On his first day at the Yarl's Wood immigration detention centre near Bedford, where Beyond Detention provides support, Sam Price, CEO of Beyond Detention, met Sofia (a fictional name to protect her), a woman from the Philippines who had been living in the United Kingdom for more than twelve years with a work visa that she had renewed without any problems each time it was necessary. In 2024, she got married and changed her visa to a spouse visa, which allows her to work and reside in the country for almost three years and then apply for permanent residence. The Home Office delayed in processing her application, and during the waiting time, her visa expired. She no longer had the right to be in the United Kingdom. ‘One night she was preparing dinner, they knocked on the door and sent her to the immigration detention centre,’ says Price.
Many people like Sofia have seen their residence in the country threatened. Some because of delays in the resolution of their applications, as in her case, and others because they cannot prove that they were residing in the United Kingdom before 31 December 2020 or because they believe that, having lived in the country all their lives, working, owning property and raising a family, they are automatically exempt from having to apply for a residence permit.
Added to the uncertain situation faced by all of them is the ‘hostile environment’ that immigrants have to deal with, which many organisations have been denouncing for years, and the problems associated with the new immigration system, the first one that can only be accessed digitally and can only be used with an internet connection.
Being an immigrant in the UK after BrexitThis article is the third article of an international investigation conducted by Maldita.es (Spain) and Funky Citizens (Romania). The project explores, in three articles, the difficulties experienced by immigrants in the United Kingdom after Brexit, both those who already resided there and those who arrived later, especially those from EU countries, with a special focus on Spanish and Romanians. Thanks to the collaboration of different organisations and NGOs working to help immigrants, and based on the various testimonies of those interviewed for this investigation, we have compiled a radiography of the United Kingdom's immigration system after Brexit came into effect. This investigation was supported by Journalismfund Europe.  The ‘hostile environment’ and anti-immigration campaigns: a reality that has gained strength with Brexit, according to organisationsThe3million, an association created after the 2016 referendum to protect the rights of immigrants in the United Kingdom, defines the concept of a ‘hostile environment’ as ‘a set of measures, both administrative and legislative, designed to make the lives of people in an irregular situation miserable’ to the point that they decide to ‘self-deport’. In practice, they explain, this means that the rights of immigrants, even those who have permission to be in the country, ‘are being challenged at every stage: from applying for a job, to travelling, finding a place to live or accessing social assistance’. These daily checks, explains Liberty Human Rights, an organisation that fights for fair and equal treatment for all people in the country, involve different people, from the public sector, such as NHS staff who check the immigration status of those who go to the doctor, to the private sector, such as employers or landlords. ‘They can face financial and even criminal sanctions if they fail to comply with these regulations,’ they add. Another example where the ‘hostile environment’ policy is being applied, according to organisations such as the3million, is at airports. ‘Airline staff now have to act as border agents,’ says the organisation’s CEO, Andreea Dumitrache. She is referring to recent changes in the application of a mandatory visa from April 2025 for people from all countries (including European countries, with the exception of Ireland) who want to travel to the United Kingdom. Airlines can be punished with fines of up to £2,000 for each passenger transported who does not have the required documentation. As a result, airline employees at airports are forced to check the immigration status of passengers and the permits of tourists. For other NGOs defending migrants' rights, such as the Migrants Rights Network, to all this must be added the raids that can be carried out in workplaces and which would also form part of the ‘hostile environment’. ‘The British authorities have started visiting certain places where, based on their information, there are people who are probably employed illegally,’ says Adrian Daniel Robert Marin, Consul General of Romania in London. This is how the British Home Office explains it on its website: ‘For the first time, employment checks will be extended’ to sectors such as ‘construction, food delivery, beauty salons and courier services’. From July 2024 to March 2025, there have been 6,784 raids on premises for illegal work and 4,779 arrests (40% and 42% more than in the same period last year), according to government data. Mostrar menos |
The Anti-Raid Network, formed by residents and activists from different parts of the country, was created to warn people about these raids. Their goal, they say, is to ‘collect and spread information’: from posting on social media about possible raids in a certain area to informing migrants about their rights when faced with a raid.
