LONDON: On Wednesday, the British government announced it would enact tougher immigration laws to make it nearly impossible for illegal immigrants arriving on smaller ships to eventually become citizens.
Immigration applicants who are found hidden in other vehicles or arriving by water will typically remain denied citizenship.
A home business spokesman said,” This direction further strengthens measures to make it obvious that anyone who enters the UK improperly, including those arriving on small boats, faces having their applications for American citizenship rejected.”
After Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Transformation UK party won almost four million votes during the most recent general election, an extraordinary turn for a far-right group, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Communist government is under pressure to lower immigration.
However, some Labour MPs have criticized the shift to the guidelines.
According to lawmaker Stella Creasy on X,” If we give people refugee standing, it can’t be right to refuse them a path to becoming a British citizen,” adding that the policy would make them “forever next class.”
Free activity, an immigration laws website, said the changes had the ability to “block a large number of refugees from naturalising as European citizens, successful soon”.
The updated advice was described as “incredibly cruel and detrimental to inclusion.”
The announcement comes after MPs this week debated the government’s new border security, asylum and immigration bill, designed to give law enforcement officials” counter-terror style powers” to break up gangs bringing irregular migrants across the channel.
Legal and illegal immigration, both of which are now running at historically higher levels, was a significant political problem at the poll in July 2024 that led to Starmer’s election.
He soon abandoned his liberal predecessor Rishi Sunak‘s strategy to deport new arrivals to Rwanda in order to deter illegal immigration to the UK.
Otherwise he pledged to” crush the groups” to take the numbers down.
According to provisional figures from the interior ministry, 36, 816 people were discovered in the channel between England and France in 2024, a 25 % increase from the 29 437 arrivals in 2023.
