UK Immigration News

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has issued its annual International Migration Outlook for 2013. The report contains summaries of changes in immigration in the 34 member countries of the OECD.

The report finds that the number of people granted citizenship in the UK rose in 2012 to nearly 200,000. The number of successful asylum applications rose slightly to 21,800.

The UK's legal establishment has united in condemnation of plans by the government to limit the right of some immigrants to the UK to receive legal aid in immigration cases. The UK's Justice Secretary Chris Grayling, announced plans to bar immigrants from receiving state funded legal assistance until they have lived in the UK legally for twelve months. Among those who would lose the right to legal aid would be 'illegal visa overstayers, clandestine entrants and failed asylum seekers'.

The UK's Office for National Statistics has revealed that in 2011, 24% of babies born in the UK had a foreign-born father. Over a third of babies had one parent born overseas. The most common birth countries of foreign-born fathers are Pakistan, Poland and then India and Bangladesh. In 2010, 23% of fathers were born overseas.

131,100 children born in the UK in 2011 had two foreign born parents and a further 86,000 had one foreign born parent.

A new institute has been established at Birmingham University in the English Midlands to research into 'superdiversity'. The Institute for Research into Superdiversity (also known as IRIS) is headed by Dr Jenny Phillimore who also invented the word 'superdiversity'. It will carry out research into patterns in migration and hopes to contribute to the public discourse on the changes to society and culture that will be caused by the movement of people around the world.

The UK government has backtracked on a major policy initiative designed to combat illegal immigration. In March, the UK's prime minister, David Cameron, announced that all landlords were to be required to check the immigration status of all tenants before allowing them to rent flats. They would only be legally allowed to let to tenants with permission to be in the UK. Any landlord found not to have carried out the test would be liable for a hefty fine, Mr Cameron said.

Theresa May, the UK's Home Secretary and a senior figure in the UK's Conservative Party, has written to Conservative Party members to claim that the UK's coalition government is 'getting immigration under control'. Theresa May, a Conservative member of parliament and the UK's current Home Secretary (the minister with responsibility for immigration and crime) has sent an email to Party members claiming 'we've cut immigration by more than a third since 2010'.