Fizza Qureshi, CEO of Migrants Rights Network, says that they have achieved that these people are seen as ‘a threat’ and that people believe that ‘we have to watch each other, as if it were Big Brother’, guided by ‘immigration status’.
In fact, the Home Office has set up a digital mailbox for reporting immigrants who are residing or working illegally in the country or committing crimes. These accusations can be anonymous and no evidence is required. All you have to do is fill out a questionnaire with closed questions (although in some cases you can write a text). Qureshi warns that this system can be ‘very easily abused’. ‘Even if you have a fight with your neighbour, who is not a white British person and speaks with an accent, you can make an accusation that they are undocumented and terrorise them with a raid,’ she explains.
The origin of the term hostile environment dates back to 2012, when, by then, Home Secretary Theresa May said in an interview with The Telegraph that her goal was to create ‘a truly hostile environment for illegal immigration’ in the UK. She introduced a series of policies that ended up negatively affecting all immigrants in the country. Since then, she has been considered ‘the architect of the term’. A hostile environment that, for organisations such as the3million, has spread to a large number of immigrants since Brexit.
From a ‘hostile environment’ to misinformation and anti-immigrant narratives
The hostile environment is not limited to actions: words matter too. This is the name of the campaign launched by the Migrants Rights Network to raise awareness of the way in which British institutions, society and the media talk about immigrants, including refugees and asylum seekers. Legislation related to immigration, such as the 2023 ‘Illegal Migration Act’, ‘has been based on demonising’ people seeking to settle in the UK, they explain on their website. Words such as ‘illegal’, ‘refugee crisis’ or ‘invasion [...] blame migrants rather than questioning the deeper causes of their displacement’, they add.
All of this has led to the spread of narratives and misinformation against immigrants that are trying to settle in the United Kingdom. Qureshi, the CEO of this organisation, says that some of this content blames immigrants as the cause of the United Kingdom's social and structural problems, from the saturation of the National Health Service to the lack of housing and the high cost of living in the country.
They are also accused of being uniquely responsible for crimes committed in the United Kingdom even before the actual identity of the person responsible is known. This happened at the end of July 2024, when a young man entered a multi-purpose centre in Southport with a knife and attacked several people, killing three girls and injuring 10 other people. From that same day, rumours began to circulate on social media that the author was an ‘immigrant’ and a ‘Muslim’, named Ali-Al-Shakati, who had asked for asylum to live in the United Kingdom and had arrived by boat. Later, the police said that the suspect was British, born in Cardiff (United Kingdom), and was the son of Rwandan refugees. Messages then appeared on social media accusing the authorities of lying. One of them was British politician Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform Party and a supporter of Brexit, who posted a video on his Twitter profile (now X) saying that the police were ‘hiding the truth’. The dissemination of this content led to xenophobic protests in the United Kingdom for several days.
The CEO of Beyond Detention, an organisation that offers support to immigrants in the Yarl's Wood detention centre and after they leave it, remembers it as ‘a difficult time’. Many of the people they had helped were staying in hotels ‘that were targeted by rioters’. Beyond Detention made sure to call ‘each and every person’ to check that ‘they were okay, felt safe and knew what to do in an emergency.’ She says that, on the recommendation of the police, they had to leave the office for a few days and remove all confidential information relating to the migrants they support. According to an article published by The Times, many immigrants in the area felt unsafe due to the violent protests and harassment they suffered during those days. Price says he tried to explain to them that ‘although what was in the news was scary, it was only a minority.’
This is not an isolated case. Misinformation has also emerged on other times regarding the nationality or religion of the person responsible for a crime. This has led the British police to review their communication protocols in such situations. Now, they try to provide information about the person who committed the crime as soon as possible to avoid speculation on social media. For example, in May 2025, a crowd of people celebrating the victory of the Liverpool football team in the city of the same name in north-west England was hit by a vehicle. Just two hours after the incident, Merseyside Police, who were responsible for the investigation, said that the suspect was a 53-year-old white British man. They added: ‘We ask people not to speculate about the circumstances of the incident.’
