Reform plans to scrap indefinite leave to remain for migrants

[Twiglets1]

BBC report following Farage's press conference this afternoon:

Reform UK has announced it would abolish the right of migrants to qualify for permanent settlement in the UK after five years, if the party wins the next election.

Under the plans, Reform would abolish the right of migrants to apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) - which gives migrants rights and access to benefits - and reapply for new visas with tougher rules.

Reform will also unveil plans to bar anyone other than British citizens from accessing welfare. The party claims their plans would save £234bn over several decades.

Reform said it would replace ILR with visas that force migrants to reapply every five years. That includes hundreds of thousands of migrants currently in the UK.
Applicants would also have to meet certain criteria, including a higher salary threshold and standard of English.

The announcement launches Reform's fresh assault on what they brand the "Boriswave" - 3.8 million people who entered the UK after Brexit under looser rules brought in by Boris Johnson's administration.

Speaking at a press conference, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the "main reason" for the policy was to "wake everybody up to the Boris wave".

Hundreds of thousands of these migrants, who have come to the UK since 2021, will soon qualify for permanent residence under the ILR scheme.

Reform said the changes would not apply to EU nationals whose settled status is protected under the European Union Withdrawal Agreement, who make up the majority of benefit claimants by people with ILR.

But EU nationals not benefiting from the provisions of the Withdrawal Agreement will be subject to the new system.

Reform will also introduce a new scheme called Acute Skills Shortage Visas (ASSV) for jobs in crisis. Under the scheme, firms can hire one worker from abroad only if they train one at home.

Reform will also raise the average wait for UK citizenship from six years to seven.

Reform say their policy is designed to bring Britain into line with other countries such as the US and United Arab Emirates (UAE) and save the UK more than £234bn over what it calls the "lifetime of the average migrant".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c930xypxpqpo

I mean, there would definitely be fewer people with ILR because they stated they’d abolish it!

I am sure they’d also try to prevent as many people as possible from actually getting UK citizenship as you say.

If the aim was to reduce welfare costs you’d simply uncouple ILR from welfare entitlements in line with every other western economy of which I have any detailed knowledge and make welfare contributory. Linking citizenship to welfare entitlements is nonsensical and bizarre, unless you’re a nationalist nut job. Many who are citizens put nothing into the system and many who are not contribute an enormous amount and obviously won’t do so if we have a hostile and xenophobic environment and they are made to feel unwelcome. We struggle to attract the highly-skilled high-tax paying individuals we need already due to the comparatively low salaries in the UK and useless infrastructure and tax levels on higher earners which are some of the highest in the entire world. We’re struggling even to convince our own highly-skilled young people not to emigrate elsewhere for these reasons and clearly Farage’s proposals were to be implemented all of the above would get worse, not better. I’d love to know which services he’d plan to cut and which taxes he’d plan to raise to compensate for the costs of this policy which will be enormous. No surprise that he hasn’t told us!

Separating ILR from welfare entitlements and making the latter contributory would help to solve our growing welfare bill which, as the data shows, is overwhelmingly being driven by British people, not immigrants. It would also mitigate against the apparent fear that people granted ILR would become dependent on welfare without having contributed sufficient tax to fund this. It would also reduce the draw factor of the UK for asylum seekers. I just can’t see any sensible reason why someone not motivated by xenophobia would conclude that the solution to these problems is to remove ILR status entirely; it’s nonsensical and it’s so unequivocal that the economic effect of this would be overwhelmingly negative and make everyone in the UK significantly poorer, just like the Brexit Farage campaigned for. He really couldn’t be making it any clearer that he wants to make mugs of the people planning to vote for him.

Really, it’s for Mr Toad to have provided a proper impact assessment and economic analysis demonstrating the supposed benefits of his proposed policy, isn’t it? No shock that he hasn’t done so.

He really is a disgraceful charlatan.

