Priority 3: Integration& Citizenship – Security, Belonging, Cohesion Universal five-year route to settlement , followed by citi­zenship, applying equally across visa types; simplify rules so all lawful residence counts. Reintroduce birthright citizenship (or remove cost and ad­ministrative barriers for UK-born children) and end NRPF for families with children at minimum. Positive government narrative : unequivocally rebut racist and anti-migrant rhetoric; link migration to shared prosper­ity and ageing-society realities. Expected impact Reduced precarity and irregularity; improved child poverty outcomes; stronger social cohesion. Asylum Three fundamental reforms to the asylum system are ur­gently necessary: 1. Safe routes 2. The right to work and faster, better asylum decisions 3. A not-for-profit asylum accommodation system Safe Routes The arrival of asylum seekers in dangerous and chaotic cir­cumstances led to the deaths of at least 82 people, includ ­ing 14 children, in 2024 – a record-breaking year. These ar ­rivals are also the key driver of public opposition and dis­satisfaction with immigration policy among the British public. It is hard to overstate the importance of genuinely addressing this issue. It is essential, both morally and polit­ically, that the government tackles it head on. The approach so far has been to propose increasingly “tough” approaches to smugglers. This involves making use of counter-terror style powers to target them, and sharing intelligence to disrupt their networks. This may plausibly have some modest impact over the medium term, but it will do nothing to remove the need that the smuggling networks cater to: the imperative for refugees to bypass European borders closed to asylum seekers, and so will ul­timately only displace or delay irregular asylum seeker journeys, not end them. Furthermore, these measures without adequate legal safe­guards, risk having the greatest impact on asylum seekers themselves. They could easily find themselves wrongfully charged as smugglers. This is the critical risk of an ap­proach based on“smashing the gangs”. 6 If Labour does not address the root causes that drive smuggling by offering real alternatives to the people trapped in a border limbo, they will fall into the same trap as their predecessors of raising public expectations, bring­ing greater visibility to the question only to then inevitably fail to deliver. The only evidence-based way of preventing irregular journeys from taking place is to put in place a re­alistic alternative way for people to reach the UK or find safety in Europe. We saw this approach effectively used to protect refugees fleeing Ukraine in the wake of Putin’s in­vasion – more than 200,000 found safety in the UK with ­out a single one paying a smuggler to make a dangerous 6  University of Oxford Centre for Criminology(2024)‘No such thing as justice here: The criminalisation of people arriving to the UK on small boats’, webpage accessed on 8 August 2024. https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2024-02/No%20such%20thing%20as%20justice%20here_for%20publication.pdf Time for change 5