Online immigration status (e-Visa): another added barrier for the most vulnerable population groups
If a border police officer, employer, landlord or any public authority in the United Kingdom asks a foreign person to show their immigration status to check whether they are allowed to live, work, rent accommodation or access benefits in the country, they will need to access the e-Visa system, the online register of each person's immigration status implemented by the British Government, which replaces physical documents.
This is the first fully digital immigration programme in the United Kingdom and can only be used with an internet connection. It is a complex system involving up to six steps, which is particularly challenging for certain groups of people considered vulnerable. For example, those who were unaware that they had to complete this process. Normally, these people ‘find out because they go to the doctor, or somewhere else, and realise that they do not appear on the system, that they are not eligible for healthcare,’ explains Mariña Fernández-Reino, a researcher at the Spanish Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC, for its acronym in Spanish). She is also affiliated with the observatories at the University of Oxford, where she published a study on the potential risks of the British immigration system for European Union citizens.
Amparo (fictional name to protect her identity), a Spanish woman, faced a similar situation a few years ago. ‘I arrived in London in 1977, during Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee,’ she explains in a video call with Maldita.es. She was 19 years old. She married a British man, had a son and even bought property in Scotland. More than 40 years later, when she tried to renew her European Health Insurance Card, she realised that she had no right to live there because she had not applied for the EU Settlement Scheme: ‘I thought it didn't affect me, that it was for people who had just arrived two or three years ago or for people who wanted to come after Brexit,’ she adds.
It can also be a complex situation for people who already face some kind of social exclusion or whose independence is reduced. The study in which Fernández-Reino participated warned that some people would have difficulty navigating the application due to various factors such as language barriers, low literacy levels or digital literacy. This was recognized by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Department for Immigration and Citizenship, Seema Malhotra, in a written statement on 4 December 2024: ‘We recognize that some customers may need additional assistance with IT issues.’ The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford identifies as vulnerable people who are elderly, have mental health problems, physical health problems, disabilities, or conditions that involve cognitive impairment.
Furthermore, it is not a fail-safe system. It can, and in fact has recently, experienced systemic failures. According to calculations by the digital rights organisation Open Rights Group (ORG), an error rate of 0.05% in a context where around four million people depend on the electronic visa would cause up to 20,000 problems. ‘Each of these could be a person who is denied a job, cannot access a service or is not allowed to board a plane to the United Kingdom,’ they say on their website.
In March 2025, one of these failures was recorded. Sylvia Ordás, president of the Coalition of Spaniards in the United Kingdom, an association that provides support to Spanish residents in the United Kingdom, and a volunteer with the Settled organisation, says that she had went to spend a few days in Spain, her country of origin, and just the day before her return to the United Kingdom, she noticed that her e-Visa displayed a strange message: ‘Invalid country’. She has settled status, but this was not reflected on the ministry's website. ‘My name, my surnames and my photo were there. Everything was fine. But at the bottom, where it says what type of permit you have and where you are from, there was a document that I didn't know who it belonged to’, she says. Ordás refreshed the page, thinking it was a temporary error. On her second attempt, she says, a document with a biometric card belonging to a person from India appeared. On her third attempt, the information belonged to someone from Pakistan.
Although there have been previous incidents, Dumitrache, CEO of the3million, says this was the ‘first major incident’ since the digital visa system came into operation. Dumitrache believes that problems like this show ‘time and time again how problematic it is to rely on a digital-only system’. In fact, the3million is promoting a proposal to reformulate this electronic visa system into a ‘permanent record and stable proof of status that belongs to them.’