Yes, people go to Dubai for the high life and to live in a very non-Emirati bubble. It’s the antithesis of what anti-immigration Britons say they would find acceptable.

Ah yes, the “buying a BRP card” swizz. When my DH went through that he was changing jobs and only found out his old passport carnet wasn’t considered proof of right to work anymore, so he had to go through the expedited path to getting the card - it was nearly £2500 to get it fast enough to not lose his employment offer.

He had to find documentation proving he’d not been out of the country for too long a period at any point in the past 10+ years. That would be something the government would know if the U.K. ran exit checks like EU countries, but they don’t so they put the onus of proof on him. Cue more money to the GP and council to get surgery registration info and council tax payment receipts. All to prove something he already legally had. It was basically a re-application for ILR on the sly.

I suspect they will ramp up the costs and hurdles further as @Twiglets1 said, to make it as difficult as possible for people to obtain citizenship in future even if they have been residents for decades. I think your decision to apply for citizenship following the referendum result was wise and know many others who did likewise because they feared precisely this, where the xenophobia Farage and his ilk was going in the future. It’s an horrendous situation for those who can’t hold dual citizenship, though. The fact that someone like Farage is even being taken seriously when everything he says is self-contradictory and fantasy nonsense and pandering to the very worst aspects of human nature makes me feel quite ashamed of being British. It’s an embarrassment when in other countries to be associated with this and Brexit etc. due to being British.

I doubt they’d be keen on immigrants paying no tax, either!

So this is where I think the personal is political for Mr Farage as well. Does his French girlfriend feel uncommitted to the U.K.? Is he allowing for the EU Settlement agreement because it affects her? How about his German ex?

How about Zia Yusef? Are his parents still alive, are they British citizens and have they given up their right to dual citizenship with Sri Lanka? Are his parents uncommitted or commuted to the U.K.?

It may seem unfair to look at people’s personal circumstances and how it affects their approach to policy, but in this case - given how completely lacking the economic case is, how conflated the different types of immigrants are in the convo, and how punitive the policy is towards permanent residents who do not fall under the EU Settlement agreement - I think it’s perfectly valid.

If you're expecting consistency, you're on a hiding to nothing

I think the main question Mr Toad should be answering currently about his personal life is why he announced on GB news that he “had just exchanged contracts to buy himself a house in his constituency”, and yet he now claims that this house has nothing to do with him and he had no involvement in its purchase.

His French girlfriend - whom he stated had come to stay with him because she had nowhere to live and couldn’t afford a hotel room at the time they got together, and whose French family went bankrupt - apparently purchased this house for cash with no mortgage, at a cost of the best part of £1m.

Mr Toad also declared publicly that he did not give her any money and that she purchased this house entirely from her own funds because - like Angela Rayner - the purchase would be subject to a higher stamp duty charge if he in fact had a financial interest in the house and not paying this is tax evasion and a criminal offence.

No financial interest in respect of this house - which Mr Toad himself stated on television that he had just bought - is declared in the MP’s register of financial interests.

Such a mystery where his broke French girlfriend who couldn’t afford a hotel room for a night suddenly got nearly £1m in cash, given that Mr Toad has declared that it was NOT from him.

So I realise it’s unpopular, but I do think asylum seekers are a different case altogether and rightly so. If someone is granted asylum, they are their famiiies have been judged to be at risk of persecution. Ask any Brit how relaxed they are about their nieces, siblings, etc being tortured to get at them - I very much doubt they would think it reasonable.

Very few asylum applications are granted, but we keep people here in limbo for years appealing and re-applying. That’s where the people-in-hotels problem is, not the comparatively small number of people who even our sceptical Home Office agrees should be granted asylum.

As for that Afghan - was it one of the MOD interpreters, by any chance?

While I’m pontificating - back to a comment earlier about the cost of applications and Britons generally being comfortably unaware of how immigration actually works. If had a quid for every time someone - right or left aligned - told me they thought DH had just been given a British passport when we got married, we’d have a nice little pot saved up for his naturalisation just from that alone.

