Citizenship: the haves and the have-nots
Today, there are two types of British people, said Kenan Malik in The Observer. There are the “British-British”, whose citizenship can never be taken away from them. Then there are immigrants and the children of immigrants, whose status seems to be “contingent upon continued good behaviour”. Recently, we’ve seen this “two-tier system” at work in a variety of cases. There was Shamima Begum, whose citizenship was revoked because she joined Isis, though until then she had spent her whole life in Britain. There were the Windrush migrants, arbitrarily stripped of their right to live in the UK. And last week, the Home Office tried to deport 42 Jamaican nationals who had served time in prison – though many of them had grown up in the UK, or were raising their children here. (After an 11th hour human rights challenge in the Court of Appeal, 25 were taken off the plane, but 17 were duly deported.) This “discriminatory” tendency is on the rise. More than 150 people have been stripped of their citizenship since 2010.
Those are false comparisons, said The Daily Telegraph: the cases are quite different. The Windrush migrants were not deported because they had committed crimes; it was an error, and their treatment was “scandalous”. But the deportation of “foreign criminals” – foreign citizens who have been sentenced to 12 months or more in prison – is the law, under Labour’s UK Borders Act (2007). Britain’s right to deport them is “automatic”, unless to do so would infringe their human rights. That’s because citizenship is a “privilege, not a right”, said Rod Liddle in The Spectator. The plane heading to Jamaica last week carried people who had served time for manslaughter, rape and drug dealing. “Sobbing” over sending them to a country where they hold citizenship makes no sense at all. People who come from one country and abuse the laws of another should be removed. This idea is “accepted worldwide”.
Even so, it is arguably “disproportionate” to send people back to a country where they have not been since they were a child, said Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. Chevon Brown, for example, now 23, was sentenced to 14 months after being caught driving at 115mph, then deported to Jamaica last year – “ripped”, as he says, from his family in Oxford, and sent to a country he left at the age of 14, where he has no relatives. In such cases, deportation is “manifestly unjust and inhumane”, said Sarah Baxter in The Sunday Times. It represents a “life sentence of exile to an unknown land”.