While all the pandemonium has been carrying on in the media, I've been writing for the last few weeks on the experiences of undocumented migrants in the UK.

No, not the couple thousand asylum seekers who come on boats. Those people enter the asylum system, they're not "illegal".
I'm talking about the many hundreds of thousands of people that we trap outside of society. People who entered the UK on a visa and slipped through the many traps in our immigration system and were unable to renew their leave.

A mad proportion have lived here all their lives.
They've mostly lived here for years, if not decades. They have families here. They are not going anywhere.

There is not a chance, not the slimmest prospect of even the worst Home Sec removing up to a million people who've lived here for years with their families from the UK.
Most people got sick, or needed to care for relatives, couldn't save up for the fees, didn't understand the system or got given bad advice by shark lawyers and just missed one of the several times they were supposed to renew their leave.

Then once you're out, you're screwed.
We have an incredibly difficult system for people who dont have papers to regularise their status again.

We lock them out of legal work, renting a home, health care and for what? So they remain an underclass that we can pin our hate on. It's utterly mad not to let them back in.
People who've lived in the UK for years should be entitled to regularise their stay. It should be a straight-forward procedure that doesn't cost the Earth.

It makes no sense not to do this. There is no other way of addressing this problem. We need fair routes to regularisation.
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