It’s laughable, isn’t it, people comparing people working in Dubai to those working in the UK? 🤨🫣🤦🏻‍♀️

The arrangements are completely different. In Dubai they don’t want people to integrate, immigrants live in totally separate compounds, are subject to different law enforcement (all the things people believe happen here in the UK but don’t yet in Dubai are actually the case), and immigrants in Dubai also pay no tax so contribute nothing but their needed skills to the country. The quid pro quo for this obviously is that there is no citizenship/ ILR because they are not moving there permanently as part of that society!

Utterly ridiculous to compare that to someone relocating permanently in the UK (or any other western country), marrying a UK citizen and raising a family of UK children, paying UK tax for decades and being an integrated part of our society in the UK.

I can see which poster made this crazy comparison and I’m not surprised! 😆 How low things have sunk for it even to be suggested that Dubai should be our comparator for our country’s legal, immigration, social, welfare and tax systems and for this to be touted as an alleged justification for the insane policies proposed by Reform.

Yes agreed. Horrible workers rights and they pinch their passports. Bad example.

Obviously my point was that you can attract software engineers if the environment is right without necessarily giving them full citizenship before 10 years. Like.most countries.

I haven’t looked countries up but for a start aren’t there more limitations for the Dutch than here wrt passports etc?

Are you trying to engage again?

There’s so much misunderstanding about this, isn’t there? In many (most?) countries marrying a foreign citizen means requirements for length of residency to obtain citizenship are relaxed. In Portugal they even do this for long-term relationships without being married (although you have to evidence a long-term committed relationship). In other countries different requirements are waived or reduced such as required income thresholds. In others there’s no relaxation of rules for spouses.

I’m not aware of a single country on Earth that provides an automatic right to citizenship of a spouse immediately after marriage to a citizen so it’s odd people were saying that to you! I guess it shows that the people making those comments really have no idea how immigration and citizenship systems work. But I also can’t think of any western countries which don’t allow permanent residency for a foreign spouse of one of their citizens (although many of course apply reasonable conditions such as not being a convicted criminal!), for all the very good reasons discussed on the thread: it would be cruel and an act of economic self-harm to be so pointlessly draconian.

I also can’t think of any other country which has retrospectively removed permanent resident status from people en masse like Farage has proposed but perhaps someone has an example showing it’s not some completely crazed idea of Farage’s and has a legitimate aim of some kind, has been done before somewhere else and achieved some kind of beneficial outcome for that country… I won’t hold my breath though!

Just seen this article about Mr Toad claiming that migrants are eating swans:

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/royal-parks-debunks-farage-claim-migrants-eating-swans-2f2x86msl

😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆

While I accept that one would expect a toad to be knowledgeable about ponds, it seems that Royal Parks have refuted his claim as completely unevidenced (like everything else the comes out of his mouth).

What makes it even more funny is that his said that swans were being eaten in Royal Parks (not taken from them)… the mental image of these imagined hordes of migrants in busy parks in our capital city grabbing swans, killing them with their bare hands and having a little picnic of raw swan meat by the side of the lake without anyone noticing this phenomenon.

He seems to be turning into an Alan Partridge caricature now with these increasingly absurd claims…

“Your donkeys are probably born without hind legs because of all the chemicals you put in their chips!

The plums have mutated and they’ve got beaks!

You make pigs smoke!

You feed beef burgers to swans!

You have big sheds that nobody’s allowed in, and inside these big sheds are 20ft high chickens. These chickens are scared, they don’t know why they’re so big!”

It’s hysterical that anybody could believe this weirdo to be Prime Minister material.

If this wasn't so seriously cruel to people who find their lives here thrown into limbo, I would be very amused by posters who are so desperate to stick it to the immigrants that they end up cheerleading for effectively the opposite of what they pretend they want from said immigrants.

