Immigration Bill Vests Immigration Police Duties on Landlords and NHS Staff - Immigration Solicitors from Kadmos Consultants Comment on Practicalities of This Measure
(PRWEB UK) 11 October 2013 -- The new Immigration Bill published on 10 October 2013 (2) introduces mandatory immigration checks before medical care can be provided to patients by the NHS professionals. The Bill also makes landlords responsible for checking immigration status of their tenants and significantly restricts judicial control over administrative decision making process.
Immigration lawyers from Kadmos Consultants outline five factors that may complicate the task of determining a migrant’s status, particularly where this task is vested on lay members of the public, such as landlords or the NHS staff who do not yet have immigration law in their university curriculum.
1. There are more people in limbo status in the UK than the government can account for: they are those who had made applications to the UKBA months, years, and sometimes years and years ago and have not received a response. Proving that there has been no response is proving the negative – it is a virtually impossible task.
2. There are migrants whose applications had been decided wrongly and they are appealing against adverse decisions – a process that does not take less than six months and sometimes goes well beyond a year. A month or two after lodging the appeal they would receive a confirmation that their appeal has been received. This notice is usually followed by months of silence.
3. For some migrants, especially for non-visa nationals, the right to remain in the UK depends on the date they last entered the country. Sometimes this date is not immediately apparent from the migrant’s papers.
4. Some migrants are not formally required to have immigration documents as they have the right to remain in the UK on the basis of being EU nationals or f amily members of EU nationals. Beside the fact that not every landlord may be immediately aware of the composition of the European Union, “family member” of an EU national is an extremely complex legal concept. Immigration lawyers would easily agree that “family members” have the right to remain in the UK whether or not they are in possession of a residence card confirming this right, but serious disagreements may arise as to whether the spouse, the parent or even the child of a the EU national is actually a “family member” for the relevant purposes.
5. British nationality is also a notoriously complex area of immigration law. British citizens are not required by law to have a passport and there are no biometric cards or ID cards for the British. Thus, many British citizens, especially of the older generation who had never travelled abroad and have no intention of doing so in the future, do not have a passport or proof of nationality. For a layman it might be virtually impossible to ascertain if the person not in possession of a British passport is a British citizen, even if their accent, manners and appearance make it difficult to imagine otherwise.
Kadmos Consultants is a London based firm of immigration lawyers. The firm deals with all aspects of UK immigration law, including family immigration, employment of migrant workers, settlement and British nationality. The firm regularly represents migrants in immigration appeals and has impressive success rate in challenging unlawful decisions of the immigration authorities.
(1) http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/10/immigration-bill-theresa-may-hostile-environment
Helena Sheizon, Kadmos Consultants, http://www.kadmos.org.uk, +44 2089309503, [email protected]
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