Member

The change also plays into the right’s conflation of asylum seeking and illegal or irregular migration in a way that is very harmful to the whole debate about asylum and migration. Given that asylum seekers have a long-standing right under international law to seek asylum, they are not so-called illegal migrants and should not be treated as such. We are talking here about people who are subsequently accepted as refugees. Why should the manner of their entry have any bearing at all on their eventual application for citizenship? Why is the manner of that assessment relevant to an assessment of good character? It could be argued that someone who has had to overcome traumatic experiences—including, sometimes, torture in their home country and during their journey to the UK in the absence of safe and legal routes—has shown qualities such as resilience and courage. To me, this smacks of good character.