Administrative delays by the Home Office in responding to applications: people stuck in limbo for months or even years
‘Behind every application is a person who remains in limbo for months or years, with no security about their future in the United Kingdom,’ explains the3million on its website. Antonio, a fictitious name, has been in this limbo for several years. He is a Spanish man who arrived in Edinburgh in 2018 with a work contract with the Scottish Government. He applied for pre-settled status. Although he says he had to ‘fight hard’ to get it, it was granted after six months. After the mandatory five years, he applied to change his residence permit to an indefinite one. It was May 2023, and despite having sent all the information required by the Home Office (bank statements, letters from his first job there, passport, birth certificate, etc.), at the time of publication of this report, more than two years later, he is still waiting for a response. The only information he receives when he asks about the progress of his case is that his documentation ‘is fine’ but that it still ‘has to be reviewed by an official’.
‘My parents are elderly, and if they were to fall ill, with pre-settled status I can only leave the country for six months. I wouldn’t be able to go and take care of them. Only for a very limited time.’ With settled status a person can be outside the country for longer, as long as it does not exceed the five years.
Although the Home Office states on its website that immigration applications that do not require additional information can ‘take up to a month’, data obtained by the3million through a Freedom of Information request shows that 75.5% of applications had been pending for more than a month as at 30 June 2024. More than 47,000 (32.5%) of these people had been waiting for a response from the Ministry for six months or more, and 12.3% (almost 18,000) for more than two years.
The CEO of the3million warns that this waiting time causes “big” fear in people’s lives. Her team of professionals and volunteers has helped people who have suffered “great stress” due to this delay, leading to “anxiety and depression”. According to Dumitrache, these problems tend to get worse as time goes by and the wait gets longer and longer.
Every quarter, the3million calculates how long it would take the UK Home Office to clear the backlog at the current rate. According to its latest analysis, based on data available in December 2024 (which put the number of people awaiting a response at 160,141), it would take seven and a half years. In other words, the counter would reach zero in August 2031. This does not take into account new applications from people like Amparo, who have to prove that they have had continuous residence in the country. According to several organisations working with migrants in the United Kingdom, these are more complex cases that can take longer to process.
The double discrimination faced by certain groups of immigrants in the United Kingdom
In 2021, at least 103,020 people who identified as Roma lived in England and Wales. This represents 0.2% of the total population at that time. These data are taken from the census taken that year and are the only official data available at this time, according to Mihai Calin, a member of the charity Roma Support Group (RSG), which works with Roma people from Eastern Europe in the United Kingdom. However, research conducted by this organisation in collaboration with the University of Salford in 2013 concluded that there were approximately 200,000 Roma immigrants in the country.
A large part of this population lives in urban areas such as Edmonton Green, a neighbourhood in north London. There, in a library located in a shopping centre, Assen Slavchev, a Roma immigration advisor at the Settled organisation, holds drop-in sessions every Thursday to address the questions, concerns and needs of the Roma community. ‘People come here to ask for help with a wide variety of things. From questions about how to get the code within the e-Visa system to how to submit a late application,’ explains Slavchev.
Generally, Roma people have to deal with several problems in order to apply for the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) and be able to continue residing in the United Kingdom. The first obstacle they encounter is the system itself. "Most first-generation Roma who arrived in the country are illiterate or semi-literate. They have no digital skills and do not speak English well", explains Slavchev. Even so, they have to go through a completely online process, conducted exclusively in English, in order to regularise their administrative situation. This has left many people in need of assistance. According to a study by the Roma Support Group, only 3% were able to submit an application entirely on their own.
Even after obtaining their status, they still need help to prove it with the e-Visa system. In fact, according to another analysis published by the Roma Support Group in 2024 on the experiences and challenges of the Roma community in London with the EUSS, more than 30% do not know how to prove their immigration status when asked. One solution proposed by this organisation is a physical document that reflects immigration status and which, according to them, would ‘reduce confusion’ and serve to ‘protect vulnerable people’.
