the state and the population at large supports a massive increase in checking and being checked I struggle to see this working. During the pandemic various countries experimented with mandating showing of QR codes to do stuff to "prove" compliance ... yet looking back on that, all it seems to have done is accelerate the erosion of trust in politicians and systems of government :/
wsc981 1y ago
Of course a digital id doesn’t prevent illegal immigration. Proper border checks prevent illegal immigration. The digital ids are introduced for other reasons - this is something Tony Blair has been pushing for a long time.
- derektank 1y ago
  Proper border checks don't do much if people enter the country legally but overstay their visas IDs (along with verification laws) discourage employers from hiring unauthorized immigrants, and without access to gainful employment, many will opt to return to their country of origin, or choose not to come in the first place.
  - arrowsmith 1y ago
    You are describing the current system. Employers can receive business-ending fines (at least in theory) for hiring illegal labour. I’ve never worked a job in the UK that didn’t require me to prove my right to work here, eg by showing them my passport. Digitising the IDs will make no difference. And frankly, if you believe this is actually about immigration then I’m embarrassed for you. Everyone can see that they’re just using the current crisis an excuse to ram through the unpopular thing that they've wanted for decades. It won’t stop the boats.
    - incone123 1y ago
      I have never seen a report of a business ending because of a fine. I have seen reports of hospitality business having to close because they lost their alcohol licence, where the licencee employing illegal immigrants was deemed not to be a fit and proper person.
      - arrowsmith 1y ago
        On paper, the punishment for hiring illegal labour is £45k per worker for the first offence and up to £60k for repeat offences[0]. That's enough to ruin a small business. Whether or not these laws are actually enforced is another matter. [Insert obligatory reference to Turkish barbershops]. But I've been asked to show ID at every job I've ever had, so companies obviously care about it even if the risk is low. [0] source: https://www.irwinmitchell.com/news-and-insights/expert-comment/post/102kppz/civil-penalties-for-employing-illegal-workers-why-employers-must-act-now https://www.irwinmitchell.com/news-and-insights/expert-comme...
lmm 1y ago
> I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true? Yes. The rules are complex, and currently the government essentially deputizes employers and banks to enforce them; anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other. I hate the UK surveillance state as much as anyone, but one-stop ID verification managed by the government is honestly less bad than the current patchwork. The banks are already "voluntarily" sharing everyone's identity information with the government, without any of the legal checks and balances that would apply to an official system. > If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here. Stop vagueposting. If you have something to say, say it.
- rtpg 1y ago
  > anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other. I don't get this. Is there nothing like some sort of number to register any tax withholding or the like? I imagine that tax authorities and immigration authorities don't actually cooperate together (and for good reason!) but my impression for places like the US is that you really do have to provide some sort of number provided by the government for most kinds of employment. Unless of course you're just not trying to pay payroll taxes I guess?
  - logifail 1y ago
    > some sort of number provided by the government There are countries where each citizen has one unique identifier (Sweden's "personnummer", Denmark's CPR). The UK is definitely not one of those! [yet] Instead there are many different identifiers, each for a different purpose, and stored in different systems which almost certainly don't talk to each other. Just for starters: NHS number for healthcare, National Insurance number for social security and pensions, Unique Taxpayer Reference for tax, Passport (with a number that changes when you renew your passport), Driving licence (with a "number"[alphanumeric] which stays constant even when you renew)... Multiple overlapping identifiers... and I may have missed some :)
viraptor 1y ago
If anything it could help legal immigration. There's a bootstrapping issue where you need a utility bill to open a bank account and a bank account to get paid and get paid to pay the utility bill. And also need all 3 to rent a property to live in. You can choose the right providers to work around that with just your passport, but that involves a bit of work and research. No idea how that would solve anything illegal though and realistically, I don't think they do either.
- monerozcash 1y ago
  Presumably most legal immigrants already have bank accounts overseas and do not suffer from this bootstrapping issue.
  - piperswe 1y ago
    Good luck paying rent/utilities in the UK, or proving a UK address, with a foreign (especially non-SEPA) bank account
