Rising immigration has changed Britain and what it means to be British. This isn’t because migrants come and go whenever they please. They can’t. The British government, and not immigrants, makes the rules – as it should be. Nor is there any right to become a citizen wherever you want. Becoming British is subject to rules – and these laws have an important history.

The legal commentator Gary Slapper has called Parliament ‘a formidable law factory’ churning out meaty products of variable quality. In ever greater quantities, too. Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of immigration law. The relevant rules and guidance change virtually every day and are expanding at such a rate that many immigration officials are struggling.

This has been a problem for British citizens and migrants alike. I’ve heard countless stories of government ministers, immigration officials and personal lawyers getting it badly wrong. The consequences can be profound for the people affected by these needless errors.

Melanie was from Canada and came to Britain on a spousal visa with her husband. Their relationship went downhill and they were soon divorced – a difficult and painful experience that will be familiar to many. Melanie’s lawyer advised her that she could continue working and only needed to decide whether to gain a new visa or leave the country when the spousal visa expired. But it ended from the date of her divorce and Melanie ran into serious difficulties with the Home Office, who accused her of overstaying. She was threatened with deportation despite having sought legal advice to avoid it.

Furhan applied for a visa permitting him to work in the UK from his local British High Commission in Pakistan. Furhan paid his application fee and received his passport a few months later. However, the High Commission made a mistake and granted a visa for six months shorter than requested. The High Commission admitted their error, but it came at a price. Furhan was given a choice. He could accept the incorrect visa allowing him to start work and return much earlier than planned, or he could cancel his request and resubmit his application to receive the visa he applied for in the first place, but he would lose the full, hefty fee paid on the first application – thanks to the High Commission’s error – and he must then pay the same fee a second time so his second application could be considered.

Welcome to immigration in the real world. These are not the stories of sly individuals eager to engage in criminality or wrongdoing to enter and stay in the UK. They are law-abiding citizens trying to play by the rules and do the right things, but those in positions of trust have let them down, leaving them out of pocket, sometimes out of a job, and at risk of being sent out of the country through no fault of their own.

Talking about immigration is like trying to hit a moving target. Such rapid changes might be born of the best intentions in attempting to reassure the public, but they are increasingly unfit for purpose. A system that splits families and fails to meet the basic needs of its citizens is nothing to be proud of.

These problems did not happen overnight. They evolved over time. Much of the migration to Britain today has its roots in past decisions on citizenship and immigration now forgotten, as we shall see. British citizenship has been an experiment that once united peoples around the world under a global empire now in retreat, and the experiment has had long-lasting effects that can be seen to this day.

This historical context helps explain how Britain came to have the immigration policies it does, which is crucial to understanding our current situation and the key drivers behind the migration debate today. At its heart, this is about a fundamental shift from recognising British citizenship in terms of being a subject to becoming a citizen. This move has had a significant effect on how immigration works – and the challenges Britain faces.

For any other country, this might be a story about how successive governments managed migration flows of citizens moving from one state to another. However, Britain is not like any other country in the world. It has a different past that has shaped its distinctive present that can be summed up in one word – empire. The United Kingdom was the heart of the world’s largest global empire. At its peak, it had about one-fifth of the global population under its umbrella; about 450 million people worldwide. The UK was, in the words of the eighteenth-century British statesman George Macartney, ‘this vast empire on which the sun never sets’. The empire may have ended, but its influence on how citizenship and immigration works today has not.

A key starting point is in its name: Britain is the United Kingdom. It is a collection of different nations under the Crown with a monarch as the head of state. This role is currently held by Queen Elizabeth II, who has been on the throne since 1952, making her the longest-reigning British monarch. The monarchy is an important part of Britain’s historical roots. It is easy to forget that while we may talk about nationality as a kind of political and legal status conferring special rights and responsibilities on its members, it was not always so. Before there was nationality, there was allegiance to the ruling monarch, and this defined political and legal membership and rights for the UK and many other European countries.

Centuries ago, local communities would swear an oath of allegiance to a feudal lord, and that lord would swear his allegiance to the reigning monarch. This grew to become a general allegiance for everyone to the monarch, in a tradition that continues today. An individual only becomes British through naturalising once they take an oath of allegiance to the Queen.

When I received my ‘citizenship invitation’ when applying to become British in 2011, my letter from the UK Border Agency clearly stated:

To complete the process of becoming a British citizen, you will need to attend a citizenship ceremony to receive your certificate. In the ceremony, you will take an oath or affirmation of allegiance to the Crown and a pledge of loyalty to the United Kingdom. This is a formal promise to Her Majesty the Queen and the United Kingdom.

