New British Immigration Law Embeds Common-Sense Principles

By Dan Cadman on June 3, 2014

This is another in my occasional series highlighting common sense in the immigration laws, rules, and policies of other nations, and contrasting them to what's going on in our own backyard.

The Home Office of the United Kingdom recently announced enactment of an immigration bill that shows a considerable amount of good sense, if it isn't eviscerated in practice, as often seems to happen to the best of laws after a few years of litigation, questionable court or administrative tribunal precedents, and sausage-making by one or more political parties when in power.

Here are the highlights, as put out by the British Home Office on May 14:

  • Cutting the number of immigration decisions that can be appealed from 17 to 4, while allowing us to return certain harmful individuals before their appeals are heard if there is no risk of serious irreversible harm

  • Ensuring that the courts have regard to Parliament's view of what the public interest requires when considering European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) Article 8 claims in immigration cases — making clear the right to a family life is not to be regarded as absolute and unqualified

  • Clamping down on people who try to gain an immigration advantage by entering into a sham marriage or civil partnership

  • Requiring private landlords to check the immigration status of tenants, preventing those with no right to live in the UK from accessing private rented housing

  • Introducing a new requirement from temporary migrants with time-limited immigration status by requiring them to make a financial contribution to the National Health Service

That's a powerful collective list of highlights. Let's consider them individually for a moment in the American context.

Cutting the number of immigration appeals and returning harmful individuals before their appeals are completed. By contrast, there has been no move in the efforts for "comprehensive immigration reform" to limit appeals or permit the United States to put its public safety and security interests before those of the individual alien. In fact, the "Gang of Eight" bill passed by the Senate last June would have exponentially increased the avenues of appeals and reopenings available to aliens on a multitude of fronts, including aliens whose prior claims to asylum had been denied or dismissed and aliens who failed to depart the United States and became absconders rather than comply with decisions of the immigration courts.

The right to a family life is not to be regarded as absolute and unqualified. The Obama administration has centered much of its refusal to enforce immigration laws on the basis of sanctity of the family. Superficially, this sounds appropriate and humane, but it isn't in practice. Consider: a parent illegally crosses the U.S. border and gains unlawful employment, quite probably by committing identity theft and using names and numbers relating to someone else. Later, he or she pays a series of smugglers to transport one or more of his/her children into the United States, also illegally, and at great risk to the minor(s), who are subject to the caprices of extraordinarily callous human traffickers the whole time — traffickers who may sexually or physically abuse them or hold them hostage for additional fees. Once here, the minor avails himself of the administration's DACA program, which turns a blind eye to its own tacit endorsement of smuggling through the program. Then, advocates urge that the parents, who initiated the vicious cycle to begin with, should be happy beneficiaries of a corollary program of administrative amnesty, to which the administration appears to be giving serious consideration. What's wrong with this picture? Clearly, and in my view properly, the Brits see much wrong with the idea that aliens should benefit from this state of affairs.

Clamping down on sham marriages or civil partnerships. Immigration enforcement authorities pay lip service to this tenet, but in actual practice there is a gaping chasm between what the investigating and enforcing officers occasionally do to make an example of fraudsters on the one hand; and the approve-at-all-costs mindset prevalent among the leaders and middle managers of our immigration benefits-granting agency, U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), on the other. It is notable that the former director of USCIS, Alejandro Mayorkas, was recently promoted to the number two position at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) despite inquiries and audits from DHS's Office of Inspector General after complaints from USCIS examiners that they were being forced into approving any number of inappropriate applications and petitions from ineligible aliens.

Requiring private landlords to check the immigration status of tenants. Wow. Can you imagine? Hazleton, Pa., passed a local ordinance to this effect and the litigation proceeded all the way to the Supreme Court, which by declining to hear the case effectively sustained a decision by the federal third circuit court of appeals striking down the ordinance.

Requiring temporary immigrants to make a financial contribution to the National Health Service. There is no precise equivalent to our American system, since we don't exactly have nationalized health care, but it is interesting to note that, despite provisions in "Obamacare" that would appear to preclude illegal or overstayed aliens from accessing the system, many health care providers opt not to press for evidence of legal status, and in any case, emergency care facilities take one and all on a first-come, first-served basis without regard to immigration status, resulting in massive fiscal and human resource strains on state and local hospitals and health systems, many of which receive filter-down federal grants and matching funds, notwithstanding whatever the Obamacare statutes may say.

When exactly, one wonders, did a country that purports to pride itself on bedrock principles, plain talk, and common sense, stray so radically from its path?