British Passport Research Articles

MacDermott Lecture 2023: Confounding the rule of law: conflating immigration, nationality, and asylum in the UK

In this MacDermott Annual Lecture, Professor Devyani Prabhat looks at current developments in immigration, nationality and asylum law and evaluates these in terms of the core ingredients of the rule of law. Specifically, the focus is on two aspects of the rule of law as elaborated on by Lord Bingham in his classic exposition on the rule of law (2011.) First, Bingham asserts that ‘Questions of legal right and liability should ordinarily be resolved by application of the law and not the exercise of discretion’ is a fundamental requirement of the rule of law; and, second, Bingham states that ‘the rule of law requires compliance by the state with its obligations in international law as in national law’. The examples Professor Prabhat analyses in the lecture are that of the East African Asians who could not enter the United Kingdom (UK) with their British passports in the 1960s and 1970s; the Windrush generation and the hostile environment of immigration control; immigration control of European Union nationals in the UK after Brexit; developments in cancellation of British Citizenship; and new legislation and proposals on asylum in the UK. Do these changes in the scope and application of the law comply with the rule of law in general and with the two specific principles on ‘law not discretion’ and ‘international law compliance’ in particular? While answering this question, Professor Prabhat explains how the different legal categories in immigration, nationality and asylum are distinct but are often conflated or confused with each other. Executive discretion should be narrow for nationality and asylum matters to conform with international law, whereas it can be wider for immigration so long as principles of fairness and non-discrimination are adhered to in each instance.

Sonic registers of belonging: British mobile young people in UK higher education

ABSTRACT Drawing on interviews with British passport holders who moved to the United Kingdom to start University, this paper explores slang and accent as sonic spatial identities. The paper analyses the inclusions and exclusions in belonging as articulated by British mobile young people through their sonic spatial identities. In doing so, the paper extends wider conceptual debates on embodied belonging by arguing for a need to further explore the sonic as a register of belonging. It argues that research on sonic spatial identities needs to be more attuned to mobility in order to explore and challenge wider discourses of exclusion. The article concludes by offering suggestions as to how to develop research in belonging and identity on an everyday sonic register.

Gold Coast Colony’s Northern Territories Protectorate Muslims on Haj: Passports and Repatriation Deposits, 1897-1950

Ghana had a census for the Muslim population in 2017 and 2021, a national census including Muslims. Two international airports were being constructed to render three international airports for Muslims to embark on planes at Accra, Cape Coast and Tamale for the annual haj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. This paper is situated in the north, where the Gold Coast colonial government wrote diplomatic letters for the dispersed Islamic people in the Northern Territories Protectorate who travelled on haj. In 1910, British colonial officers and the Gold Coast colonial government made policies that met the Saudi monarch’s requirement that Muslim pilgrims had to travel with British passports. During the colonial era, the Gold Coast colonial government allotted passports to Muslim pilgrims in the Northern Territories Protectorate from the Gold Coast and Nigeria and controlled the finances they deposited for repatriation during haj.

The Berlin Mission: The American Who Resisted Nazi Germany From Within by Richard Breitman

