Controlling our Borders – Making Immigration Work for Britain

The Government’s Five Year Plan

Executive Summary

This strategy is the next stage of the Government's comprehensive reform of the immigration and asylum process, which has already succeeded in strengthening our border control, reducing the level of asylum applications by 67% from its peak, and doubling the number of removals from pre-1997 levels. It builds on these foundations and supplements the comprehensive review of our legal migration routes, which the Prime Minister announced last year. It develops an approach to immigration which is simple, straightforward and robust. The strategy shows:

• who we admit and why; and
• who we allow to stay permanently in the UK and why
• we enforce the rules rigorously to admit only those who meet the criteria and prevent those who do not from getting here; and
• we ensure people leave when they are no longer entitled to be here.

Section 2: Who we admit and why

This section sets out who can enter the UK. It demonstrates the economic benefits they bring and reaffirms our commitment to our international obligations to refugees who need our protection. It sets out how we will further develop our approach by:

• introducing a transparent points system for all those who come to the UK to work
• requiring a sponsor for all but the most highly skilled and bonds for specific categories where there has been evidence of abuse, where necessary to guarantee that migrant's return home
• phasing out low skilled migration schemes in the light of the new labour available from the European Union
• accepting genuine refugees but preventing abuse of the asylum system within an agreed international framework
• rooting out abuse of our legal system with a clampdown on bogus advisers
• ending appeals from abroad to work or study

Section 3: Who we allow to stay

This section sets out who we allow to stay in the UK permanently, and how we will tighten the criteria further to ensure that we carefully control permanent migration to provide long term economic and social benefit. We will:

• introduce English language tests for everyone who wants to stay permanent in the UK
• grant refugees temporary leave to begin with and keep the situation in their countries under review. If it has not improved with in five years we would allow them to stay, if it does they will be expected to return
• only allow skilled workers to settle long-term in the UK
• increase the period skilled workers have to be here before being allowed to stay permanently from four years to five years
• end chain migration - no immediate or automatic right for relatives to bring in more relatives
• we already have tight rules about migrants' eligibility for benefits and public services but will review them and how they are enforced to see whether any tightening is necessary

Section 4: Secure borders

This Section sets out how within the next 5 years we will introduce a fully integrated pre-entry border and in-country control. We will:

• introduce fingerprinting of all visa applicants currently over 2 million a year) before they travel to the UK by 2008, to prevent people concealing their identity after entry
• introduce pre-boarding electronic checks of all persons entering and leaving the UK by air
• require all foreign migrants staying in UK for more than 3 months to have an ID card with their photograph and fingerprints by 2008
• screen visa applicants for tuberculosis on high risk routes and require those diagnosed to seek treatment before they would be allowed entry to the UK                            
• expand the network of Airline Liaison Officers (who work with carriers overseas to preventing undocumented passengers reaching the UK)
• introduce fixed penalty fines on employers for each illegal worker they employ

Section 5: Removal

The Strategy sets out the progress we have made in recent years in removing a greater absolute number and a greater proportion of failed asylum seekers. It acknowledges the importance of doing more in this area. That is why the Government wants the monthly rate of removals to exceed the number of unfounded applications by the end of 2005. We will achieve this by:

• Detaining more failed asylum seekers
• Introducing fast track processing of all unfounded asylum seekers, with greater control over applicants throughout the process including through more detention capacity and the use of electronic tagging. Overtime, as intake falls and removals become easier as we negotiate even more effective return agreements, we will move towards the point where it becomes the norm that those who fail can be detained.
• Preventing applicants concealing their identity to frustrate removal. We will continue to prosecute those who arrive without documents and ask airlines to copy passengers documents on more high risk routes. We fingerprint people from some high risk countries on arrival.
• Working with countries which generate the most failed asylum seekers to ensure that they re-document and accept back failed asylum seekers. We will place this at the centre of our relationship, supporting them in their efforts, including through a new migration fund, but making clear failure to co-operate will have implications for our wider relationship - including their access to some migration schemes.
• Expanding our voluntary returns schemes, maximising returns to safe countries and