    - cdsghh 1y ago
      I have been doing so for years, never had a problem.
      - viraptor 1y ago
        You have not been proving your UK address with your account abroad. You may have used it for other purposes, but not that.
        cdsghh 1y ago
        I have done that once too, just changed the account address to my UK address and printed a PDF statement. No problem whatsoever. But anyway, you can just get utilies and pay with foreign account. This gets you an utility bill.
  - 1y ago
gethly 1y ago
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem It does not. That is not what this is for. It is just how they are selling it to the public. Just like with age verification for porn sites to supposedly protect the children or how they limit your cache and financial transactions to supposedly fight money laundering and financing terrorism(what a joke). It's all about monitoring and controlling citizens offline and online to gain full control over their lives. Yes, it sounds Orwellian and no, it is not a joke. Digital wallets and money comes next. This way the government will be able to actually control your behavior. Why do they do that? Why not. It makes their lives easier as they do not have to be accountable to the people that voted for these public servants to manage the country and instead can push unpopular agendas by their puppeteers whom have private agendas of their own that usually, essentially always, goes against the well being of the population and nation itself. Politics has not changed since we first discovered fire. This is nothing new. We just have better technology.
Lio 1y ago
I’m not sure how about illegal immigration but, coincidentally, it’s really handy for tracking people’s online activity when combined with the Online Safety Act. You know, coincidentally. (Oh, hold on I guess it helps with immigration numbers because people won’t want to put up with this bullshit.)
shortercode 1y ago
Every job I’ve worked in the last 10 years has asked to see my passport so they can check I’m allowed to work in this country. I expect employers who aren’t checking don’t care, and digital ID isn’t going to change this.
- monerozcash 1y ago
  Yeah, and they'll accept any document you buy from the internet for 5 quid that vaguely resembles a passport.
mechanicum 1y ago
I don’t think so, no. This is how it works today: https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work If your new hire is a British or Irish citizen, you ask for their passport on their first day and retain a photo/scan. In most cases this means that a layperson has to verify that the (possibly foreign) document is genuine, but I don’t think fake passports are a statistically meaningful problem. If they have a visa or, probably most likely in recent years, EU right to remain, they will have a share code for online verification. That takes you to a page with their details and a passport-style photo that you can download as PDF for your records. Identifying whether someone has the right to work has never been a problem. If somebody is working illegally, it’s because the employer is either knowingly employing them illegally, or doesn’t care/bother to check (or even know that they’re legally required to do so – a perennial problem with early stage startups in London, in my experience).
- tim333 1y ago
  Except there's no obligation to have a passport. That says if you don't you need a birth certificate and an official letter showing a national insurance number. I guess the new thing would substitute for that?
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    > Except there's no obligation to have a passport. No but if you don't have it then you can't show it.
AlecSchueler 1y ago
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? Remember that the "problem" is that it can be used as a political tool by outside parties like Reform. It helps this problem by allowing the Prime Minister and others to appear on TV pointing to strong measures they're implementing. The efficacy of the measures is beyond the attention span of someone watching the headlines.
ninalanyon 1y ago
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? It doesn't. The kind of employer who would employ an illegal immigrant is certainly not going to ask to see ID of any kind. They would surely be especially wary of any electronic ID because that would make it easier to associate them with the immigrant. ID cards are only of any use to legal workers and honest employers. If the UK wants the benefits of a solid ID it should look to Scandinavia. In Norway everyone has a unique number in the population register and this ID is your user ID for all state services. Employers can ask for this number and look you up. Of course it still doesn't prevent people working on the black for cash in hand but neither will an ID card or ID app. There is no appetite for ID cards in Norway either, yet successive governments keep pushing the idea despite there being no compelling reason to believe that any problems will be solved by them.
ahoka 1y ago
But illegal immigration, like bicycle theft, is a demand and not a supply driven problem.

