Thread by @Helenreflects

The prize for most misleading headline for today goes to The Times!
It says: Brexit: £3.5m adverts ask EU citizens to stay
But in reality, the adverts aren't asking us to say, oh no... 1/

The adverts will ask EU citizens to "secure their status after Brexit".
That's not the same as asking us to stay. That's asking us to apply so we won't be kicked out. Big difference.
Settled status is an application process, not a registration process. 2/

If it were a registration process, we'd see a 100% success rate. An application process has no guarantees.
We still don't have clarity about what the UK will do with our personal data when we apply. Still, you want to stay, you have no choice but apply 3/
politics.co.uk/comment-analys…

The UK government seems to hold that they'd be able to process and have 3 million people register in the space of just less than 2 years. That's bonkers. Such a mass registration system is unprecedented, and previous mass registration schemes never have 100% uptake 4/

See e.g., the Indian biometric ID scheme, providing a billion citizens with biometric ID cards. In spite of its large scale, the poor and other vulnerable citizens were still under-enrolled 5/
bbc.co.uk/news/world-asi…

Also, as the BBC glibly points out about the Indian registration scheme "Misuse of the database for state surveillance and targeted coercion is also unpreventable.... " 6/

"Anyone committing her data to such a system is betting for her lifetime that her government will never become totalitarian or even strongly anti-democratic, lest she be subjected to forms of oppression she cannot possibly evade."
Indeed. Not an enviable position to be in. 7/

Indeed. We will have no physical proof of settled status. What if the system crashes, or is subject to cyber-attack? What if a future generation of government does the equivalent of destroying the Windrush landing cards? 8/

Being asked to stay is not the same as being coerced into applying for a status that
* leaves your personal data up for grabs
* has no physical proof of ID
* is not clearly safe from breakdown or cyberattacks
* is unclear how to appeal a negative decision
9/

We're not being asked to stay. We're being asked to apply for an opaque system so we don't pose too much of a headache down the road when the government is massively busy with Brexit (a project that will take decades, as the withdrawal agreement doesn't specify much). 10/

Because of course, with the hostile environment, if we do not apply we will be kicked out. Deported. Detained. It doesn't matter if you're married to a Brit. It doesn't matter if you have British children. It doesn't matter if you have lived here for 20 years. 11/

If we do apply, then hopefully, the UK will play nice and not lose our digital proof, will not change the rules, will not water down our rights later on Brexit hurts and scapegoats must be found, will safeguard the system from cyberattacks and breakdown. Hopefully. 12/

Whatever they're doing they're not asking us to stay. The UK government loves to replace the "queue jumpers" with increased non-EU net migration, because non-EU citizens currently need to jump through more hoops and are more vulnerable to deportation 13/

The UK government, in spite of their Conservative lip service to small government, is very much a fan of big government when it comes to immigrants. Mass surveillance, detention, deportation, ripping families apart.
And that is why we must apply for settled status. /end