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Not at the moment, but the result of the current UK system has been huge uncontrolled levels of immigration leading to deep public resentment, so that may chang

Not at the moment, but the result of the current UK system has been huge uncontrolled levels of immigration leading to deep public resentment, so that may change in the future

mschuster91 1mo ago
> leading to deep public resentment That "public resentment" mostly was fueled by a rabid, out of control yellow press and a healthy dose of Russian propaganda spread by Russia-financed entities (Brexit, UKIP and Reform UK all have been shown to have very suspicious links to Russian money).
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
jarym 1mo ago
‘Uncontrolled’ - surely the control point was the initial application being submitted from abroad? It was very much ‘controlled’. We lost SO many European workers due to the obsession with EU Freedom of Movement that entire sectors like nursing were about to implode without a source of new workers.
room271 1mo ago
The system has already been changed and numbers are falling (and have already fallen) quite dramatically. See Fig 2 here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/yearendingdecember2025 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
- ifwinterco 1mo ago
  Yes that's kind of what I mean - the powers that be are already quietly moving in the direction of cracking down on immigration, because they can see it's now causing them real political problems. Not because they care about doing the right thing, but purely for self preservation reasons
  - rapind 1mo ago
    > Not because they care about doing the right thing, but purely for self preservation reasons Call me crazy, but this is something I want in a democracy. Less ideology and more pragmatism.
DiscoDays 1mo ago
Could you explain a bit more? Not sure what is achieved by forcing people to renew their visas from abroad. I appreciate that, philosophically, it is a way of setting requirements higher, but it does not strike me as principled. From my perspective as an immigrant in the UK, there have got to be so many parameters the UK government can adjust before indulging into performative cruelty. Setting higher requirements for visas, revising what jobs qualify for Skilled Worker visas and such. In fact, my understanding is that this is exactly what they have been doing (rather mildly), and it's been successful.
- ifwinterco 1mo ago
  If the government refuses a visa renewal while the person is in the country and they don’t comply you have to deport them, which is often problematic. If you make it standard procedure that everyone has to leave the country temporarily to renew their visa, the person is already outside your country when you refuse the renewal. Instead of having a deportation challenged in court and mired in paperwork, you simply don’t let them back in. That’s what the parent comment was getting at. Not saying this is right or wrong or it will necessarily happen in the UK, but it’s the kind of change you can make if you want to quietly reduce immigration without fuss about deportations. And that does seem to be the direction that UK policy is going, albeit currently only with baby steps
  - bubblethink 1mo ago
    This would be true if visa and status were the same thing. In the US, they are not. Whether you are legally present in the US is governed by status. So what happens is that your status is valid and even renewed or extended in the US. But your visa expires. And you need to renew the visa just to bring the date on the visa to the same date as your status. You literally go to the consulate and show them your other status document, and they stamp your passport with the date from the other status document. It's all quite silly. A bit like the movie Brazil.
  - DiscoDays 1mo ago
    I find this quite confusing, but then I am far from being an expert on the matter: * Do we expect a high number of people applying for visa renewals and getting rejected? How come? Otherwise, when it comes to people illegally overstaying their visas, how does this policy idea address intentional non-compliance? * Don't legal challenges to deportation of criminals have to do with the deportation rather than visas. It would be convenient if hardened criminals complied with the law and removed the need to deport them, but what would motivate them to do so? The idea seems to be to inconvenience law-abiding visa holders without addressing major concerns, but then I probably misunderstand the concerns. For instance, maybe there is a way of creating legal busy-work when one's visa renewal application gets rejected in a way that is cheap to the individual, but costly for the state, and that this happens on a scale that makes the problem significant. Sounds surprising, and surprising that there'd be no other way to avoid that too!
dijksterhuis 1mo ago
couple of notes — 1a. Illegal immigration has nothing to do with visa based, legal immigration. illegal immigration is the type of immigration people are upset about here in the UK. most people have no problem with legal migration. 1b. anyone claiming the UK’s legal migration is any sort of problem right now, or in the past, should probably not be listened to in any way shape or form for anything they have to say on the matter. 2. a lot of the folks who have illegally entered the country end up asking for asylum, and by law their claims must be processed 3. the dublin convention states something along the lines of “asylum requests must be processed in the first EU country the person entered into”, ie it’s possible to remove people claiming asylum if they initially arrived in a different EU member state country 4. most people get to the uk having traveled through EU member states, because geography. 5. we left the EU, we cannot do 3 anymore. so we have a bunch of people stuck in hotels waiting for asylum claims to be processed. illegal immigration got worse because we left the eu.
- ifwinterco 1mo ago
  People absolutely do have a problem with legal immigration, especially post-Boriswave. If legal immigration means millions of new people every year and rapid demographic change, of course that will cause a political issue. It would be very strange (basically unheard of in human history) if it didn't. People I know who are non-white all report increased racism (mostly not aggressive but noticeable) since Covid, despite having English accents so clearly not being illegal immigrants. That is caused by reckless immigration policy stoking resentment
  - cycomanic 1mo ago
    There are no millions of people every year, stop spreading lies. Net immigration to the UK in 2025 where 170000 people. Decidedly not millions!
    - bluefirebrand 1mo ago
      In Canada it has been closer to 500k per year Maybe not millions per year but millions over a very short time Close to a quarter of our population are immigrants right now. It's become a pretty fragmented society imo as a result.
cycomanic 1mo ago
"huge uncontrolled levels of immigration". Let's put some actual numbers to this. Net immigration in 2025 was about 170k people, over the next 10 years projections are for about 2.2 million net immigration. So that's about 3-4%. However, UK population is shrinking without immigration so net population growth with immigration is about 1.7 million. Not sure if that matches a definition of huge, but it's important to note that with a shrinking population without immigration the UK would be in serious economic trouble (like every country). This is even more exaberated due to the aging population that the shrinking population implies. Immigrants like always are the convenient scapegoat that is being used to distract from the increasing gap between the rich and everyone else.
- vintermann 1mo ago
  It's a little more than scapegoating, though. It's also absolutely about social dumping. Yes, the UK would be in serious trouble without immigrants, but richer people would be disproportionately in trouble, especially non-working ones (i.e. retirees). Working poorer people, well they wouldn't be better off maybe, but they'd have some compensation in that their labour would be in much higher demand.

