How Britain Turned Citizenship Into Identity By Paperwork

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ended a year of argument by confirming that a child born on American soil is an American. The debate about belonging in Anglosphere countries is not new, nor are attempts to have the law decide. It happened in England in 1608, in a case about a Scottish toddler called Robert Calvin and whether he could inherit English land.

Sir Edward Coke, maybe the most brilliant and most bloody-minded lawyer England has ever produced, held that anyone born within the king’s allegiance was the king’s subject. The rule crossed the Atlantic with the common law, and in 1868 you carved it into the Fourteenth Amendment.

England, meanwhile, scrapped it. In 1983, with no constitutional convention and no soul-searching, the British Nationality Act of 1981 quietly ended the automatic citizenship of every child born on British soil. What Coke built and America entrenched, our Parliament undid in an afternoon, because in Britain Parliament can do anything within the bounds of physics. Both the protections in the American Constitution and the flexibility in the British system show the difficulties of using law as a measure of who is “really” American or British, and who might be merely administratively so.

The latest flare-up of this debate in England is housing. This week Reform UK, the insurgent party of Nigel Farage, pledged to put young British workers at the front of the queue for social housing (public housing, roughly), to remove foreign nationals from it, and to limit the welfare non-citizens receive. You might wonder why foreigners are paid welfare and given houses in Britain. Me too. Yet the socialist Labour government called Reform’s plan “unserious and unworkable,” and the very next day proudly unveiled its own master plan: 70,000 affordable homes, spread over 10 years, against a waiting list of 1.3 million households. At that pace, the last family in the queue gets its keys around the year 2212. That’s how incompetent socialists are.

But behind the housing row sits this deeper argument about belonging, and at its center is a system American readers may not know. It has a name only the British civil service could have produced: Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR). ILR is our green card. Created in 1971, it gives a migrant on a qualifying visa, after just five years’ residence, the right to stay forever, to claim welfare, and to join that public housing queue. In the last year, Britain granted permanent residence to 525,000 people. That is a foreign population the size of Atlanta, every single year, promised permanence in Britain.

After Brexit, Boris Johnson’s Conservative government promised control of our borders. Instead, after the lockdowns, Britain ran its own version of the Biden surge: visas issued in the millions, which Britons now call the “Boriswave,” pushing net migration above 900,000 in a single year. About one in five people in Britain was born abroad, an astonishing figure for a country that had net emigration as recently as 1993, and a higher share than America has ever had, Ellis Island included.

The Boriswave cohort is now arriving at its five-year mark, and the queue for permanence is about to become the longest in our history. The government’s answer is “earned settlement”: doubling the qualifying period to 10 years, including for people who arrived under the old rules. Reform would go further and abolish ILR altogether.

That is because, just 12 months after receiving ILR, a migrant can apply for citizenship and a passport. The tests are not demanding. English is required at an “intermediate” level. There is a 45-minute multiple-choice quiz of pub trivia, Life in the U.K. There is no test of contribution, of whether you have worked or claimed, integrated into mainstream society or withdrawn from it. That is how a country manufactures citizens who are British by filing rather than belonging.

Defenders of this arrangement insist that once someone has a passport, they are just as British as everyone else, and nothing can ever be done to remove them. But a passport does not magically and retroactively justify the decision to grant it. Britain has handed out passports like confetti, and pretended that the paperwork is all it takes to become part of the British family.

Some European neighbors have stopped pretending. Since January, Sweden has offered refugees a repatriation grant of 350,000 kronor per adult, about $35,000, to go “home,” for those the migration minister says have “not become sufficiently integrated.” In May, the Swedish parliament took the first of two votes to amend the constitution so that dual nationals who commit crimes that “seriously damage Sweden’s vital interests” can be stripped of citizenship. Denmark has paid repatriation grants for years. So the question Britain must answer is whether membership in a nation is a contract whose terms the nation may revise, or a promise the state can never rewrite, no matter what its citizens think.

Britain has rapidly moved to copy the American idea of being a “creedal” nation, with insistence from the Left that there is no such thing as an “English” or “Scottish” or “Welsh” ethnic people, and that Britishness is merely a series of stereotypes familiar to American audiences. Cups of tea, London buses, a spot of rugby or cricket, and some dry wit. But identity runs much deeper than all of those things.

You see it in deep social mores and customs (that are shared across the Atlantic by our joint provenance), in our sense of fair play, family unit structure, belief in the common law, and so on, that are just different from even other Western European nations. Alan Macfarlane shows this in a work called “The Origins of English Individualism.”

He shows that Englishness, Britishness, or Americanness for that matter, is not merely a matter of what food you eat, or even whether you can speak the language. It’s obviously not just an ethnic distinction either, as many interracial marriages and non-white people integrate marvelously. But if the Left continues to insist that paperwork is all that defines our sense of belonging and citizenship, and ignores the deep, powerful wellsprings of national identity, they may come to regret severing the link between the nation and the state.

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James Price is a former Chief of Staff to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.