Reviewed by: The Berlin Mission: The American Who Resisted Nazi Germany From Within by Richard Breitman Martin Kitchen The Berlin Mission: The American Who Resisted Nazi Germany From Within. By Richard Breitman. New York: Public Affairs, 2019. 336 pages. $27.52 (cloth). That the State Department, in spite of some indifferent ambassadors in Berlin, was relatively well informed about Nazi Germany was in large part due to a junior consular officer, Raymond Geist, who was posted to Berlin in 1929. In The Berlin Mission, Richard Breitman gives in sympathetic detail an account of this relatively minor figure, whose considerable influence, both in helping Jewish emigrants and in advising the State Department, has hitherto been overlooked. At first, Geist and his superior, George S. Messersmith, were able to do very little to help potential immigrants to the United States, due to the Hoover administration's stringent restrictions. When the SA and SS went on the rampage after the Reichstag fire, Geist and Messersmith were virtually powerless to help US citizens caught up in this mindless violence. They received no support from the ambassador, William E. Dodd, a man justifiably described as "a trivial, pedantic professor" by the colourful "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, one of Martha Dodd's many lovers. During these early years, Geist played second fiddle to Messersmith, but as early as 1934 he voiced the eccentric opinion that Germany was bent on creating an empire "similar to that maintained by the Caesars." Both men were now caught between a mounting demand for visas to the United States and a State Department determined to curb immigration, using the cruel and preposterous argument that American Jews were deliberately exaggerating the extent of Nazi persecution to enable more immigration. In 1934, Messersmith was appointed Assistant Secretary of State to Sumner Welles, both of whom listened to Geist's reports from Berlin. He was replaced by Douglas Jenkins, who deferred to Geist, his intellectual superior. In 1936, Geist began to send a series of jeremiads directly to the State Department, warning that Hitler was bent on war, that the Wehrmacht preached a doctrine of "world power or ruin," that Adolf Hitler would never surrender, and that only his death would remove him. At the same time, he bearded the lion and negotiated directly with Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard [End Page 435] Heydrich in an effort to promote immigration to the US. He also cultivated a close relationship with the intriguing Werner Best, who was then a key figure in the Gestapo. Geist was by now in effect the chief US intelligence analyst in Germany, often reporting directly to the President. He sent a trenchant analysis of the Blomberg-Fritsch Affair and was one of the first to suspect that Hitler was bent on attacking the Soviet Union. Geist was adamant in insisting that Jews found guilty of "racial defilement" by having sexual intercourse with an "Aryan" should not be barred from immigration to the US on the grounds that they had a criminal record. After the Anschluss, he negotiated directly with Werner Best and Karl Haselbacher, the Gestapo boss in Vienna, to protect US citizens from Nazi thugs. He then had a tough battle to increase the immigration quota from Austria, but his success was at the expense of the German quota. Among those whom he was able to assist were Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Geist worked closely with the British passport control officer and secret intelligence officer, Frank Foley, an admirable character who became known as the "British Schindler" and "The Scarlet Pimpernel." According to Raymond Geist, Werner Best told him that Hitler had ordered the pogrom on November 9, 1938 and that he intended to "annihilate" the Jews. Haselbacher repeated this assessment. Ambassador Wilson noted on Geist's report that this was "real eventual genocide." Never afraid to go directly to the top, Geist introduced a delegation of Quakers on a mission to rescue Jews to Heydrich, who proved to be remarkably cooperative. Geist also worked closely with George Rublee, President Roosevelt's special envoy for political refugees, but they were now in a frantic race between the outbreak of war and finding a solution, however inadequate, to the chronic refugee crisis...

Remainers are nostalgic too: An exploration of attitudes towards the past and Brexit preferences.

Nostalgia had a prominent place in the Brexit Referendum campaign, epitomized by Nigel Farage carrying around with him an old-fashioned blue British passport on the campaign trail. In this paper, we seek to examine British attitudes towards the past through a new survey instrument administered online in July and August 2018 (N=3,000). We empirically establish two dimensions of nostalgia that are differentially associated with political preferences. We conclude that it is the substance of the nostalgia that matters, not the looking towards the past per se.

On the Origins and Legacies of Really Existing Capitalism: In Conversation with Kari Polanyi Levitt

On the Origins and Legacies of Really Existing Capitalism: In Conversation with Kari Polanyi Levitt

When I Met Kathy Acker

When I Met Kathy Acker

Only a Shadow

Only a Shadow

Unmaking citizens: passport removals, pre-emptive policing and the reimagining of colonial governmentalities

ABSTRACTWith the intensifying securitization of Western borders in the global War on Terror citizenship rights are increasingly fragile. Measures introduced by the British government to deal with the terrorist threat at home include citizenship deprivation, temporary exclusion orders as well as passport removals. Whilst citizenship deprivation has provoked critique for its potential violations of international human rights conventions on statelessness, cancellations of passports have not been subjected to the same kind of critique. Drawing on recent debates and interview data we demonstrate the alignment of citizenship deprivation and passport removals and conclude that these measures serve the same goal: of unmaking citizens. In this paper, we discuss findings from novel empirical research with individuals who have been removed of their British passports to illuminate the racialized dynamics of this process and the reconfiguration of racial governmentalities.

