The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced her revised proposals for lengthy routes to settlement in the UK.
While she will now allow an estimated 280,000 care workers and their dependants to apply for indefinite leave to remain after five years, most of the hardline plans drawn up by Mahmood’s office last year remain. Asylum seekers who arrived in the UK by irregular means, such as small boats, and who are reliant on public funds, will have to wait 30 years before being able to apply for settlement. Many skilled workers will wait 10 years. Meanwhile, the highest earners, those earning over £125,000, will be able to apply for settlement after three years.
As we said when the proposals were first put forward in February (see our statement here), these policies are being advanced in the name of integration, but they will cause immense poverty, hardship and division, and make integration even more difficult to achieve for many migrants.
Women will be disproportionately affected. They are more likely to be dependants of male earners, to work part-time or in informal or low-paid sectors, to have childcare and other domestic responsibilities and to rely on welfare benefits. The disadvantages and barriers to integration they already face will be exacerbated by their effective exclusion from early routes to settlement.
Women who have experienced domestic abuse, coercive control, trafficking and exploitation have often overstayed their visas or entered the UK illegally – through no fault of their own. Most depend on the welfare safety net to exit abuse and overcome trauma, but under the proposals they will be penalised and made to face long qualifying periods. In addition, those who try to defend themselves against violence or have been criminalised as a result of counter-allegations made by abusers – who increasingly use such tactics as part of their coercive control – will also be denied early settlement. Under these proposals, such women’s dependency on exploitative men will be further heightened and they will remain trapped in destitution and precarious situations for even longer.
Far from encouraging integration, the proposals are likely to add to a growing migrant underclass subject to punitive state responses, racism, sexism and exploitation.
We still believe that the Government should reconsider the earned settlement model in its entirety. It will cause untold distress and hardship within migrant families as members, including children, are forced along different and arbitrary paths to settlement and citizenship. It will also create divisions between British citizens and migrants and further institutionalise hatred, intolerance and exclusion. The Government contends that settlement is a privilege, not a right, however we assert that settlement and citizenship rights should no longer be rooted in the country's colonial legacy, but must be forged in the values of democracy and our shared humanity.