jesterson 1y ago

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Insanity 1y ago

In all fairness, the “immigration” story is likely just a convenient spin on a more realistic goal of state surveillance on it’s own citizens.

Nursie 1y ago
While there is almost guaranteed to be an aspect of this, the UK is going through a period where immigration is in the news constantly and the populist party "Reform UK" are on the rise. The Labour government has realised that whatever their own feelings are about people coming to the UK by irregular means and claiming asylum, they need to be seen to recognise the popular narrative right now that the boats must be stopped, and be seen to be taking action. So I don't think the immediate state goal right here is likely to be anything deeper than desperately trying to head off Nigel Farage, who is capturing a lot of public discourse about this 'crisis'.
- pixxel 1y ago
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- gmac 1y ago
  … except that trying to out-Farage Farage (by being bastards to asylum seekers) will lose them many of their traditional supporters (who are not big on being bastards to asylum seekers) and seems unlikely to gain them many Farage supporters (why would they take some half-hearted populist bastardry when they can have the real deal?). The ‘small boats’ narrative is ludicrously over-reported here. It’s such a clear case of those with most of the resources scapegoating those with none of the resources as the cause of everyone else’s problems.
  - Nursie 1y ago
    I don't think any of that matters any more, the issue is so firmly in the public eye that Labour need to show that they've solved it whether it's a 'real' problem or not. > unlikely to gain them many Farage supporters Farage is polling ahead of both major parties at the moment. That support came from somewhere. To characterise all of those supporters as only interested in populist bastardry seems a bit of a surface take on the issue. Why have they turned to someone like that? Most likely they feel their own lives and prospects getting worse and in their dissatisfaction have turned to an easy answer, someone who promises to change everything and blame the outsider. To put it starkly, reductively even, you don't get nazis when everyone feels like their life is on the up and up. Well not many anyway. The mainstream of UK politics needs to get to grips with (perceived?) worsening standards of living and failing services, and actually take action that makes people's lives better. Instead for decades now it has just tinkered at the edges, seemingly run by ambitionless accountants. Shuffling half a percent here, half a percent there, not really achieving very much but spewing vast volumes of hot air. It's not really a wonder to me that a sizeable minority are looking outside of that, or are getting frustrated that they can't get a doctor's appointment or the roads are falling apart. It's all too easy for Fartrage to say - look over there!
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      > Instead for decades now it has just tinkered at the edges, seemingly run by ambitionless accountants. Shuffling half a percent here, half a percent there, not really achieving very much but spewing vast volumes of hot air Speaking from the other side of the pond, we can say quite confidently that the solution is not electing someone who will make reckless, bold moves. The brain trust here voted against “ambitionless, measured improvements” and for that, we got a chaotic circus.
- crote 1y ago
  The media are (mostly) just parrotting what the politicians are saying. Having both major parties talking about "stopping the boat" isn't going to quiet down that down, is it? It'll just shift the Overton window. What's Labour's plan when the boats are stopped and Reform progresses to "round up and deport all the brown people"? They are never going to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants, all they will achieve is losing the left-wing vote.
  - incone123 1y ago
    Recently the prime minister delivered a speech and then later walked the entire thing back saying that he hadn't read it before delivering it. A man who has declared that he is nothing more than a text to speech engine probably doesn't have a plan.
  - Nursie 1y ago
    I think that the boats thing stirs up ideas that migration is out of control, that the government is unable or unwilling to get a grip on the situation, that the system (even if they don't know what the system is, or even if there is a system) is being abused and somehow cheated. That's (IMHO) why it's so easy to get people riled up on irregular migration. I'm not sure if they end that route that they would need to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants any further, but in the current climate they will need to be able to make the case that the country can decide who comes in, and that migration is to the benefit of everyone, migrant or not. Again, it doesn't really matter if it's an actual problem, it is an important enough perceived problem that they need to be able to show they have a grip on it and are running the show in the interests of the average Brit on the street. Then to really put the issue to bed, they'll need to do something about the failing services and general feeling of decline in the UK. As I said in response to a sister comment - you don't get many nazis when people feel their lives are going well. It's not so concerning if some out group is getting a slice of the cake if you feel you're getting yours too. It's when your slice seems to get a little smaller every day that you start looking for scapegoats. Of course the other question is - will they actually lose the left wing vote? Or would they win it back? Opinion polls in UK politics (from what I've heard on the radio) put the politics of 'Reform' voters left of centre - they're keen on renationalising rail, water and electricity for a start. All solid left-wing ideas outside of immigration policy, that you'd usually expect to hear from Labour supporters.
octo888 1y ago
Never waste a good crisis
- hn_throw2025 1y ago
  You are correct. The Identity Cards Act of 2006 was brought in by Blair’s Labour Government under the guise of preventing terrorism, the hot topic at the time. It was repealed by the incoming Tory/Liberal coalition under the Identity Documents Act 2010. Lobbying for Digital ID cards continued by the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change” amongst others.
sunshine-o 1y ago
Yes and keep in mind that while the common law abiding citizen feels like he is living in the 1984 novel, most governments have no idea who is actually walking around, a resident or citizen in their countries. It is now anywhere between a 5% to 20% error margin in "the west". Worst I knew for sure of a specific country which had no databases of who was currently imprisoned, with inmates just walking out. Yes, it is that bad. At the end it can just be viewed as an IT problem, the same way most corporations have multiple CRM and have been working on "a 360 view of their customers" for decades. Even most licensed, audited banks have those types of error margins if you really asked them to provide a clean list of their clients. So all we hear about Digital IDs is a marketing term for the new version of that database they are working on. A lot of countries were already collecting fingerprints when issuing IDs decades ago. But those projects fails like most CRMs. So now the UK and others are arresting people for Facebook posts because it is actually a good database. Probably way better than their actual fingerprints or criminals databases. I am not sure if you should be terrified or just not care about those announcements.