Political Belonging and Fantasies of Inclusion. Romanians in London and Paris

This article analyses from a bottom-up perspective Romanians’ complex emotions surrounding their reasoning for applying for a French or British passport. It illustrates the extent to which interviewees’ fantasies of inclusion in the host countries are thought to be dependent on the political membership of the country of residence. It is argued that British/French naturalisation is perceived as a status enhancer, allowing the interviewees to overcome the marginalisation associated with their Romanian nationality.

SEPARABILITY AND INSEPARABILITY OF SPORT AND POLITICS: THE REALITY IN AFRICA TODAY

INTRODUCTION:Interference is an act of coming in or hindering by a powerful body when either an unacceptable or acceptable situation is prevailing. The power dynamics stand to dominate the trajectory of the development for the benefit of those with power. Politics has been regarded as an external force that should not interfere with sport activities. Sociologists in Eshuys, Guest and Lawrence,(1987), Rowe (1995) in Amusa et al (2005), argue that the relationship between sport and orthodox politics is marked by a contradiction between denial of politics in sport and political mobilization of sport. Further to that, there is an existing and unresolved controversy between governments and sport administrators, many argue that politics has no place in sport and some say it is impossible to separate politics and sport.The constructive or positive use of sport in politics began with the ancient Greeks. Leading athletes were paid the equivalent of thousands of dollars to enhance the prestige of their city -states. In Rome, according to Davis, Kimmet and Auty (1986), political groups used charioteers to para de their political causes. During the Middle Ages, both in East and West, jousting and other ritualized sports tested the administrative strengths and loyalties of court retainers. Nineteenth century has seen sports and games used to encourage desirable social characteristics.The two, politics and sport seemed to cordially work together for the good of each other but a wave of change was precipitated by the Black September's Fedayeen smash into the Olympic Village by terrorists in 1972, (Davis et al, 1986). So the Munich massacre marked a paradigm shift that saw sport authorities agitating for the separation of sport and politics, as states wanted to take advantage of sport to settle their political misunderstandings. The competitive power with sport has been singled out by nations as a fertile ground and opportunity to demonstrate expression of political grievances. Nations have joined international sport bodies not for show-casing sport excellence only, but even for advancing political mirages. Consequen tly, sport has suffered and also benefited at times. However, sport sociologists have remained adamant that political interference is detrimental to sport development. Therefore, this study is motivated by this argument, thereby, elaborating the connectedness between sport and politics today, the bad side of political interference into sport and the way forward.Individual athletes have their careers been shuttered if their nations have been banned from participating in international sport events. For instance, the controversy over South African-born Zola Budd (Eshuys et al 1987:127) and whether she should have been issued with a British passport in order for her to compete for Great Britain, the Russian military presence in Afghanistan was protested by Brit ain and USA by asking sportsmen and women not to take part in Moscow in 1980, thus, sport became a weapon of foreign policy. Developing nations suffered economic under development once they are excluded from sport competitions globally, for example, South Africa during its apartheid rule until 1994. Sport could be used as a tool to bring political independence, development and fair practice of human rights by states to their people that is the goodness of the interference, but could be used by those privil eged to power to advance their minority supremacy, that is the worst side of it. With that note, this study aims to draw the reality on the ground, that is, the relationship between sport and politics and the way forward.STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM:Political interference finds expression in sport today as politicians demand appearance and their visibility during sport events. Sport authorities find themselves at cross -roads whether to avoid politicians during sport development in order to abide by sociological perspective or to include them for the development and success of sport, that leaves out an unanswered question, Is sport and politics mixable? …

The New Contentism

The New Contentism

Polish Graduates and British Citizenship: Amplification of the Potential Mobility Dynamics beyond Europe

In light of the EU enlargements and a promise of unrestricted mobility within EU borders for European nationals, the opportunity was rapidly taken up in particular by young and highly educated Poles. However, some aspirant migrants wished to travel beyond EU borders and such individuals sought different strategies to migrate, including obtaining British citizenship and passports. The paper highlights the possibility of a go-stop-go mobility, which can be described as a stepped approach to citizenship, and a key feature of the new elite cohort of young European graduates, who use their European citizenship to obtain an alternative citizenship that acts as a passport literally and metaphorically to mobility beyond Europe.