Not at the moment, but the result of the current UK system has been huge uncontrolled levels of immigration leading to deep public resentment, so that may change in the future

mschuster91 1mo ago

> leading to deep public resentment That "public resentment" mostly was fueled by a rabid, out of control yellow press and a healthy dose of Russian propaganda spread by Russia-financed entities (Brexit, UKIP and Reform UK all have been shown to have very suspicious links to Russian money).

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

jarym 1mo ago

‘Uncontrolled’ - surely the control point was the initial application being submitted from abroad? It was very much ‘controlled’. We lost SO many European workers due to the obsession with EU Freedom of Movement that entire sectors like nursing were about to implode without a source of new workers.

room271 1mo ago

The system has already been changed and numbers are falling (and have already fallen) quite dramatically. See Fig 2 here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/yearendingdecember2025 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

ifwinterco 1mo ago
Yes that's kind of what I mean - the powers that be are already quietly moving in the direction of cracking down on immigration, because they can see it's now causing them real political problems. Not because they care about doing the right thing, but purely for self preservation reasons
- rapind 1mo ago
  > Not because they care about doing the right thing, but purely for self preservation reasons Call me crazy, but this is something I want in a democracy. Less ideology and more pragmatism.

DiscoDays 1mo ago

Could you explain a bit more? Not sure what is achieved by forcing people to renew their visas from abroad. I appreciate that, philosophically, it is a way of setting requirements higher, but it does not strike me as principled. From my perspective as an immigrant in the UK, there have got to be so many parameters the UK government can adjust before indulging into performative cruelty. Setting higher requirements for visas, revising what jobs qualify for Skilled Worker visas and such. In fact, my understanding is that this is exactly what they have been doing (rather mildly), and it's been successful.

