Hundreds of stateless people forced into hardship and exploitation in ‘Windrush-style’ scandal

Yan Kit, 42, who has been stateless since 2005, said he was desperate to return to Malaysia to reunite with his wife, but that he was “stuck” in the UK, unable to work and having to report to the Home Office every month.

He said: “I’m not allowed to work. I just sit at home. The worst thing is every month I have to go and report with the UK border agency, but it means nothing because they can’t deport me. If I ask questions, they can’t tell me what’s happening. They just give me the date for my next report time.”

The issue arose when a large number of Malaysian citizens in the UK received misleading immigration advice saying that if they obtained a British overseas citizens (BOC) passport – a relic from the UK’s colonial past – and renounced their Malaysian citizenship, they would be eligible to become British citizens.

This had previously been the case, but a change to immigration law in 2002 toughened the rules by adding the requirement that they must not have voluntarily renounced another citizenship – making these people ineligible.

Campaigners said this was one of a number of post-colonial decisions made by the British government which “reduced whole classes of citizens to second-class status on racialised lines” and “continue to do irreparable harm today”.

The issue was highlighted in the media and by a number of politicians prior to 2010, but no resolution has been reached and hundreds still remain in limbo.

During a Home Office surgery meeting earlier this week, enforcement staff from the department told one man affected that he had “fallen through the cracks” along with “hundreds” of others, and that it was a “Windrush-related” situation that had been “forgotten about over the years”.

The enforcement officer said there had been an increase in people appealing for help about the issue in the past year, and that a Home Office team set up in the wake of the Windrush scandal was looking into it, but that it would take increased public pressure to bring about change.

“There have been individuals coming forward before, but now it’s an actual movement … There were people coming in before Windrush, but because of Windrush, I think there’s a bit more of an urgency to nip things in the bud before it goes that far,” they said.

“You’d expect there to be an easy solution and for someone to go ‘Look, this is what we’re doing’. But there’s red tape.”

Alvyn Kee, partner at Bloomsbury Law Solicitors, who said he had dealt with between 200 and 300 cases like this, accused the Home Office of treating these individuals as “numbers, not human beings”, and said there were likely to be between 1,000 and 2,000 cases.

He said he knew of one person affected by the issue, a stateless woman in her twenties, who had died of alcohol consumption several years ago after she turned to drinking because of the stress caused by the problem.

“These people have been left in limbo. The Home Office is saying this is not our problem, but it’s the Malaysian point of view that they’re viewed as traitors. The UK has become a prison to them,” Mr Kee said.

“They aren’t allowed to but they need to earn money to survive. So they’re being exploited, often doing restaurant work. You get raided by immigration officers. Sometimes they try to deport them. They are continuously subject to the hostile environment.”