Before implementing the proposed changes, the Home Office is today (Saturday 5 August) opening a 4-week consultation with carriers, ports and those that use statistics gathered from landing card data. Landing card meaning: a card given to passengers on a plane or boat that they must fill in with personal information about themselves and show to officials when they arrive in a foreign country:.
The Home Office destroyed thousands of landing card slips recording Windrush immigrants’ arrival dates in the UK, despite staff warnings that the move would make it harder to check the records of older Caribbean-born residents experiencing residency difficulties.
A former Home Office employee said the records, stored in the basement of a government tower block, were a vital resource for case workers when they were asked to find information about someone’s arrival date in the UK from the West Indies – usually when the individual was struggling to resolve immigration status problems.
Although the home secretary, Amber Rudd, has promised to make it easier for Windrush-generation residents to regularise their status, the destruction of the database is likely to make the process harder, even with the support of the new taskforce announced this week.
Who are the Windrush generation?
They are people who arrived in the UK after the second world war from Caribbean countries at the invitation of the British government. The first group arrived on the ship MV Empire Windrush in June 1948.
What happened to them?Nascar wives hot.
An estimated 50,000 people faced the risk of deportation if they had never formalised their residency status and did not have the required documentation to prove it.
Why now?
It stems from a policy, set out by Theresa May when she was home secretary, to make the UK 'a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants'. It requires employers, NHS staff, private landlords and other bodies to demand evidence of people’s citizenship or immigration status.
Why do they not have the correct paperwork and status?
Some children, often travelling on their parents’ passports, were never formally naturalised and many moved to the UK before the countries in which they were born became independent, so they assumed they were British. In some cases, they did not apply for passports. The Home Office did not keep a record of people entering the country and granted leave to remain, which was conferred on anyone living continuously in the country since before 1 January 1973.
What did the government try and do to resolve the problem?
A Home Office team was set up to ensure Commonwealth-born long-term UK residents would no longer find themselves classified as being in the UK illegally. But a month after one minister promised the cases would be resolved within two weeks, many remained destitute. In November 2018 home secretary Sajid Javid revealed that at least 11 Britons who had been wrongly deported had died. In April 2019 the government agreed to pay up to £200m in compensation.
Whenever you enter the US, you are required to fill out Form 6059B, which asks for your personal details and whether or not you're bringing in any restricted goods. Whenever you are entering the UK, you are required to fill out a landing card and passengers entering Canada fill out an E311 Declaration Card. As far as I can tell the immigration officers usually completely ignore whatever details you wrote in those forms and simply scan your passport to enter your details into their computer. It therefore looks like a complete waste of time, as the majority of passengers have no goods to declare anyway and therefore the immigration forms get thrown away right after you get your passport stamp.
So what's the point of these forms/declarations? Why require absolutely everyone to fill them out? As a bonus question explain why car passengers are spared from this obligation and are instead asked verbally if they have something to declare. Watch one piece dubbed english.
My understanding is that the forms primarily exist for two purposes:
I do agree that the forms often seem pointless in practice: yesterday I dutifully declared I was bringing a meat product to the US, twice at that (Customs paper form and ESTA machine), and nobody even bothered to ask me what it was (jerky), much less inspect it..
In the UK, there are situations where the landing card is recorded - a so-called coded landing. This happens when, above the date stamp, you get a 'custom' rectangular stamp with the landing card number on it rather than the plain-text 6-month stamp.
This happens when there's been suspicions about a person they nevertheless chose to land, and always happens when a visa national is admitted for visa-free landside transit (until 23:59 the next day) as well as when a non-visa national is admitted for visa-free study for up to 6 months (short-term study).
As for the US, either the customs form or the APC/Global entry receipt has to be collected by the customs officer (for what purpose, I do not know) - hence the need to fill that one out.
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