The ceremony was held at Gateshead Civic Centre. All of us approved for citizenship had to declare that ‘on becoming a British citizen, I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Her Heirs and Successors according to law’. Oaths of allegiance to the British monarch have been an ancient rite of passage for centuries, with no end in sight. Some things never change.

Anyone who swore allegiance to the monarch became the Crown’s subjects. This included virtually everyone born in the Crown’s territories, and anyone born on a ship in service to the Crown, which is important given Britain’s major naval presence at home and abroad. There was nothing like an official immigration policy at this time. What probably passed for the prevailing view is that of a Chartist commentator writing in 1848: ‘The exile is free to land upon our shores, and free to perish of hunger beneath our inclement skies.’

So what mattered was being a subject. Today, many countries follow one of two models. The first is to grant citizenship on grounds of a ‘right of the soil’, called jus soli. This links a citizen to a particular place, such as by birth. The United States is a good example of this: anyone born in a US state can become an American citizen. The second model is the ‘right of blood’, called jus sanguinis, where citizenship comes from parentage. Britain brought these two together: place of birth and parentage both have their place. Being a British subject has historically been about being born in the UK to a British father, although much has changed more recently.

Of course, prior to 1707, British citizenship did not exist: English and Scottish subjects each bore allegiance to their respective monarchs. The Act of Union between England and Scotland forged a new individual: the British subject. Being British was neither exclusively English nor Scottish, but a status that encompassed both. A new form of citizenship and identity was born.

British citizenship grew slowly, but surely. The year after the Act of Union, Parliament passed an Act that would naturalise ‘Foreign Protestants’. Its aim was to provide support and refuge to Protestants facing religious persecution in Europe. It was short-lived and was repealed in 1711 because it was viewed as a threat to national identity.

Before 1844, it wasn’t easy for migrants to become British – each naturalisation required a special Act of Parliament. These were expensive and were rare because most could not afford to do it. After 1844, naturalised migrants were more often approved to become British by the Home Secretary. However, these special Acts of Parliament continued, albeit very infrequently, as late as 1975, which saw the passing of the James Hugh Maxwell (Naturalisation) Act.

So gone are the days when you can have your own personalised law; now, the process for becoming a British citizen has become transformed into a complex hurdle-jumping exercise increasingly difficult for migrants to pass. I clearly missed my chance for a Thom Brooks (Naturalisation) Act – and no chance we will see a Kevin Spacey (Naturalisation) Act or a Madonna (Naturalisation) Act for these American entertainers with homes in the United Kingdom. Instead, anyone seeking to become a naturalised citizen must gain approval by the Home Secretary. That’s more complicated than it might sound, as we will soon discover.

Being British meant different things depending on where a person came from in an expanding global empire. There were two classes of British subjects at this time in the nineteenth century. The first were imperial subjects from the United Kingdom. The second were local British subjects based outside the United Kingdom. Only imperial subjects from the UK could travel freely to any part of the empire. Non-imperial British subjects had greater restrictions on their travel.

The second-class status of non-imperial subjects became an increasing problem as the British Empire expanded between 1870 and the start of the First World War. While a young lawyer in South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘I felt that, if I demanded rights as a British citizen, it was also my duty, as such, to participate.’ So began Gandhi’s efforts to help his fellow Indians first in South Africa and then in India to exercise their rights as British subjects, which would lead to his spearheading India’s successful independence campaign. The British Parliament in Westminster governed the nationality for all British subjects throughout the global empire. As dissatisfaction grew with the special privileges afforded to only persons from the UK having imperial status, the British government took what seemed like a bold move by extending the status of imperial British subjects beyond the UK to include Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and later Burma. This was enacted through the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act in 1914, made law under H. H. Asquith’s Liberal government. The Act neatly divided the world’s population into imperial subjects, local subjects and everyone else – ‘everyone else’ being ‘aliens’. This built on the Aliens Act 1905. Originally targeting the settlement of Jews from Eastern Europe, it established the first immigration officers at all ports of entry to the UK with the power to refuse ‘undesirable’ aliens unable to support themselves or their dependants. Anyone who had been expelled or convicted abroad of a serious non-political crime could be denied entry.

These changes represented another significant shift in how British citizenship was understood. It meant that being British no longer required being born in the United Kingdom or setting foot on British soil. An Australian was as much of an imperial British subject as someone from Yorkshire. What started as the forging of English and Scottish nationalities into a shared British citizenship had grown much further. Being British became more than being from Britain. And border controls were becoming a permanent fixture of British immigration law and policy, as well as an area of frequent change.

