1. Abandoning the Rwanda scheme would be a massive win for the Home Office. The department has limited budget, staff, time and energy. For years that has been frittered away on developing and implementing ideas that are not just impractical but actually make the situation worse. 2. The latest version of the Rwanda scheme involves declaring all asylum claims 'inadmissible' and a legal ban on refugee status being granted. Unless tens of thousands of asylum seekers can be removed to Rwanda then it creates a perma-backlog of asylum claims.

🧵 1. The Illegal Migration Act prohibits any person arriving illegally after 7 March 2023 from being granted asylum or legal status. One of three things can happen to them: (a) be removed to a third country, (b) voluntarily depart to their own country or (c) stay in the UK with no legal status. 2. Voluntary departures likely to be tiny. So unless no. of removals to Rwanda is equal to or greater than number of new arrivals, there will be an ever-growing perma-backlog of asylum seekers who can never be granted status. More people will enter the backlog than leave it.

1. I don’t think preventing care workers bringing their family will cause a shortage of care workers. I agree with @alanmanning4 and @robfordmancs on this. Plenty will still want to come here without family. 2. It is possible the average profile of care workers might change from women with partners and children to women or men without dependent children or partners. Not likely though.

1. I don’t know about you but I’m totally exhausted. Doesn’t help that I’ve been bed-ridden for most of the last week, admittedly. The recent government “climbdown” on the minimum income rule for spouses and partners is a good illustration of why I’m so, so tired of it all. 2. The pattern is a deliberately or incompetently over-egged govt announcement which is so stupid or outrageous it will have a calamitous effect. Outcry and reality intervene. The government “compromises”. But the new plan is still a terrible one.

1. When Braverman (and many others) claims that refugees who passed through safe countries aren’t real refugees, she is arguing those safe countries should do more than they do already. Think about it in the real world for a moment. 2. In the UK we receive VERY few refugees compared to, say, France and Germany. Never mind Poland or Turkey or further away. Are we seriously telling those countries to “step up” or whatever, while we do so little?

Rwanda case live stream here, now: youtube.com/live/ilGULIDgF… Appeal allowed on Rwanda being safe - as in, the claimants succeed on that ground.

1. I know there are many that disagree with me on this but I’m fine in principle with citizens having more rights and preferential treatment in some ways than temporary migrants or even permanent residents. That’s kind of what citizenship is. But in the UK it is complicated…

https://twitter.com/colinyeo1/status/1670539407034667009

2. Under the ‘immigration’ (actually quasi nationality) reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, fully codified in the British Nationality Act 1981, many former citizens were turned into permanent residents. This was the Windrush generation.

I'm taking a look through the National Audit Office asylum report from this morning. I could have sworn I heard Sunak say less than two weeks ago that the Home Office was "on track" to meet its targets. The Home Office *itself* expects the "new" asylum backlog (not the legacy one) to increase to 84,000 by the end of this year.

And... the Home Office immigration stats are out. I'll be picking out a few highlights in this thread. gov.uk/government/sta… The stats relate to the year March 2022-March 2023. Starting with asylum, asylum claims are up a bit again but still below the peak in the early 2000s. There were 75,492 applications by 91,047 people.

1. Ahead of the net migration figures, I've written about why the Conservative Party is, ideologically, the party of high immigration. Even if they don't seem to realise it yet. open.substack.com/pub/wewantedwo… 2. Basically, immigration laws are no substitute for an immigration policy. Laws control supply of migrants but immigration policy is more about demand in the economy. It's easy to pass laws. Far harder to adopt and implement a policy.

1. A thread on how refugees might react in the real world to the Illegal Migration Bill when it becomes law. I'm interested in suggestions from others and might write it up into a blog post. 2. First, we know little about refugee decision-making. The motivations for trying to reach the UK seem to be complex and mixed. There is a lot of chance involved. And it is not necessarily rational. This is the best study I've seen jcwi.org.uk/Handlers/Downl…

And the latest immigration stats are out. The asylum backlog is indeed huge. This chart does not include dependents. Total backlog is actually 166,261 people. gov.uk/government/sta… Number of asylum applications has not yet reached same level as early 2000s but it is high: 89,398 people claimed asylum in 2022 including dependents.

1. This is what I said about Rishi Sunak's new, new plan for asylum when he announced it in December 2022. He announced various measures to eliminate the backlog by the end of 2023.

freemovement.org.uk/rishi-sunak-an…

TL;DR it won't work without further steps. 2. The Home Office would have to *massively* increase the number of decisions. The scale of increase required looked impossible then and looks even more impossible now.

I agree in principle with the calls for Shamima Begum to face justice in the UK. She is our responsibility. But I’m entirely clueless on criminal law - what offences might she potentially have committed? Asking a genuine question here because… (cont) I’m minded to support a new treason law as an alternative to citizenship deprivation. The existing treason law is basically defunct. It dates to 1351 and the last conviction was 1946. So she wouldn’t face a treason trial.

1. There are so many levels on which the Shamima Begum case is awful. A short thread. 2. The casual, media-led reforms of the law in the 2000s was awful. freemovement.org.uk/bad-cases-make…

1. Imagine a situation where the state has misunderstood its own nationality laws for 20 years. That state has either wrongly issued passports to tens of thousands of people and will now have to take them back. Or has wrongly denied citizenship to tens of thousands of others. 2. Inevitably, it is the British state we're talking about. Those affected are children of EU citizens where the parent from whom British citizenship was derived did not have formal settled status. Children who can claim British citizenship from another parent are not affected.

1. A thread on @RishiSunak's announcement that hostile environment bank closures are going to re-start, the problems with the underlying data and the failure to learn lessons from the Windrush scandal. 2. The banks account closures were introduced by the Immigration Act 2016 but paused by @sajidjavid in 2018 when he was Home Secretary "until I am more comfortable that we have got it right."

Sunak statement on now. Says will clear asylum backlog by end of 2023 parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/d0… A new new agreement with Albania. Immigration officers posted in Tirana. New guidance to officials making "crystal clear" Albania is a safe country. Objective evidence of modern slavery will be required, "not just a suspicion"

1. These tied work visas are inherently exploitative and this sort of abuse of workers is inevitable under current rules, as the government has repeatedly been warned theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/d… 2. The problem is that workers are tied into working for specific employers and a specific sector with basically no employment rights protection, and they take on debt to come here. If they are abused or fall sick they are in real trouble.

1. Been thinking overnight about the proposal to re-start the Oakington asylum process. It would cost a LOT of money and routinely detain refugees for administrative convenience. It is true that decision making needs to be faster but why not instead... freemovement.org.uk/how-does-the-a… 2. Create a simple, affirmative asylum process for Syrians, Afghans, Eritreans and Iranians, who make up a third of all claims? They all have v high success rate. Establish nationality = refugee status. Quicker decisions on new claims and would quickly clear the backlog as well.

1. The latest quarterly immigration statistics are out. A developing thread on stuff that seems interesting... gov.uk/government/sta… 2. Asylum applications have continued to rise sharply. There were 72,027 asylum applications (relating to 85,902 people) in the UK in the year ending September 2022. Previous peak was 84,132 applications in 2002.