The British government has introduced stricter immigration policies, which makes it almost impossible for undocumented migrants who arrive in the country through small boats or hidden in vehicles to acquire citizenship.
According to new directives, people who enter the United Kingdom through these media will generally have their requests for denied citizenship.
“This guide further strengthens the measures to make it clear that any person who enters illegally in the United Kingdom, including arrivals of small boats, faces a request for British citizenship,” said a spokesman for the Ministry of Interior .
The Labor Government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces a growing pressure to stop migration, particularly after the Nigel Farage's United Kingdom Reform Party obtained approximately four million votes in the last general elections, an unprecedented achievement For an extreme right group.
However, policy change has caused criticisms of some labor members of Parliament.
“If we give someone the status of refugee, it can not be correct to reject them a route to become a British citizen,” Deputy Stella Creasy wrote in X, arguing that the policy would relegate them to the state of “second class forever.”
Free circulation, a legal blog focused on immigration, warned that revised guidelines could “block a large number of refugees for naturalization as British citizens, immediately valid.” The platform described the changes as “incredibly grudging and harmful to integration.”
This development follows the recent parliamentary discussions on the border security of the government, the asylum and the project of immigration, which seeks to equip the police with “controles style powers” to dismantle smuggling networks responsible for transporting migrants through of the channel.
Legal and irregular migration has reached historical levels, becoming a key issue in the general elections of July 2024 that led to Starmer's victory. When assuming the position, he discarded the controversial plan of the conservative government under Rishi Sunak, which aimed to deter undocumented migration by deporting the arrivals in Rwanda. Instead, Starmer promised to “crush gangs” facilitating illegal crosses.
The provisional figures of the Ministry of Interior revealed that 36,816 individuals were detected that crossed the channel between England and France in 2024, marking an increase of 25 percent of the 29,437 registered in 2023.
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