Digital ID cards: Why control and surveillance are not the answer to Britain's immigration problem

Keir Starmer confirmed last week the government is considering digital ID cards as a measure to tackle irregular migration and Britain’s black economy.

With the new home secretary Shabana Mahmood being rumoured to be supportive of the policy, while her predecessor Yvette Cooper was resistant, it’s now looking like we’ll all be burdened with another expensive shiny project purporting to fix the government’s political problems on immigration.

Since Theresa May’s “go home” vans, politicians have continuously pushed hostile environment policies on migrants in the UK. These punitive measures are designed to make life unbearable for undocumented people, in the hope that they will leave the country. Yet, despite years of continued enforcement of these deeply flawed policies, they have not worked.

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When the only approach is control and punishment, such as checking everyone’s right to work and penalising employers who hire undocumented migrants, you only create fear.

This fear is then exploited by unscrupulous employers who become the last resort for people in desperate situations. They trap people in unsafe working conditions, pay them exploitative wages, and push them into dependency on the black market. The hostile environment creates the perfect conditions for labour exploitation.

The proposal for digital IDs shows how performative the scheme really is, because the truth is that a system is already in place for millions of us migrants in the UK.

It’s called the eVisa system, and since January of this year, it has transitioned more than four million people to a digital-only immigration status. Before that, more than five million EU citizens have been using this system to prove their rights after Brexit.

Every migrant in this country is required to navigate this system to access any service. Whether it’s opening a bank account, securing a job, or renting a property, we must prove our immigration status.

And this process is riddled with glitches and errors – a reality we’ve been researching at the3million for years. When the system fails, the consequences are devastating. People are denied jobs, housing, and even the ability to board a plane when returning from abroad. The repercussions mirror the Windrush scandal: people with legitimate rights to live and work here are left without a way to prove them.

For example, Sekai, a woman from Zimbabwe who’d lived in the UK for 15 years and had refugee status, was refused from two jobs due to a technical error that caused her photo to disappear from her eVisa.

For Soisic, a French pensioner who’s lived in the UK for 45 years, the distrust from her local NHS Trust meant she received a £500 invoice for an appointment from the hospital she’s given birth to three children in, despite Soisic sharing digital proof of her status.

Agnieszka, a Polish woman in her 20s who came to the UK as a child, couldn’t start her career because tech errors linked her account to the wrong name and expiry date. She spent three months unemployed, struggling with her mental health, trapped by unnecessary bureaucracy while the Home Office failed to fix the error. 

So, the idea of introducing digital IDs across the entire UK population to “solve” the problem is disingenuous. In fact, it’s likely to worsen problems that are now only experienced by migrants, to British people too.

The concerns surrounding mandatory digital IDs are not limited to migrants. They are shared by many British citizens, who fear the erosion of privacy and the potential for increased surveillance. As someone who relies on a system outside of my control to prove my right to live here, I understand the anxiety. I don’t own a single document that verifies my status. Instead, I have to hope that everything goes smoothly with the Home Office’s system every time I need to prove my rights.

This proposal, despite its seeming novelty, has already been partially implemented and has failed to address the core issues facing Britain’s immigration system. Yet the government’s instinct is to reach for more measures of control, rather than genuinely addressing the root causes of immigration challenges.

Until the government acknowledges the deep flaws in the UK’s immigration system, no amount of digital schemes or top-down control will solve the problem. Only when safety, compassion and justice take precedence over control can we begin to discuss real, meaningful solutions.

Andreea Dumitrache is CEO of the3million, the largest grassroots organisation for EU citizens in the UK, formed after the 2016 referendum to protect the rights of people who have made the UK their home.

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