Meeting of the Parliament 19 December 2018
The Greens join our colleagues from the SNP and Labour in paying respect to the contributions of EU citizens and, indeed, of all people who choose to make Scotland their home. They have made Scotland a better place—culturally, socially and economically.
We have had cause to debate the issues that face European citizens repeatedly in recent months. Each time, I have talked about the benefits that free movement has brought to our education sector, in particular. I have highlighted how West College Scotland takes part in Erasmus+, which allows students from Scotland to develop their skills in Denmark and Finland, and vice versa. I have talked about how the University of the West of Scotland works with Dundalk Institute of Technology and Queen’s University Belfast to conduct award-winning research.
It is not just EU funding and the Erasmus+ scheme that have driven those opportunities: free movement has also done so. Free movement has allowed our universities, colleges, schools and research centres to benefit from thousands of talented staff from across Europe. Almost a quarter of research staff at our world-class universities, and 20,000 university students, are EU citizens from other countries. If we want to enjoy the full benefits of that talent, we need a system that is welcoming and attractive—one that attracts and retains workers and which allows students to stay here after their studies. I believe that that is the instinctive desire of the majority of people in Scotland and, certainly, of the majority in Parliament.
Across our society, we see the benefits that EU citizens have brought to education, to health and social care, to hospitality and tourism, to construction and to every other sector of our economy. All those benefits are being endangered by the crude racism of the UK’s Conservative Government. EU citizens who want to come here after Brexit—if we do not stop it—will be subjected to the same degrading and inhumane hostile environment that people from the rest of the world currently face.
Despite scandal after scandal—from the Windrush generation to EU citizens being sent letters ordering them to leave the country—the situation is only getting worse. The Tories’ Home Secretary might prefer a new term—the “compliant environment”, as if that does not sound sinister enough to have come from the pages of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”—but the same policies and practices of humiliation and callousness remain. Employers, landlords, the national health service, charities, banks and other services are expected to act like border force officials, by carrying out immigration checks. The Tories’ priority is to deport first and let appeals happen later, as we saw with the Windrush scandal and elsewhere.
Not that long ago, a woman who is originally from Singapore but who has been married for 27 years to a British citizen whose primary carer she is, who is a grandmother and who is the mother of two British children, was torn from her home and put on a flight. That woman has finally been granted a UK visa—more than £55,000 later. She was fortunate to have raised the money through public funding, but no amount of money can undo the trauma of being forced from one’s home and deported. We cannot crowdfund everyone’s basic rights.
The immigration system is cruel by design, but it also has a shocking level of incompetence almost baked into it. The UK Government’s new procedure for offering settled status to EU citizens is meant to allow applications via smartphone, but it works on only one operating system—so, no luck for people who have an iPhone, which is the most popular handset in the country. People who cannot use the smartphone app can go to one of the Government’s locations that offer identification document scanning. However, there is only one office in Scotland—in Edinburgh. That is not much use to an EU citizen in Ullapool, Stromness or Stranraer.
They will also need to pay for the privilege, as Adam Tomkins said. Even children will be charged. The UK Government will not let EU citizens in our public sector have their employer—the Scottish Government—pay for them. That is an ideology of hostility. No wonder there is no faith in the Home Office to administer the settled-status regime.
It is no surprise to see the latest decision to impose a £30,000 minimum income threshold for migrants, including EU citizens, after Brexit, and to restrict lower-skilled migration to single-year visas, which will only compound the problem of precarious work. That is the kind of crass and cack-handed intervention that tears people’s lives apart, undermines our culture and society, and hammers our economy.