Time to chuck out the lawyers
The immigration system is broken beyond repair, thanks to activist barristers and a hopeless Home Office
There can be few people in Britain who think that our system of immigration and asylum law achieves what they would like it to. Readers of the Daily Telegraph will be familiar with its regular churn of stories with eye-catching headlines about the perverse results of appeals in the tribunal system against Home Office decisions — for example, “Asylum seekers allowed to stay in UK despite lying in claims” or “Asylum seeker sold drugs days after deportation was cancelled” or “Migrant spared deportation because he has tattoos”, ad infinitum and ad nauseam...
Part of the problem is that the size and complexity of immigration and asylum law defies comprehension. If you ask Google’s AI how many UK immigration statutes there are, its response is: “It is impossible to state a definitive number of UK immigration acts because new legislation is continually enacted and previous acts are often amended, rather than replaced entirely.”
The answer is not less than 13, starting with the Immigration Act 1971. The Supreme Court said in a 2013 judgment: “The Immigration Act 1971 is now more than 40 years old and it has not aged well. It is widely acknowledged to be ill-adapted to the mounting scale and complexity of the problems associated with immigration control.”
The immigration system is broken beyond repair, thanks to activist barristers and a hopeless Home Office
There can be few people in Britain who think that our system of immigration and asylum law achieves what they would like it to. Readers of the Daily Telegraph will be familiar with its regular churn of stories with eye-catching headlines about the perverse results of appeals in the tribunal system against Home Office decisions — for example, “Asylum seekers allowed to stay in UK despite lying in claims” or “Asylum seeker sold drugs days after deportation was cancelled” or “Migrant spared deportation because he has tattoos”, ad infinitum and ad nauseam...
Part of the problem is that the size and complexity of immigration and asylum law defies comprehension. If you ask Google’s AI how many UK immigration statutes there are, its response is: “It is impossible to state a definitive number of UK immigration acts because new legislation is continually enacted and previous acts are often amended, rather than replaced entirely.”
The answer is not less than 13, starting with the Immigration Act 1971. The Supreme Court said in a 2013 judgment: “The Immigration Act 1971 is now more than 40 years old and it has not aged well. It is widely acknowledged to be ill-adapted to the mounting scale and complexity of the problems associated with immigration control.”
What is to be done? It is beyond the scope of this article to produce a detailed answer, but here’s a modest proposal. Everyone criticises the current system for its complexity and legalism. A reformer could do worse than chuck out the lawyers and judges and simplify the law. Rather than having to navigate the archipelago of courts and discretionary decision-making, a better system would see immigration control subject to oversight from Parliament, not the courts and activist lawyers. Ultimately who is here should be a political choice, not a legal right.
1 comment:
Discretionary decision-making is the issue, as it becomes controlled by graft.
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