No one knows how many EU citizens live in the United Kingdom. We do not have the population register or ID card system in this country that would tell us. EU citizens have never, until now, been required to register in any way. At the time of the Brexit referendum, an estimate of three million resident EU citizens was doing the rounds. So far, there have already been over five million applications under the EU Settlement Scheme, which enables EU citizens to apply to remain lawfully in the United Kingdom after the deadline of 30th June 2021.
However many apply, we know that some will not. One of the cast-iron laws of deadlines is that they will always be missed. Some will not even know about the deadline, some will be children whose parents or carers do not apply for them, some will think they do not need to apply, some think they are not eligible, some will be afraid, some will just be plain disorganised.
Boris Johnson says the law will be lenient. He may genuinely think that, but that is not how laws work—particularly immigration laws. Immigration officials and civil servants working in benefits offices and housing departments can be instructed to “go easy” on people and most, although not all, will follow such guidance. But it is landlords, employers, banks, doctors, hospitals, even schools—although schools are not supposed to—who carry out modern immigration checks. A sweeping range of public servants, agencies, companies, private organisations and members of the public are in effect obliged to check people’s immigration status and enforce immigration-related restrictions. They are not so easy to instruct or control. This is the “hostile environment” system introduced by Theresa May. It remains largely intact, albeit relabelled as the “compliant environment.”
These street-level immigration deputies are encouraged to be overzealous: this bias is built into the hostile environment system. If they misunderstand the law by being too harsh, they suffer no real sanction. If they are too lenient, they risk huge fines or even criminal prosecution. For reasons of self-preservation, their approach has to be to deny service if in doubt.
Discrimination on grounds of race or nationality is inevitable. The law does not require checks to be carried out equally on all people. Rather, it punishes a landlord or employer if they rent to or employ a person who lacks status. Some of these private actors may think that a white person with a local accent and a British-sounding name is unlikely to be an unlawful resident but that others might be. Some will likely believe that these others—those with darker skin, a foreign accent or an unusual name—represent more of a risk and have to be checked carefully, or even denied service. This is not a radical proposition: former Tory minister Eric Pickles warned as much to David Cameron in a crucial ministerial meeting before the system was extended to landlords.
And there will be doubt. Some EU citizens will be temporarily protected by “extra legal” policy concessions from the government. An employer or landlord will need to know about and understand any such concession, and very few will. Even weeks before the rush of last-minute applications there was a backlog of over 400,000 unmade decisions on in-time applications. These EU citizens are supposed to be issued with certificates of application, to be accepted as temporary proof of status by landlords, employers and others. But some report their certificates have not arrived and certain landlords and employers may not accept them anyway.
Even those who have applied and been granted status are deliberately not being issued with physical documentary proof. EU citizens are guinea pigs for a new digital-only future. A landlord or employer faced with a British applicant and an EU citizen applicant can accept the British citizen’s passport as proof but must carry out online checks for the EU citizen. And some of those who applied have been granted only temporary status, called “pre-settled status,” which will have to be renewed in five years’ time. The same problems of missed deadlines and pending applications will arise then. An unknown number will find they are ineligible to apply for settled status because of absences from the UK in the meantime and, under present rules, will be forced to leave the country then instead.
We have already seen the consequences of when deputised immigration enforcers encounter people with uncertain immigration status. The hostile environment was supposedly not intended to make the lives of the Windrush generation miserable, but it did. We are very likely to see something similar with EU citizens after the deadline of 30th June 2021.
