‘A dizzying maze’: how the UK immigration system is geared to reject

Author- Maya Goodfellow

ONavigating the roadblocks into Britain gets ever more difficult and expensive, as government hostility leaks into every transaction.

n an industrial estate on the edge of central Birmingham, in a building nestled behind a car park and overlooking the city’s network of canals, I met a group of about 30 people who had come from all over the world but whose experiences of the UK’s immigration regime were remarkably similar. They formed a circle in the middle of the room and began talking about the problems they had faced. Overstretched lawyers and immigration specialists were on hand to offer advice.

Diana was there that night. She came from Zimbabwe and moved from a visitor visa to a student visa, before going on to marry an EU citizen. But her marriage quickly deteriorated: “I had to come out of the relationship because of domestic violence.” She says she left her partner to save her life. She knew nothing about the asylum process, but in 2013, she was told that because she feared persecution in Zimbabwe, she could apply for refugee status. Diana quickly learned how many people are “ready to mislead you”. One of her lawyers did not give her the right information about applying for asylum, which meant that, when she went to court, she did not present the relevant facts that might have helped her case. Other lawyers she paid barely gave her any time and did not go through her case properly. At each appeal, she was refused the right to stay in the country.

Some of the people in the room had struggled alone to navigate disorienting immigration rules, while others had to find a way through for their whole family. There were children of various ages – from curious babies to bored seven- or eight-year-olds. Some had been born in the country; others had migrated with their parents. What united these people was the time, effort and money – often money they did not have – they were spending to try to stay in the UK. They shared stories of being fleeced by lawyers, going into courtrooms where the people they had paid to represent them did not know even the most basic details of their case, and explained the desperation they felt when their claims were repeatedly rejected.

If considered at all, their experiences might be regarded by some as an unfortunate byproduct of the UK’s necessary system of immigration controls. But they are just some of the many who find themselves plunged into uncertainty for years; trying to make it through a dizzying maze of application forms, court dates and ever-changing discriminatory immigration rules.

Support for immigration and asylum cases is almost non-existent unless you have the money to pay for it. When you are not allowed to work – as is the case for people seeking asylum – funding legal representation can be an impossible task, in a country where legal aid has been decimated. In 2007, the government introduced a flat fee for legal-aid asylum cases, which meant lawyers were paid a fixed amount regardless of how long they worked on a case. “If you did go over a certain number [of hours] and if you could justify that …then you would get paid by the hour,” the former immigration barrister Frances Webber explains. But getting to that stage was very difficult. These changes incentivised a factory-style process; encouraging “rubbish firms who do no work or do very little work” and penalising those who took “great care”, Webber says. Firms were expected to subsidise work on asylum cases with money received from more straightforward legal aid cases. The coalition government further cut legal aid in 2013, including the money available for most immigration and asylum cases. New Labour had cracked down on fraudulent lawyers, but as costs spiralled and legal aid was hacked away, the chaos left people once again exposed to predatory lawyers. What this has essentially resulted in is a two-tier justice system.

Reliable help is now extremely hard to come by. Two of the biggest not-for-profit immigration and asylum centres, Refugee and Migrant Justice (RMJ) and the Immigration Advisory Service, closed in 2010 and 2011. Between them, they represented about 20,000 clients and employed hundreds of staff. The reason for their failure was financial; RMJ said this was brought on by changes to legal aid, which meant bills were not paid until a case was finished. When they went under, they were owed £2m by the Legal Services Commission, which ran the legal aid scheme in England and Wales from 2000 until 2013.

“You just don’t have the bodies helping people, so you are going to see more rejections,” explains Alison Moore, director of Refugee Women Connect, an asylum organisation in Liverpool. “It’s not an area where you shouldn’t have a legal representative with you.”

The immigration and asylum system is not only confusingly complex in how it is designed; the way it is implemented makes almost every step you have to go through outrageously expensive. In 2016-17, fees for settlement, residence and nationality increased by 25%. They are constantly changing, but at the time of writing, if you want to become a permanent resident of the UK, it will cost you £2,389. That is on top of £50 for a “Life in the UK” test, which you have to take when you apply to become a British citizen or for permanent residency and, if you are required to take one, £150 for an English exam. Anyone given discretionary leave to remain has to refresh their status every three years, which costs £900 each time. It has even got to the stage where the Home Office is charging £5.48 every time you require a response by email. This inevitably affects poorer migrants disproportionately, people who might not be able to pay to get the reply they need, which may subsequently prevent them from resolving their claim.

Having cash is not an automatic guarantor to frictionless movement, but money lubricates the whole system. As of 2010, if you have £2m or more to invest in the British economy, you can apply for an “investor ” visa – and, if successful, come to the country for three years and four months and bring immediate family members.

For everyone else, the cost – in all senses of the word – can shape their whole lives. “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty,” wrote the essayist James Baldwin, “knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

It has become common sense to think that too much immigration of a certain kind is bad for the UK in all kinds of ways – for wages and public services, but also for “integration” and “cohesion” – and that controls are a solution. But look at what they do: leave people in limbo, separate them from friends and family or stop them from staying long enough to make local connections if they want to. Controls give the super-rich the chance to move, but treat this same freedom as dangerous in the hands of the poor. Controls are making people’s lives a misery; they are part of the problem.

he few organisations that exist to help people struggling to regularise their status are overstretched, underfunded and laden with more responsibilities than they can manage. But they are vital. “It’s become almost impossible for people with most kinds of immigration issues to get any advice,” says Benjamin, who gives assistance to destitute migrants (he did not want to give his full name). “And it’s become much more difficult for people who’ve got that legal advice to find routes to regularising their status.” As successive governments have talked and acted tough on immigration, migrants – documented and undocumented – feel able to trust very few people. “Just from the point of view of people who have jobs in the sector and get paid to do advice work, it’s really frightening. Caseworkers are burning out, services are just going to become more and more strained than they already are,” Benjamin exp

He calls charities that hold regular drop-ins for migrants, asylum seekers and refugees “advice factories”; they are under immense pressure, people cannot stay in the line of work for long and, as they leave, knowledge goes with them. This slowly depletes the level of experience within organisations, which is necessary to help people navigate what is an intentionally onerous and complex set of rules.

“It’s hard not to feel like the government is doing it deliberately, not just to create a hostile environment for people who are here ‘illegally’ but [also] to make it more difficult for people supporting them … and I think everyone anticipates that at some point there will be legislation deliberately aimed at the organisations that support, for example, undocumented people, to make it more difficult for them to be accommodated and to make it more difficult for people to get advice.”

Without this advice, it is hard to navigate the UK’s labyrinthine network of ever-changing rules and regulations. Since the early 90s, there has been, on average, a piece of legislation on immigration every other year. Between 2010 and 2018, there were seven immigration bills, containing all kinds of changes.

Source-https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/01/dizzying-maze-uk-immigration-system-hostile-environment