Henry Fielding’s Proposals for an Internal British Passport System

Although Henry Fielding’s political writings have long generated considerable scholarly interest, his detailed proposals for an internal British passport system have so far been neglected. From the...

UK passport authorities tender for facial recognition

The UK Identity and Passport Service (IPS) is seeking suppliers of a £12.8m facial recognition system to help determine an applicant's eligibility for a British passport.

British passport body plans £12.8m facial recognition system

UK authorities are planning to buy a £12.8m facial recognition system to help determine an applicant's eligibility for a British passport, reports Guardian Government Computing.

Review: Active Citizenship

Do you fancy yourself as an active citizen? Ah, I hear you say somewhat suspiciously: how active do I have to be? Is that about helping old ladies across the road, or picking up rubbish in the street, or what? I've got a lot on my plate, I hear you mutter. OK. Try this. Would you qualify just as a citizen, then? There's a test for that sort of thing. You can find it on www.ukcitizenshiptest.co.uk. You'll need to get 75% to pass. This reviewer failed it, with 58%. True, I've lived here all my life; I have a British passport; and consider myself well-informed, as you have to be in my job. Where did I go wrong? I don't mind sharing my ignorance with you. Here are some of the questions I got wrong:

Photo Essay: Nowhere People

Photo Essay:Nowhere People Greg Constantine (bio) Greg Constantine presents images from two projects. One, "Nowhere People: The Global Face of Statelessness," documents the lack of citizenship in various places around the world. The other, "Kenya's Nubians: Then and Now," offers a visual account of a particular group pressed to the margins of a nation-state. More information about and further images from the projects can be found at the photographer's websites, http://www.nowherepeople.org and http://nubiansinkenya.com. Click for larger view View full resolution Nubians must prove their connection to Kenya at the age of eighteen. The process is called "vetting" and is required for Nubians to be issued national identity cards, which are essential for everything from finding employment to driving a car, obtaining a passport, or opening a bank account. Nubians are the only group in Kenya to be vetted. Nubian youth often have to wait years before they are issued identification. Two unemployed Nubian youths sit in their youth group's office in Kibera. [End Page 305] Click for larger view View full resolution A Nubian woman holds a family photo of her grandfather as an officer in the King's African Rifles. He served in the British army in World War II and held a British colonial passport. Click for larger view View full resolution Since Kenya's independence, the Nubians have been denied many civil, social, and economic rights. Until the most recent census in 2009, the Nubians were not formally recognized as a tribe in Kenya but were instead considered to be "others." Elders in the Nubian community sit in a soda shop in the Makina section of Kibera. [End Page 306] Click for larger view View full resolution In 1917, the British designated 4,000 acres of land outside Nairobi for Nubian settlement, because Nubians could not return to Sudan. The Nubians called the land Kibra or "land of the forest." Over the past forty years, hundreds of thousands of rural migrants flooding into Nairobi in search of work have been encouraged to settle in Kibra, even as Nubian claims to ownership of the land have been denied by Kenyan authorities. As a result, the Nubian have lost almost all of their land. Eventually, Kibra, originally a Nubian village, became Kibera, one of the most notorious slums in Africa. This Nubian family home is almost one hundred years old and was once situated amid bush, mango trees, and green grass. [End Page 307] Click for larger view View full resolution While people from larger tribes hold important positions in the public and private sectors in Kenya, few if any Nubians do so. Unemployed Nubian youth collect garbage to earn extra money. As land prices escalate in Nairobi, private development and unsuccessful slum upgrading programs surround Kibera. Click for larger view View full resolution While Nubians are now a minority in Kibera, they are determined to preserve their traditions and cultural identity. Nubian weddings draw people from all over Kibera. Over one hundred Nubians walk through the dusty paths in the Makina section of Kibera during a traditional Nubian wedding ceremony. [End Page 308] Click for larger view View full resolution When people question Nubians about their connection to Kibera, many Nubians will tell them about the cemetery. Nubians have been buried at a Kibera cemetery since World War I. Nubian men must make a final prayer at the Nubian cemetery in the Makina section of Kibera. It is the only graveyard in Kibera, since the dead from other tribes are sent on the long journey to their rural homes to be buried. [End Page 309] Click for larger view View full resolution Conflict in the Philippines in the 1970s and a need for laborers on palm oil plantations saw hundreds of thousands of people from the Philippines and Indonesia flood into Sabah, Malaysia. By 2005, one third of the residents of Sabah were foreigners. An estimated 10,000 to 30,000 children of Filipino and Indonesian descent in Sabah are stateless. [End Page 310] Click for larger view View full resolution Children roam through the fish markets in Kota Kinabalu looking for customers. Loads can vary in size...

