Labour's Britain: Conditional citizenship is forcing minorities to have a Plan B

For many British-Bangladeshis, it is common to grow up hearing about your parents sending money to the homeland to build a house in the bari or the city. Every bit of remittance sent to make a house was meant to stand as proof that leaving had been worth it. But, on a more strategic level, it was also a way to keep a home away from home should they be forced to leave Britain.

The idea can be baffling to many children who have viewed Britain as their home. Not Bangladesh.

But as the political environment in Britain moves further to the right on immigration and citizenship, it is easier to understand why families sent this money.

Last month, Reprieve and the Runnymede Trust released the report ‘Stripped: The Citizenship Divide’, stating that approximately 9 million people are at risk of losing their British citizenship because they may qualify for other citizenship through their parents.

These reports are normally ignored by the mainstream press, but for the outlets that did cover the issue, the commentary attached was all too familiar: "Should I have a backup plan?"

It’s also a current running through a lot of our research as academics in post-Brexit Britain. Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust, we interviewed Bangladeshi families across Luton, London and Birmingham, who told us they had begun to reconsider investing in Bangladesh in case they were ‘kicked out’ of the UK.

Some participants spoke about visiting Bangladesh as a holiday destination, and to visit relatives who are still around. But others raised concerns that they needed to re-examine their relationship with Bangladesh and better look after their parents' assets, including houses and land.

The generational divide over whether one belonged to Britain, however, was particularly stark.

As we conducted interviews with parents and children (over the age of 18) sitting side by side, it was interesting to watch their reactions to each other. Whilst parents had come to terms with Britain as their home, the children – who spoke more concretely about the impact of Brexit – had other ideas.

The children questioned their relationship to Britain despite being part of it. They spoke about reinvesting their time and energy into the houses their parents had built, to secure a Plan B should things ‘go wrong’ here.

When we presented the findings, some Boomer Bangladeshis were sceptical, claiming the children were being hyperbolic about the political climate and that they had lived through the racism of the 1970s, so this too, will pass. But many of the younger generation we interviewed felt this was different.

Conditional belonging

This research was conducted before Shamima Begum had her citizenship revoked in 2019 by Sajid Javid, the then Home Secretary. Indeed, her revocation rocked the British Bangladeshi Muslim community, as many rightly panicked about their place in this country, previously unaware that such citizenship stripping was even possible.

It wasn’t just Begum’s story that raised awareness about changes in immigration law that jeopardise the citizenship of British people with ethnic minority heritage/parents, the Windrush scandal had also sparked fears and debates.

Here we saw Caribbean communities given differential treatment because they ‘acquired citizenship through a colony rather than through British ancestry following decolonisation in the 1960s, and the dilution of the right of citizenship by birth in the UK.’

Certainly, the citizenship report does not bring forth a new debate as such for ethnic minority communities, but it does remind them that their place in this society and country is conditional, and dependent on the political climate and those in power.

This continuous targeting of ethnic minority communities intensifies a dangerous climate of racism, within which the discourse of not belonging is already ingrained. The government’s hostile environment immigration policies are also re-entrenching the idea promulgated by the far-right, that the nation is ‘overflowing’ with non-white bodies who must be purged.

As the report identifies: ‘legislation and government practice have created a fundamentally racist, two-tier citizenship regime that undermines community strength and is at odds with the foundational British principle of equality before the law’.

Many policies in immigration debates have been further fuelled by Shabana Mahmood, the current Home Secretary, who has laid out plans to make asylum seekers wait 30 years before they can apply for British citizenship.

She has also asserted that the Labour government will use Denmark’s model of withholding refugees’ gold when they arrive in the UK, pandering to the far-right framing of immigration being ‘out of control’.

The anxieties that ethnic minorities have held about how they are treated as second-class citizens are undoubtedly legitimate. But the question is whether the rest of the population is ready to ring the alarm and challenge the state over its regressive, racist policies. The reemergence of Shamima Begum’s case, now before the EHRC, will spark further discussion on citizenship.

Sadly, it is not easy to have faith in Britain’s readiness to reckon with this reality. But that does not mean we sit back and do nothing. It is necessary that we collectively organise better, in much larger numbers, and that we learn how to fight back when the state targets any of us. This is especially urgent in the face of the rising far-right that continues to peddle a toxic rhetoric regarding migrants and the repatriation of ethnic minorities.

What we can be confident about is that we have a generation that will not sit quietly; the young people in our research were keen to fight back against an oppressive status quo.

Dr Fatima Rajina is a sociologist based at the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre at De Montfort University. Her work looks at British Muslim communities with a specific focus on the British Bangladeshi Muslim communities.

Follow Fatima on X: @DrFrajina 

Dr Victoria Redclift is a political sociologist at University College London, where she works on the sociology of 'race' and migration with particular focus on citizenship and political exclusion.

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