for settlement or citizenship, doubling the period of precar­ity from five to ten years. She also removed the right to ever obtain citizenship at all from refugees who enter the country through irregular means. This means that people recognised as victims of persecution, who we have a legal duty to protect and offer a place to rebuild their lives to, will never now be able to become British, even if they live here for the rest of their lives. 57 There are ways to reduce immigrant numbers, but this should never be achieved – and indeed has demonstrably not been achieved – by reducing the rights of those who do come to the country. Whatever the number of people we allow to enter the country, those people should enjoy equal rights and dignity when here and be supported to become full members of our communities. Instead, we have a sys­tem that brings in high numbers of immigrants with very limited rights, creating a two-tier society and exacerbating poverty and divisions. A simplified, universal pathway to settlement after five years The immigration visa system is unnecessarily complex and punitive. Different categories of worker have differing lengths of leave, differing limitations on their pathways to settlement, and differing opportunity to work or change employer. These disparities result in a byzantine, inefficient system where poorer and racialised migrants are most ad­versely affected. 58 This complexity reflects the fact that the immigration system was never designed to meet the UK’s immigration needs as one coherent whole, but developed over decades of successive governments responding to the perceived need to limit migrants’ rights on the one hand, while maintaining the flow of labour on the other, resulting in a terrible mess. In addition to the simplified points­based visa system for work proposed above, there should be one, uniform process for access to settlement and citi­zenship for all migrants. This should comprise a secure, permanent status guaranteed after five years’ residence, followed by a route to citizenship. Such an approach has been shown to enjoy strong support from the public. 59 A universal five-year route to settlement would significant­ly reduce the instability and exclusion of migrant families forced to remain in an arbitrary“temporary” status for ex­tended periods, which can lead to lost work, study and de­velopment opportunities and have a negative impact on mental health. 60 Secure and accessible pathways to settle­ment would also reduce the number of people who become undocumented when they are unable to renew their leave and lose their formal immigration status. 61 All forms of residence in the UK ought to count equally to­wards the required five-year period for settlement, replac­ing the current situation where certain types of leave, for example as a student or worker on a temporary visa, does not“count” towards the accumulated residence years’ re­quirement. Taking this logic a step further, the UK should take the example of other European countries by introduc­ing accessible pathways to a regular status and settlement for people who currently have no formal immigration sta­tus as well. While factors such as participation in the work­force or family ties enable the regularisation of undocu­mented migrants in France and Spain, routes to regain a regular status for someone who has lost it in the UK are in­credibly restrictive. 62 Trapping people outside of the regular immigration system with no route to redress does not make them disappear, for all of the hostility that people in those circumstances face. Indeed, research suggests that the undocumented migrant population in the UK is largely made up of long-term resi­dents with about a third estimated to have been living in the UK more than a decade. 63 The Spanish have undertak­en major regularisation drives to bring undocumented mi­grants in this situation into the formal economy on several occasions over the last decades, gaining significantly in economic terms from their integration into formal systems. The Spanish experience also provides strong evidence against the idea that such regularisation drives act as a “pull factor” for more migrants to enter or stay on an irreg­ular basis, hoping for the chance of regularisation down the line. In Spain, no change in the rates of undocumented residents have been observed in the years following large regularisation programmes. 64 57  https://migrantsrights.org.uk/2025/06/11/refugee-citizenship-ban-good-character/ 58  Oxford University Migration Observatory(2021)‘Migrants on 10-year routes to settlement in the UK’, website last accessed: 8 August 2024. https://migrationobservatory. ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migrants-on-ten-year-routes-to-settlement-in-the-uk/ 59  UK in a Changing Europe(2024)‘Migration to the UK after Brexit: Policy, politics and public opinion’, website last accessed: 8 August 2024 https://ukandeu.ac.uk/reports/ migration-to-the-uk-policy-politics-and-public-opinion/ 60  IPPR(2023)‘A punishing process: Experiences of people on the 10-year route to settlement’, website last accessed: 8 August 2024. https://www.ippr.org/ articles/a-punishing-process 61  JCWI(2021)‘We Are Here: Routes to regularisation for the UK’s undocumented population’, website last accessed: 8 August 2024. https://jcwi.org.uk/wp-content/up­loads/2024/07/JCWI-We-Are-Here-2021-A4-web-ready-1.pdf 62  https://picum.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Regularisation-mechanisms-and-programmes_Why-they-matter-and-how-to-design-them_EN.pdf 63  https://www.pewresearch.org/global/fact-sheet/unauthorized-immigrants-in-the-united-kingdom/ 64  thinking Migration: The Spanish Model, Racho& De Clerke, Forthcoming Autumn 2025 14 Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung e.V.