A
few weeks ago, Theresa May suddenly
declared that EU citizens migrating to Britain after Brexit, during the
two-year transition period, can’t expect to have the same rights as those
already here. That was something of a surprise, since the government has
already agreed that EU law – which, of course, includes freedom of movement –
will apply in full through the transition.
That
was beside the point for May’s announcement, whose purpose was to get
sympathetic headlines in the Brexit-supporting press. It succeeded at that,
even getting written up in the Daily Mail as a promise to ‘end free movement’.
But it’s not: it’s an entirely futile symbolic gesture, and one that’s sucking
government resources away from properly preparing for the parts of Brexit that
actually matter.
The
new system isn’t going to involve visa requirements for EU nationals, because
it can’t under European law. Instead it will consist of a series of more modest
measures, many of which are already used in most other EU countries. European
migrants will need to register their presence if they stay for more than a few
months; they may need residence permits to rent homes, and work permits to take
up employment, but the government will simply be obliged to grant them in
almost all cases. What there certainly won’t be is stricter border controls or
any measures to prevent EU citizens working in Britain. We
don’t really know anything about the details of this new registration scheme,
because the government hasn’t said much about it. What we do know is that almost
nobody thinks it’s a good idea.
On Monday, the Times reported
that civil servants in the Home Office warned that they "would
struggle" to create the prime minister’s desired new registration system
for EU citizens by Brexit day, and that she'd overruled them. Today, the
Commons Home Affairs Select Committee is publishing
a report on the government's progress on delivering changes to the
immigration system, and they too are scathing about the prospects for
completing the new scheme in time.
None
of this would matter that much, except that it’s drawing Home Office effort
away from preparing a different registration
scheme – for EU citizens currently living in the UK – which is much more
important. That system, allowing streamlined applications for a new ‘settled
status’ for current residents, is meant to come online later this year -
currently Europeans are in a legal
limbo that makes it risky to leave the country.
The
government needs this system. In the first-stage agreement with the EU struck
last December, it agreed to protect the EU law rights of citizens already
settled here, so it needs to know who those people are.
But progress is
apparently shambolic. The committee report expresses doubts about whether
enough new staff are being recruited. (There is even dispute about how many
actually have been recruited so far.)
It criticises the visa agency’s track record and concludes that the Home Office
doesn’t have “sufficient staff and systems” and is only “planning moderate
adjustments for an immense bureaucratic challenge.”
There
is practically no prospect of delivering this important piece of Brexit
machinery while effort is being spent on the new scheme for transition period
arrivals. And that effort is entirely wasted. The registration scheme won’t
limit immigration from the EU, or do anything other than make life slightly
more annoying for Europeans in the UK. The payoff is the symbolic benefit of something actually changing on the day
of Brexit, and for Theresa May that seems good enough. (Actually it’s pretty
worthless on that score, too, since everything in this scheme would be possible
without leaving the EU.) To rub salt in the wound, this pointless new system
will in all likelihood become completely redundant after the transition period,
when EU citizens will start to need actual visas rather than just rubber-stamp
permits.
Meanwhile,
the immigration white paper that was originally meant to be published last
autumn seems to have been
delayed indefinitely. The immigration bill, once expected early this year,
is receding further and further into the distance. It’s hard to avoid the
conclusion that nobody in the government really cares about immigration policy
beyond cynical politicking. They want the benefits of sounding tough, and to
get them they’ll make as much costly noise as necessary, ignoring the work that
actually needs doing.