I applied for British citizenship out of fear

In February, I became a British citizen after 11 years in the UK. While it’s a relief to be granted citizenship, it’s not a cause for celebration. I applied to protect myself from the stress and insecurity of being an immigrant in the UK.

Getting my citizenship wearing a New Jersey shirt and USA flag socks because I’d like to make it very clear I’m an American…who also happens to have British citizenship now.

I was scared of being forced into digital immigration status

My main reason for applying for citizenship was because I did not want my immigration status to be only accessible online (as opposed to a physical document).

In 2020, I got indefinite leave to remain in the UK, after 9 years of living here. When I got my biometric residency permit to confirm my status, I noticed it came with an expiration date: December 31, 2024.

This made me nervous because I thought my card would last for 10 years before I needed a new one. When I searched online about it, I learned that the expiration date had to do with needing to make a change to BRPs to meet EU requirements for encryption technology.

However, since then, the Home Office has set plans for the UK immigration system to become fully digital from 2025.

From that year, I would no longer have a physical biometric residency permit. My status could only be verified using the Home Office’s online service.

This is what is already in place for EU immigrants with settled or pre-settled status in the UK. Some non-UK immigrants who have applied more recently already have digital status, too.

If you’ve never experienced an immigration system before, you might think digital status doesn’t sound so bad. Most things are digital nowadays, right?

But it’s actually really bad, and in some cases dangerous, for a variety of reasons. Consider this:

• British citizens have access to physical documentation (a passport), while yours is digital. If you need to prove your immigration status to secure somewhere to live or to work, who is a landlord or employer going to choose if it’s between you and a British citizen? The Brit has a passport they can see. Your status can only be seen if someone knows how to navigate the Home Office’s friction-filled online system.
• Digital services can go down, contain errors, and be hacked. If there’s an outage when you need to prove your status, you can’t. If your status is wrong when you return to UK, you might be denied entry.

These aren’t just hypothetical scenarios. They are already happening:

• The University of York did a pilot study where they found landlords, when choosing who to rent to, were influenced by what type of ID a prospective tenant had. In one case, “a tenant with a non-British sounding name, aged 20 and working in construction had an 87% probability of being chosen with a British passport. This plummeted to 13% with digital status.”
• An EU citizen in an abusive relationship had to go back to her abuser because she had difficulty proving her settled status when seeking refuge.
• In a recent audit of digital checks done by a firm which wishes to remain anonymous, it was found that many people with indefinite leave to remain had an incorrect expiration date on their digital status. After a conversation with both ILPA (the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association) and the Home Office, this issue was rectified, but it highlights how easy it is for problems to arise.

So as I’ve learned more about the horrors of digital status, I’ve felt the need to get UK citizenship sometime before the end of 2024.

Even when I got indefinite leave to remain, I knew I needed to apply for citizenship. That 2024 expiration date filled me with dread of having to interact with the Home Office again sooner than expected.

I didn’t have a timeline in mind for when exactly I’d apply for citizenship until I endured an awful border experience at the beginning of 2022.

The UK border was still terrifying with indefinite leave to remain

In March 2022, I returned to the UK from a holiday abroad where I had booked two separate one-way tickets.

Because I was traveling on a US passport, I went through a whole ordeal to prove my right to travel to the UK. Then when I got to the UK, the e-gates to enter the country weren’t working for me, and I had to speak to a border officer to get through.

When that border officer asked me, ‘how did you qualify for settlement’, I knew I needed to apply for citizenship sooner rather than later.

I wrote about this awful border experience shortly after it happened. What I said there and what I’ll say again is how unsettled I was by being treated with suspicion even after getting indefinite leave to remain.

I didn’t want to have to keep qualifying how I got to live here. I didn’t want to feel forever owned by my visa sponsor.

I thought indefinite leave to remain would be the thing to give me a sense of relief living in the UK, and while it did in some respects, in others, it felt meaningless.

I didn’t want the fear surrounding my immigration status to haunt me any longer. I had to apply for citizenship.

I faced more obstacles without a UK passport

I also want to mention something that became clear to me around the time I applied for UK citizenship: UK services are built around UK citizens.

That might sound like an obvious point, and you might even think that that’s the way things should be. But as someone who has lived in this country over a decade, it is incredibly frustrating to face more obstacles to using services that require ID simply because you don’t have a UK passport.

Here are two examples that happened recently:

• I switched banks last year. While signing up for my new account online, I was told to scan a UK passport or driving license. I didn’t have either, and there was no option to scan other ID. The help text said I may need to go to a branch to open an account. (I didn’t in the end, but point still stands it shouldn’t have to be this way when you’re a long-term resident with an existing bank account in the UK.)
• I applied for a provisional driving license in January. The online application system for this only works if you have a UK passport. You have to use an old system if you don’t have one. After completing the form online, I was then sent a paper form telling me I needed to physically send DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) my biometric residency permit. Had I had a UK passport, they would have just needed my passport number. (I couldn’t fully complete my license application because of this. I was waiting on a decision on my citizenship application and didn’t want to risk being without my residency permit when that decision came through. This is because you need to return your permit to the Home Office once you become a citizen.)

So this isn’t a point about fear, and it wasn’t really a factor in my decision to apply for citizenship. But when these things happened, it did make me reflect that these occurrences were all the more reason to get citizenship.

I didn’t want to be a secondary audience in the place I’ve called home since I was 18.

You shouldn’t need citizenship to have the same rights and access as others

According to the Home Office, British citizenship is a “significant life event” and “gives you the opportunity to participate more fully in the life of your local community” (from the Nationality guidance documentation).

To this statement, I would formally like to respond by saying: screw that.

Citizenship is a ‘significant’ event only because the world has built up a system where we must apply for permission to cross a bit of land, pay an appalling amount of money to justify our existence in that land, and then pay even more money after a stupidly long amount of time just to get the same rights as everyone else.

Not everyone makes it through the process, so we see it as a big deal when someone gets to the end.

It’s so sickening.

If you’re someone who has always lived in the same country reading this, I’d like you to take a moment to reflect, how long do you think someone should get to live in your country before they are granted citizenship? And why do you think that?

If you answer that first question with a number, I’d then like you to consider why some people have to prove themselves to access to the same rights as you, while you just had to be born to get them.

People shouldn’t have to go through a long, costly, demoralizing process to fully participate in their communities. If you’re in a community, you should get to participate in it. End of.

More on my citizenship experience

This is my first post in a series about my citizenship application experience.

The rest of the series focuses on the application process and my issues with it. I’ll be releasing the next post in April.