jufger 1y ago

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Nursie 1y ago

I can think of several, which problem were you thinking of? In lots of countries you need a specific right to work, and people who are on holiday visas or who are making asylum applications, or have simply entered the country without the right to do so, are not allowed to work. Some consider these restrictions themselves to be a problem. Currently, employers in the UK are legally required to check the right-to-work status of people they employ. This is usually done with a random assortment of ID documents and visa status checks. The proposal (I think) is to replace this and other functions with "Britcard", a digital ID system. So another problem might be that government security schemes are usually pretty bad. And a further one could be that there's little to stop (say) an asylum applicant from 'borrowing' someone else's britcard-enabled phone to sign on and work Uber Eats illegally, which is one of the issues that they are allegedly trying to tackle. Beyond that ... sure there's massive privacy implications etc etc. So yeah, which problem did you have in mind?

wakawaka28 1y ago

It doesn't solve any immigration problem at all. It's just a dumb excuse for a bunch of bullshit.

mrtksn 1y ago

The banks and service providers can ask for your digital ID, the employers can ask for your digital ID and when that becomes the standart you will have very hard time to have a life in UK without having all the permissions. Most of EU and many other countries have something like that, at least you have a citizenship or resident number that they can check against to see what's your situation. In UK though, everything is run over proof of address and it's quite annoying for new immigrants(legal or not) because its circular. You can't have anything that can be used as proof of address without having proof of address already. At some point you manage to break circle by first having something that doesn't require proof of address but it is serious enough to be accepted as one, i.e. I know people who were riding the tube without tapping in so that when they are caught the government will send them a letter about their fine and they can use the letter to open a bank account. The Turkish version is both great, annoying and terrible.Great because you can do all your government stuff and some other stuff like see your full medical history, make an appointment etc or managing your service subscription(water, electricity, cable. GSM etc) from the government portal. Annoying because whatever you buy beyond groceries now they are asking for your ID number and all purchases are becoming a chore. Terrible because these systems are regularly hacked and all your private data is online for sale and some even run an API to access your govt stuff live. It works fine to manage legal immigration, you give the immigrants the ID so the can have their subscriptions etc. Once they are no longer wanted you know where to find them and make providers cut them off. It doesn't work for illegal immigrants because since they can't register to anything they end up just asking a friend to start them a subscription or pay extra to have some employee start them a subscription that in the records look like its for the employee.

wsc981 1y ago
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- mrtksn 1y ago
  That's just propaganda. It does matter if you are legal or not a lot. It's extremely hard for an illegal immigrant to have a life in EU. Free housing is some shithole where you have to stay all the time until you are processed and that can take years, healthcare is something very basic if you get injured and welfare is some very basic food or money to buy food. Some countries with enough resources may provide something slightly better or use you as a method to transfer money to local businesses by putting you in a hotel room and giving you pocket change instead of running proper immigration camps. If you think that its so great being immigrant burn you documentation and enjoy the experience. You understand that you can too claim that you lost your ID, right? I don't understand why people are this gullible, its widespread to believe that its a lifehack to be an illegal immigrant. If you like it that much, just become one.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents? Not saying it's a good tradeoff. But executed competently, it makes sense in theory.

