The current UK rule on unauthorized immigrants being able to apply for legitimization of their status only after twenty years is inhuman and needs to be revised downward to ten years at least.
This is crucial in order to address the grave humanitarian and economic challenges represented by the massive numbers of unauthorized immigrants whose lives are being increasingly constricted and whose potential for contributing to the economy are being increasingly blocked by progressively harsh immigration laws.
Most of these immigrants are going nowhere regardless of the emergence of increasingly draconian immigration policies. The rules criminalize the money earned by unauthorized immigrants, allowing the government to seize such monies. Businesses are raided and business owners fined large sums for employing unauthorized immigrants. Landlord are liable to a large fine and even prison for letting to unauthorized migrants. Landlords and estate agents require proof of right to stay in the UK before letting out premises.
These rules on housing and work exist on top of extremely tight conditions in terms of which non-EU migrants can be allowed to settle in the UK.
These police state strategies may be seen as ultimately a waste of time as well as a distortion of society, feeding a shadow world magnifying immigrants' susceptibility to exploitation, fueling such criminal activity as people trafficking, inspiring desperate economic survival methods, clamping the lid on potentially huge economic returns if these immigrants are allowed to work freely, generating a boiling underclass that could erupt in ways unanticipated by society.
The current UK immigration regime is also working steadily to hobble the UK's position in education and innovation measured on a global scale, with immigrant demographies central to such initiatives, a centrality evident in immigrant contribution to US dominance in various development indices, being increasingly reminded by constrictive immigration rules that they don't belong in the UK.
Managing immigration is vital on account of inadequacy of resources and security concerns, but such management needs to be humane, not inhumane, needs to operate in terms of recognition of a common, unifying humanity, not criminalizing the human drive to move across space and cultures, a central driving force of human development.
The escalation of harsh immigration laws do not make most unauthorized immigrants return to where they came from. Such people are propelled by a determination that practically nothing can destroy. Their numbers are too huge to be adequately addressed by the policing efforts of the relevant agencies. All harsh laws do is inspire increasingly desperate methods of survival and the growth of a shadow society. Syndicates who exist to provide arranged marriages that facilitate legal stay refine their methods. Trafficking of EU women for such purposes grows increasingly sophisticated. The monies charged by both syndicate operators and private individuals for similar services continue to rise in the thousands of pounds. Unauthorized immigrants are compelled to seek out housing dangerous to their lives because better housing is denied them. People are tempted to engage in financial fraud in order to survive.
These are people who simply want to live basic, decent lives like anyone else but are being pushed into dark corners of human debasement.
The foundational understanding of migration as a human right, a fundamental catalyst to human development, its role in the development of the former British Empire and the reshaping of the world in the image of Europe, inspiring global gravitation to the West, needs to be revisited in relation to UK immigration law.
For now, though, urgent efforts need to be made to integrate immigrants who have already spent a large chunk of their lives in the UK.
Revising down to ten years, a sizable chunk of a human life, the time such people need to have spent in the UK in order to apply for right to settle in the UK, should go a long way to integrating this teeming, hidden population, allowing them to contribute legitimately to society.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
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