Foreigners who stay in separate ghettoes and scarcely interact with local people, don't bother to learn the language or integrate, treat the country like a temporary holiday stopover that they care nothing for and only what they can extract for short-term personal benefit and don't pay any tax. Imagine the outrage!

Exactly! It’s difficult to understand how anybody could think that there’s any comparison at all between the immigration system here and in Dubai, or should be and imagine if there was and foreigners were subject to more permissive laws, lived in separate, exclusive and luxurious compounds protected by security, and paid no tax at all! I’m sure that’d go down so well with Reform voters. 😆

As you say, the cluelessness of some of these posts would be hilarious if it wasn’t for the damage that Farage’s supporters will inflict not just on themselves but on everyone else in our society if they are successful in voting in enough Reform MPs to form a Government. 😔

I don't think people are cheerleading for Dubai itself. I wasn't. It was just a country that had been referred to yesterday as somewhere where you can never achieve citizenship. That's what I meant (for clarification. Just to nip this in the bud before people get side tracked and waste their time descrbing the Dubai immigration system😆 ). And that educated people do still go there for whatever reason they chose to.

I'm not advocating for their immigration system obviously, having had quite a few long discussions with poor immigrant workers in Dubai. Not nice.

There’s certainly informed, constructive and compassionate debate to be had on immigration - but this won’t come from Farage or anyone else in Reform; so much of this is deflection from his role in Brexit (which dramatically changed and increased immigration) with a side of populism for GB News and the like to churn out. The timing to coincide with the Lib Dem conference makes me think of Steve Banon’s recommended ‘Flood the zone’ approach with Trump (I mean today’s swan eating headline-grabber is textbook Trumpian).

My other worry is that this is moving politics further and further to the right: is Farage paving the way and opening up the potential for the likes of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon? Farage likes to brag about all of their party members/subscribers, but he has courted ‘Tommy Robinson’ supporters amongst them and how far will he go to get/keep their vote? And if/when his policies fail and/or the Reform party follows the same breakdown that Farage’s previous parties have, who will they turn to? It’s highly unlikely it will be one of the traditional main parties.

All very good points. I hadn’t even considered about the timing of his “swan eating” claims but what you say makes perfect sense; another deliberate attempt to distract from genuine public discourse and debate on the issues that matter.

Much of the media are giving him and his rants far too much air time, particularly given that they lack any credibility as serious proposals.

It all very much has the feel of propaganda designed to deliberately mislead and shift the Overton Window and as you say, if successful in normalising the disgusting misogynistic and xenophobic views and the disgusting and ignorant attitudes to disabled people he has been promoting then it will be very difficult to move back towards a decent and stable society again even after Reform falls apart. The damage being wreaked is likely to take decades to repair, if it happens at all.

I think it would be good to avoid long rants in general. Mr Farage's and anyone else's.

I haven’t listened but on another thread someone did watch Ed Davey’s speech. He talked a lot about Reform? I do think people give him a lot of air time. Probably not for the outcome they’re after.

@EasternStandard Yes, I think you make a really valid point and it’s frustrating that Farage and Reform seem to be dominating so much of the narrative in politics, the media and the comms from other parties - as you say, often it does seem to be counter-productive in that it just feeds into more attention for Farage. On the other hand, it’s so important for the other parties to challenge him/them directly, so it’s a tricky one to balance, especially within the climate of GB News, X, etc. Davey did discuss Farage/Reform, but he did also cover other really important issues and policy, which then seems to get lost in the Farage headlines.
I think all of the other parties would benefit from driving their own clear Farage-free narratives more, although I would also add that I think we need some serious MSM and social media reform too.

Sorry, just to add to my most recent point, if anyone hasn’t seen the California governor Gavin Newsom’s social media approach to tackling Trump, then it’s definitely worth a look - I can’t imagine any high-profile British politicians using the same tactics, but I think it’s an interesting insight into how you can deal with the Trumps/Farages of the world.