monerozcash 1y ago
But it's not very hard to forge the application papers. Passport fraud is already not uncommon in Britain, people are getting authentic passports with cryptographic signatures using dishonest applications every single day.
- hdgvhicv 1y ago
  So a forged or stolen id card will be impossible?
  - incone123 1y ago
    Can't say until the implementation is revealed, but the person you replied to pointed out that fraud at the application stage is a problem.
  - monerozcash 1y ago
    That depends on the actual implementation of the checking. For example despite passports having chips, essentially no passport control is going to deny you entry if your genuine passport has a broken chip. So currently at least, a good forged passport will work everywhere except on e-gates. Although on the other hand actually procuring for example a decent forged polycarbonate passport (which most new EU passports are) is next to impossible, the printing techniques used require such expensive machinery that criminals simply don't have access to them. I've held probably thousands of forged passports, never seen a decent polycarbonate one. Perfect EU id cards you can find everywhere, a lot of them still printed on Teslin.
logifail 1y ago
> It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents? Unless there is both serious pressure from the state and the population at large supports a massive increase in checking and being checked I struggle to see this working. During the pandemic various countries experimented with mandating showing of QR codes to do stuff to "prove" compliance ... yet looking back on that, all it seems to have done is accelerate the erosion of trust in politicians and systems of government :/

wsc981 1y ago

Of course a digital id doesn’t prevent illegal immigration. Proper border checks prevent illegal immigration. The digital ids are introduced for other reasons - this is something Tony Blair has been pushing for a long time.

derektank 1y ago
Proper border checks don't do much if people enter the country legally but overstay their visas IDs (along with verification laws) discourage employers from hiring unauthorized immigrants, and without access to gainful employment, many will opt to return to their country of origin, or choose not to come in the first place.
- arrowsmith 1y ago
  You are describing the current system. Employers can receive business-ending fines (at least in theory) for hiring illegal labour. I’ve never worked a job in the UK that didn’t require me to prove my right to work here, eg by showing them my passport. Digitising the IDs will make no difference. And frankly, if you believe this is actually about immigration then I’m embarrassed for you. Everyone can see that they’re just using the current crisis an excuse to ram through the unpopular thing that they've wanted for decades. It won’t stop the boats.
  - incone123 1y ago
    I have never seen a report of a business ending because of a fine. I have seen reports of hospitality business having to close because they lost their alcohol licence, where the licencee employing illegal immigrants was deemed not to be a fit and proper person.
    - arrowsmith 1y ago
      On paper, the punishment for hiring illegal labour is £45k per worker for the first offence and up to £60k for repeat offences[0]. That's enough to ruin a small business. Whether or not these laws are actually enforced is another matter. [Insert obligatory reference to Turkish barbershops]. But I've been asked to show ID at every job I've ever had, so companies obviously care about it even if the risk is low. [0] source: https://www.irwinmitchell.com/news-and-insights/expert-comment/post/102kppz/civil-penalties-for-employing-illegal-workers-why-employers-must-act-now https://www.irwinmitchell.com/news-and-insights/expert-comme...

lmm 1y ago

> I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true? Yes. The rules are complex, and currently the government essentially deputizes employers and banks to enforce them; anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other. I hate the UK surveillance state as much as anyone, but one-stop ID verification managed by the government is honestly less bad than the current patchwork. The banks are already "voluntarily" sharing everyone's identity information with the government, without any of the legal checks and balances that would apply to an official system. > If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here. Stop vagueposting. If you have something to say, say it.

rtpg 1y ago
> anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other. I don't get this. Is there nothing like some sort of number to register any tax withholding or the like? I imagine that tax authorities and immigration authorities don't actually cooperate together (and for good reason!) but my impression for places like the US is that you really do have to provide some sort of number provided by the government for most kinds of employment. Unless of course you're just not trying to pay payroll taxes I guess?
- logifail 1y ago
  > some sort of number provided by the government There are countries where each citizen has one unique identifier (Sweden's "personnummer", Denmark's CPR). The UK is definitely not one of those! [yet] Instead there are many different identifiers, each for a different purpose, and stored in different systems which almost certainly don't talk to each other. Just for starters: NHS number for healthcare, National Insurance number for social security and pensions, Unique Taxpayer Reference for tax, Passport (with a number that changes when you renew your passport), Driving licence (with a "number"[alphanumeric] which stays constant even when you renew)... Multiple overlapping identifiers... and I may have missed some :)

viraptor 1y ago

If anything it could help legal immigration. There's a bootstrapping issue where you need a utility bill to open a bank account and a bank account to get paid and get paid to pay the utility bill. And also need all 3 to rent a property to live in. You can choose the right providers to work around that with just your passport, but that involves a bit of work and research. No idea how that would solve anything illegal though and realistically, I don't think they do either.

