Immigration lunacy watch
Every so often, I link to articles here on the UK’s idiotic asylum and immigration policies, and the side-effects which impact on ordinary people. The most recent is a family in Wales, in which the man is a British citizen, but the mother is Brazilian, and they have received conflicting messages sent on the same day telling them both that they are OK to stay, and that they must go back and re-apply in Brazil!
There is a contradiction in the country’s treatment of people who claim to be British but have links outside, which is that asylum policy is being driven by the right-wing press, but the same press will complain loudly when people of mixed parentage have trouble proving themselves to be British. Often, these people were born in an overseas English-speaking country. Not many people know this, but people born overseas to a British mother and a foreign father before a certain date in 1982 are not British citizens. This obviously relates to an act of Parliament passed in 1982 (the same act, I believe, which also contained laws preventing residents of overseas dependencies like the Turks and Caicos Islands settling in the UK – this was, in fact, aimed at Hong Kong Chinese), but why could they not have made all descendents of at least one British parent eligible for citizenship?
While obviously I agree that they should not put up with abuse of the asylum system, they should also make sure that people who are of this country, and have close links with the UK, should not be put to any trouble in order to live in this country. I would like to see the following:
(1) Any child, grandchild or great-grandchild of any British citizen, born while the parent was a citizen, is automatically entitled to citizenship.
(2) Any spouse of a British citizen is automatically entitled to residency. The marriage is assumed to be genuine unless proven otherwise (eg. the couple live apart and show no signs of being a couple).
(3) Any parent of a British citizen is automatically entitled to residency.
(4) Anyone who shows signs of having grown up in the UK is automatically entitled to citizenship. This particularly means speaking English in the customary way (i.e., not with an obvious foreign accent) and being indistinguishable from his or her peers in cultural terms (excepting changes in culture due to such things as religious conversions).
All this, I suppose, is unrealistic given present attitudes to immigrants, although my point is that these people aren’t immigrants, but our own people. As one who has been asked on numerous occasions to consider the possibility of marrying someone in some Muslim country, it’s rather upsetting that some bureaucrat may tell me I’m not allowed to live in my home country with my wife. The notion that they might refuse my children the rights I have is worse still. We hear too much talk of those here without right; we should also make sure those with the right are not prevented from exercising it.