In addition, many Roma people face an added problem: difficulties in obtaining and presenting evidence to prove that they have lived in the country long enough to be eligible for a residence permit. ‘The lack of a digital record meant that Roma people had difficulty proving their residence, in some cases even if they had actually been long-term residents in the United Kingdom,’ explains a joint report by this organisation and the University of Sheffield published in May 2024. In many cases, they do not have, for example, a rental contract in their name, medical reports or open bank accounts.
Calin explains that the Home Office can check all the information available in its records on the applicant to decide whether to grant temporary, permanent or otherwise no right to be in the UK. “Although it was supposed to be quite easy to do, it didn't work for many Roma,” he says. “Although it was supposed to be a fairly easy thing to do, it didn't turn out to be easy for many Roma,” he says. Many people from this community have had to submit additional documentation. Roma Support Group estimates that 25-30% of Roma applicants have had to provide further evidence to the Home Office to prove that they were resident in the UK by December 31, 2020. The downside is that there are many people who do not have it.
Black people who are citizens of European Union countries also claim to face double discrimination. Aké Achi, CEO of Black Europeans, a group to address the barriers faced by the black European community in the UK after Brexit, was waiting to be assisted at a drop-in session on the Settlement Scheme for EU citizens when he was asked, “Are you an EU citizen?” The person in front of Achi was white, he is black, and he says the treatment they both received was very different. “The person in front was never asked if she was a European citizen. The first question they asked him was, 'How can we help you,'” he says. He thought the volunteers thought he was a refugee or asylum seeker. “Because I'm black, people assume I'm not a citizen of the European Union,” he laments.
This is not an exceptional situation. Several studies and surveys reveal that black people living in the United Kingdom feel discriminated against in different aspects or situations of daily life. For example, the Black British Voices project (2023) interviewed more than 10,000 black British people and concluded that 88% had experienced racial discrimination in the workplace. As well as that 41% identified racism as the main barrier to academic success for black youth or that less than 2% believed that educational institutions seriously address racism.
This exclusion, Black Europeans' CEO tells, has also been reflected with Brexit. “Our issues are not included,” considers Achi, because the talks between the European Union and the United Kingdom for the Withdrawal Agreement ”were starring white people.” This agreement, he continues, “was not designed with us in mind because we were not involved at all.” It is the same, she says, as if a group of men were to draw up a policy for women and they were left out of the decision-making process. Thus, they have had to face double discrimination: for being immigrants and for being black.
Now, more than five years after the process of the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union began, they are having space and meetings to talk about issues affecting black people through another platform they are involved in, “European Ethnic Minority Citizens” (EUROMEC), Achi says. “We're not even fighting for our rights, we're fighting to have a seat at the table,” he adds.
The EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) is a settlement program in the United Kingdom aimed at EU citizens who were residing in the United Kingdom before December 31, 2020. It is part of the Withdrawal Agreement between the European Union and the United Kingdom, with the aim of guaranteeing residence and acquired rights for these citizens. The deadline to apply was June 30, 2021, although there are some cases in which a late application can be submitted . For example, immediate family members of people who were resident in the United Kingdom before December 31, 2021, who want to reside in the country.
Depending on the length of time a person has been residing in the country, a different immigration status is chosen :
Pre-settled: For those who have resided in the United Kingdom for less than five years.
Settled : For citizens who have been in the country for more than five years, provided they have spent less than six months abroad in any 12-month period. This is an indefinite residence permit, although it can also be lost if you spend more than five consecutive years outside the United Kingdom.
According to data from the British Home Office, since its launch on August 28, 2018, and until December 31, 2024, the scheme has received 8.4 million applications, corresponding to 6.3 million people. In total, 5.7 million applications have been granted (4.1 million with indefinite or settled immigration status and 1.7 million with temporary or pre-settled status).
Since January 1, 2021, any EU citizen wishing to live and/or work in the United Kingdom must apply for a visa from their home country. There are different types of visas: work, study, and family visas, among others. Some visas, such as work visas, require sponsorship licenses approved by the UK Home Office.
*The EUSS applies to citizens of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein. For citizens of Ireland, it is voluntary.