ifwinterco 1mo ago
If the government refuses a visa renewal while the person is in the country and they don’t comply you have to deport them, which is often problematic. If you make it standard procedure that everyone has to leave the country temporarily to renew their visa, the person is already outside your country when you refuse the renewal. Instead of having a deportation challenged in court and mired in paperwork, you simply don’t let them back in. That’s what the parent comment was getting at. Not saying this is right or wrong or it will necessarily happen in the UK, but it’s the kind of change you can make if you want to quietly reduce immigration without fuss about deportations. And that does seem to be the direction that UK policy is going, albeit currently only with baby steps
- bubblethink 1mo ago
  This would be true if visa and status were the same thing. In the US, they are not. Whether you are legally present in the US is governed by status. So what happens is that your status is valid and even renewed or extended in the US. But your visa expires. And you need to renew the visa just to bring the date on the visa to the same date as your status. You literally go to the consulate and show them your other status document, and they stamp your passport with the date from the other status document. It's all quite silly. A bit like the movie Brazil.
- DiscoDays 1mo ago
  I find this quite confusing, but then I am far from being an expert on the matter: * Do we expect a high number of people applying for visa renewals and getting rejected? How come? Otherwise, when it comes to people illegally overstaying their visas, how does this policy idea address intentional non-compliance? * Don't legal challenges to deportation of criminals have to do with the deportation rather than visas. It would be convenient if hardened criminals complied with the law and removed the need to deport them, but what would motivate them to do so? The idea seems to be to inconvenience law-abiding visa holders without addressing major concerns, but then I probably misunderstand the concerns. For instance, maybe there is a way of creating legal busy-work when one's visa renewal application gets rejected in a way that is cheap to the individual, but costly for the state, and that this happens on a scale that makes the problem significant. Sounds surprising, and surprising that there'd be no other way to avoid that too!

dijksterhuis 1mo ago

couple of notes — 1a. Illegal immigration has nothing to do with visa based, legal immigration. illegal immigration is the type of immigration people are upset about here in the UK. most people have no problem with legal migration. 1b. anyone claiming the UK’s legal migration is any sort of problem right now, or in the past, should probably not be listened to in any way shape or form for anything they have to say on the matter. 2. a lot of the folks who have illegally entered the country end up asking for asylum, and by law their claims must be processed 3. the dublin convention states something along the lines of “asylum requests must be processed in the first EU country the person entered into”, ie it’s possible to remove people claiming asylum if they initially arrived in a different EU member state country 4. most people get to the uk having traveled through EU member states, because geography. 5. we left the EU, we cannot do 3 anymore. so we have a bunch of people stuck in hotels waiting for asylum claims to be processed. illegal immigration got worse because we left the eu.

ifwinterco 1mo ago
People absolutely do have a problem with legal immigration, especially post-Boriswave. If legal immigration means millions of new people every year and rapid demographic change, of course that will cause a political issue. It would be very strange (basically unheard of in human history) if it didn't. People I know who are non-white all report increased racism (mostly not aggressive but noticeable) since Covid, despite having English accents so clearly not being illegal immigrants. That is caused by reckless immigration policy stoking resentment
- cycomanic 1mo ago
  There are no millions of people every year, stop spreading lies. Net immigration to the UK in 2025 where 170000 people. Decidedly not millions!
  - bluefirebrand 1mo ago
    In Canada it has been closer to 500k per year Maybe not millions per year but millions over a very short time Close to a quarter of our population are immigrants right now. It's become a pretty fragmented society imo as a result.

cycomanic 1mo ago

"huge uncontrolled levels of immigration". Let's put some actual numbers to this. Net immigration in 2025 was about 170k people, over the next 10 years projections are for about 2.2 million net immigration. So that's about 3-4%. However, UK population is shrinking without immigration so net population growth with immigration is about 1.7 million. Not sure if that matches a definition of huge, but it's important to note that with a shrinking population without immigration the UK would be in serious economic trouble (like every country). This is even more exaberated due to the aging population that the shrinking population implies. Immigrants like always are the convenient scapegoat that is being used to distract from the increasing gap between the rich and everyone else.

vintermann 1mo ago
It's a little more than scapegoating, though. It's also absolutely about social dumping. Yes, the UK would be in serious trouble without immigrants, but richer people would be disproportionately in trouble, especially non-working ones (i.e. retirees). Working poorer people, well they wouldn't be better off maybe, but they'd have some compensation in that their labour would be in much higher demand.