monerozcash 1y ago
Presumably most legal immigrants already have bank accounts overseas and do not suffer from this bootstrapping issue.
- piperswe 1y ago
  Good luck paying rent/utilities in the UK, or proving a UK address, with a foreign (especially non-SEPA) bank account
  - cdsghh 1y ago
    I have been doing so for years, never had a problem.
    - viraptor 1y ago
      You have not been proving your UK address with your account abroad. You may have used it for other purposes, but not that.
      - cdsghh 1y ago
        I have done that once too, just changed the account address to my UK address and printed a PDF statement. No problem whatsoever. But anyway, you can just get utilies and pay with foreign account. This gets you an utility bill.
- 1y ago

gethly 1y ago

> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem It does not. That is not what this is for. It is just how they are selling it to the public. Just like with age verification for porn sites to supposedly protect the children or how they limit your cache and financial transactions to supposedly fight money laundering and financing terrorism(what a joke). It's all about monitoring and controlling citizens offline and online to gain full control over their lives. Yes, it sounds Orwellian and no, it is not a joke. Digital wallets and money comes next. This way the government will be able to actually control your behavior. Why do they do that? Why not. It makes their lives easier as they do not have to be accountable to the people that voted for these public servants to manage the country and instead can push unpopular agendas by their puppeteers whom have private agendas of their own that usually, essentially always, goes against the well being of the population and nation itself. Politics has not changed since we first discovered fire. This is nothing new. We just have better technology.

Lio 1y ago

I’m not sure how about illegal immigration but, coincidentally, it’s really handy for tracking people’s online activity when combined with the Online Safety Act. You know, coincidentally. (Oh, hold on I guess it helps with immigration numbers because people won’t want to put up with this bullshit.)

shortercode 1y ago

Every job I’ve worked in the last 10 years has asked to see my passport so they can check I’m allowed to work in this country. I expect employers who aren’t checking don’t care, and digital ID isn’t going to change this.

monerozcash 1y ago
Yeah, and they'll accept any document you buy from the internet for 5 quid that vaguely resembles a passport.

mechanicum 1y ago

I don’t think so, no. This is how it works today: https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work If your new hire is a British or Irish citizen, you ask for their passport on their first day and retain a photo/scan. In most cases this means that a layperson has to verify that the (possibly foreign) document is genuine, but I don’t think fake passports are a statistically meaningful problem. If they have a visa or, probably most likely in recent years, EU right to remain, they will have a share code for online verification. That takes you to a page with their details and a passport-style photo that you can download as PDF for your records. Identifying whether someone has the right to work has never been a problem. If somebody is working illegally, it’s because the employer is either knowingly employing them illegally, or doesn’t care/bother to check (or even know that they’re legally required to do so – a perennial problem with early stage startups in London, in my experience).

tim333 1y ago
Except there's no obligation to have a passport. That says if you don't you need a birth certificate and an official letter showing a national insurance number. I guess the new thing would substitute for that?
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  > Except there's no obligation to have a passport. No but if you don't have it then you can't show it.

AlecSchueler 1y ago

> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? Remember that the "problem" is that it can be used as a political tool by outside parties like Reform. It helps this problem by allowing the Prime Minister and others to appear on TV pointing to strong measures they're implementing. The efficacy of the measures is beyond the attention span of someone watching the headlines.

ninalanyon 1y ago

> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? It doesn't. The kind of employer who would employ an illegal immigrant is certainly not going to ask to see ID of any kind. They would surely be especially wary of any electronic ID because that would make it easier to associate them with the immigrant. ID cards are only of any use to legal workers and honest employers. If the UK wants the benefits of a solid ID it should look to Scandinavia. In Norway everyone has a unique number in the population register and this ID is your user ID for all state services. Employers can ask for this number and look you up. Of course it still doesn't prevent people working on the black for cash in hand but neither will an ID card or ID app. There is no appetite for ID cards in Norway either, yet successive governments keep pushing the idea despite there being no compelling reason to believe that any problems will be solved by them.

ahoka 1y ago

But illegal immigration, like bicycle theft, is a demand and not a supply driven problem.