Smoke 'n' Guns: A Preface to a Poem about Marginal Souths, and then the Poem

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] You are Irish. You live in America's marginal South, where being Irish remains sufficiently unusual as to be found exotic. You get used to the conversation. It seems to happen once a day, every day. Where are y'all from? Oh really! What part? It gets murky around about here. You want to be polite--everybody in the South always is--but you know as well that the only names of Ireland they recognize are Dublin and Killarney. momentary hesitation registers, and to help you out they ask more specifically, The north or the south? The south, suppose. It doesn't sound right in your head. The border actually. Almost exactly halfway between Dublin and Belfast. conversation tends to peter out about this point. When we moved to North Carolina in August zoos, the conversation happened so frequently that in late September my family gave me for my birthday a green T-shirt with Halfway between Dublin and Belfast printed on it in some hokey stagecoach font. wore it on St. Patrick's Day as a private joke. got asked so often what it meant that it stopped being funny. have been publishing poems and prose for almost twenty years. My biographical note has always informed the casual browser that born in Newry in 1968, and grew up in Dundalk. Anyone with even the most basic knowledge of Ireland's political geography will recognize that there is a large fraught chasm running between those otherwise innocent sub-clauses. Putting it more baldly, was born in the United Kingdom and grew up, thirteen miles away, in the Republic of Ireland. From the upstairs bathroom of the house in which spent almost all of my childhood, the house in which my mam still lives, the hills of Armagh are clearly visible. They belong to a different administrative state, a separate culture, a whole other country. Somewhere between the horizon and where you stand there is a largely imaginative line that anyone who lives on the border must instinctively bear in mind. came to North Carolina expecting all to be irredeemably foreign. gradually realized that this feeling--of being slightly out of place in the South, and only just in the South--is a sensation have lived with all my life. My paternal grandfather was a self-made insurance broker from Newry. He had built his business in Dundalk and, in the Sixties boom, opened a second branch in his hometown. My father got the brief. We lived in a development up off the dual carriageway to Warrenpoint. When my next eldest brother was born in 1966 and christened at the same time that Reverend Paisley was coming to prominence, my Aunt May, a nun in Newry's Carmelite convent, prayed my mother would see sense. Within six months of my birth, two years after Ian's, the branch had folded and we had migrated south again. In spite of the brevity of all that, whenever God Save the Queen blared out of the telly, our brothers jeered at us to stand and salute. Sometimes, out of sheer pigheadedness, we did. In my rebellious late teens, called to get forms for a British passport but never filled them out. Two years ago, in the U.S. embassy in Dublin to get the visa to come here, the man on the desk told me had to go away and get a whole new DS2019 form that would correctly declare my place of birth as the United Kingdom. I'm very sorry, he did say. I understand that you've probably never thought of yourself as British. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Usually, dual citizenship is a wooly legalistic aspiration that its holders enjoy only in the abstract, but seldom if ever get to experience actually in a single moment. Living right on the border, it becomes a day-to-day thing. There wasn't a week in my childhood where we didn't cross north. My father kept change separate in the front pockets of his trousers: the right was for Irish, the left for sterling. …

Tourism and the Development of the Modern British Passport, 1814–1858

Tourism and the Development of the Modern British Passport, 1814–1858