European nationals in Britain are required to "settle their situation" or leave

In early May, Doris Ratnam sat at her kitchen table, trying to copy her German passport using her mobile phone. She was applying for a “status settlement” in the UK, a new measure needed by 3.4 million or so EU citizens living in Britain if they wanted to stay in the country legally after the Brexit. Brexit ». Ratnam, 72, who has lived in London since joining her husband in 1968, was upset that she had to apply to stay in a country she considers her home.

By the end of June 2021, if Britain leaves the EU with a deal, or by December 31, 2020 without any deal, all EU citizens residing in the UK must apply to settle their status, if they wish to continue living and working there. The settlement of the situation is designed to fulfill the government's promise that all EU citizens and members of their families will be entitled to remain without prejudice to their rights. Anyone who has lived in the Kingdom continuously for five years should, in theory, be able to easily settle his / her status. Permanent Once they have spent enough years of continuous residence, this means not leaving the country for more than six months a year.

Decisive factor

For Europeans in the UK, the Home Office's “identity verification” is the gateway between staying or leaving. The success of this part of the programs will be a decisive factor in the government's attempts to present exit from the Union as a success. Last year, nearly 1.5 million Europeans living in the UK struggled with the Home Office application process and managed to settle their situation. The Government has allocated £ 460 million to the operation, of which £ 50 million has been spent on developing this application. When the program was launched in March, a radio advertising campaign in the Interior Ministry assured people: "It's free, and all you need is your passport or identity card and complete the online form."

Former Home Secretary Amber Rudd was optimistic that the digital app would be as easy to use as a normal online account. According to Interior Ministry figures, 75% of applicants complete the verification process in less than eight minutes. In May, the offices of the Home Office in Liverpool, where there were 1,500 employees, handled some 6,000 “status settlement” requests a day. A senior civil servant in charge of the plan said it would be good to see media coverage confirming how things were going.

Serious consequences

But what is at stake here is enormous, and the possibility of a mistake is so high that it is difficult to ascertain whether people should feel confident or worried. Even if the application process achieves an unexpected 95% success rate, it may still have serious consequences for those who have not applied (about 150,000).

After the deadline, those who did not apply will be transferred from legal residents to illegal immigrants. In a hostile environment, they won't be able to work, rent a place to live, get free health care, drive a car, open a bank account, get a mobile phone contract, or travel without being asked to prove their status. Gradually that normal life became impossible.

The Ministry of Interior did not attempt a "digital exercise" of this magnitude. There were unexpected challenges. By the end of January, two months ahead of its national launch, IT professionals working at the Home Office had successfully designed an application that would charge applicants a fee of £ 65. Days before the application was put to public testing, they were told that the issue of fees was politically sensitive and had to be abolished. Therefore, as a last-minute temporary solution, the first applicants were charged anyway and had to recover their money later. The decision to abolish the fees also means that the government immediately lost about £ 190 million from the revenue the scheme was supposed to achieve.

Prerequisites

"They were trying to introduce the biggest and most controversial system, while the basic requirements were changing, even days before the start-up," said program director Joe Owen. For the government, a research center is working to make the government more effective. Brexit referendum.

One major problem is that the application does not yet work on the iPhone, at a time when the Interior Ministry is struggling with Apple's refusal to allow third-party developers to use its own communication system since the development of the application began. Given that iPhone accounts for nearly half of UK smartphones, this creates a major problem for applicants. Many people had to borrow phones or take a long way to complete their orders. Officials say the application should be available on computers later.

Other complications It is not known how many EU citizens are in the UK. The figure of 3.4 million adopted by the government in all its plans, many believe is less than reality.

"Nobody knows how many people are qualified," said Madeleine Sombchon, director of the University of Oxford's Observatory of Immigration.

Deadline

The Home Office estimates do not include family members from countries outside the European Union who are also eligible under this scheme, and the total number of people who need to apply can be as high as four million.

For the time being, the political rhetoric is still warm, and officials say people with good reason to go beyond the deadline will be allowed another "reasonable" period of progress, but things may not be encouraging. Although politicians do not currently want to publicly highlight this, the Home Office explained that as of January 2021 (in a scenario without a deal), anyone who does not have a valid immigration status in the UK “will be subject to detention procedures”. Deportation as a violation of immigration laws ».

• £ 460 million, allocated by the British Government for the receipt of applications.

• 3.4 million EU citizens in Britain must settle their situation, if they want to stay in the country legally after the Brexit.

The last insult

Not surprisingly, many Europeans residing in the UK feel weak and angry. They have faced years of hostile headlines. They are angry that the MOI scheme has been developed as an application process rather than a registration scheme. They point out that this is not an automatic guarantee of the rights promised by the Brexit campaign and the government. Forcing them to apply for the right to reside in their homes is the latest insult. Many argue that the application may serve a repugnant policy aimed at locating, enumerating and classifying them.

At the same time, some 1.4 million Britons residing across Europe are eagerly watching the planned, realizing that their treatment may depend to a large extent on the generosity of the UK government in dealing with EU citizens.

In April 2018, thousands of people born in the Commonwealth, who moved to the UK as children in the 1960s and 1970s, when there was free movement between Britain and its former colonies, became victims of changes in immigration legislation, in what became known as the Windrach scandal. Those who did not apply for British passports found themselves in violation of immigration laws. Some were arrested and deported from the United Kingdom, and returned to countries they had not visited for half a century. Others lost their jobs or homes or were denied free treatment.

Europeans in Britain feel weak and angry after Brexit. Archival

Project fear

The experiences of victims of the Windrach scandal have alarmed EU citizens. The scandal has highlighted the weakness of the Home Office in pinpointing who legally or illegally lives in the UK, and its reputation as an institution combining inefficiency and culpability has crystallized. Many of those obliged to apply for a status settlement are forced to give all their personal data to the Ministry of Interior, which they find disturbing.

For a quarter of applicants, the process is more complicated than simply submitting passport details and filling out an online form. The Advertising Standards Authority recently ruled that reassuring Interior Ministry announcements should not be broadcast, after complaints indicated that in some cases applicants had to submit documents much more than a passport or identity card.

Since the beginning of the year, the Labor Party has warned of looming problems in the Interior Ministry process and has even spoken of a new Windrach. But these warnings are often categorized as part of "legitimate fear."

There is already concern among immigration lawyers about the optimistic tendency of statistics. The ministry says it has given some 1.5 million people "some form of settlement."