One example is how the process of becoming British was revised. The 1914 Act made clear specific hurdles that migrants must leap to naturalise. These required their residence in the UK or another ‘dominion’ of imperial British subjects for at least five years. Migrants needed to have the intention to stay permanently if granted citizenship. They must also be of ‘good character’ with ‘an adequate knowledge’ of English or a language ‘recognised as on an equality with the English language’ in dominions that recognised other languages. This ‘equality’ exception on English gave equal recognition to the Welsh and Scots Gaelic languages.

If the Home Secretary or his representative approved an application for citizenship, the individuals only became British if they swore an oath of allegiance taking the form of ‘I, [name], swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty, King George V, His Heirs and Successors, according to law.’ While these requirements of residency, intention, good character, common language and formal declaration of allegiance to the Crown largely remain, their uses and interpretations have changed over the past century.

Thus, British subjects continued to exist in countries spanning the globe. Then as now, Britain was a major exporter – of people. British subjects left the UK to populate colonial territories from North America to the Far East – not always voluntarily, as in the case of convicts sentenced to transportation to places like Australia. But the subjects in these colonies, whether convicts or free residents, lacked the full rights of their colonial masters. While imperial status was extended to some, it did not apply to most. The effect was that imperial subjects in the more prosperous parts of the British Empire were able to freely travel to set up their livelihoods and pursue opportunities, while the poorer majority faced more restrictions.

By the start of the First World War, the UK still had an immigration system that placed Britain at the centre of a large empire – and this created a unique problem. Britain’s empire soon began to decline in the aftermath of the world wars. In 1946, Canada decided to create its own brand of citizenship, separate from the status of a British subject. The system now risked collapse as other countries in the Commonwealth considered their next moves.

Then something extraordinary happened. Asquith’s 1914 reforms had extended imperial British subject status only to some. A new British Nationality Act in 1948 went one giant step further and created a new status: the citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies, otherwise affectionately known as ‘CUKC’. All subjects were recognised as citizens, even where their countries had become independent with their own nationality laws. That’s right – all subjects. Everybody. This was the last gasp of a receding global power that it would come to regret. CUKC soon became a shared form of citizenship some might find cuckoo.

The British government even encouraged people to migrate to Britain in order to take new jobs. Indeed, such facts are included in an earlier version of the UK’s citizenship test to highlight that Britain has tried to import migrants to support its economy. To quote an example: ‘In the 1950s, centres were set up in the West Indies to recruit bus drivers for the UK.’ A second illustration points out, ‘After the Second World War the British government invited people from Ireland and other parts of Europe to come to the UK’, while textile and engineering firms sent agents to India and Pakistan to find workers. Encouraging people to immigrate to Britain was an important part of the UK’s economic strategy in the post-war years.

If the 1914 Act extending full British citizenship to subjects in dominions like Australia and Canada was a great expansion of what it was to be British, then the new citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies form of citizenship represented more of the same – but at full throttle with bells and blinkers on. ‘Being British’ now meant being a subject in any one of nearly fifty different territories around the world, including the Bahamas, Belize, Christmas Island, Cyprus, Mauritius, colonial Nigeria, the Seychelles, Singapore and colonial Sierra Leone.

And then the unravelling started to happen – and fast. British citizenship began its retreat soon after it made its furthest reach. Independence was in the air and soon India, Pakistan and Southern Rhodesia were gone. These former British dominions and colonies launched their own separate nationalities, such as the Republic of Ireland, ending British citizenship for many in their countries. It sometimes remained possible to still be a British subject and non-British citizen concurrently, but things were clearly moving in one direction.

Britain’s global empire was receding and its newly expansive ideas on who could have British citizenship shrunk accordingly. Since the Act of Union joining England and Scotland, British identity had rapidly stretched to include people the world over. Now that process went into reverse.

The great contraction of British citizenship began in earnest with the passing of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, which brought to an end the free movement of citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies throughout the Commonwealth. This was a change ushered in by events: Britain’s hand was forced to some degree by the increasing number of Commonwealth countries declaring independence and establishing their own nationality rules. People in these countries could remain British although they usually chose the citizenship of their new free state. If the decision to launch a new citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies was the last gasp of a receding empire, the move to taper off this global view of British citizenship was its final groan.

Consider the enduring legacy of these legal changes. Since 1914, many British subjects living outside the United Kingdom held the same right of movement as British subjects in Britain. Not only could they travel for work or study in the UK at will, but they could enter as fellow citizens. In tightening restrictions, the UK tries to move to the kind of British citizenship it had in the early eighteenth century. In doing so, the door has been closing not merely on nationals of states formerly part of the British Empire, but on many other people who had rights to full entry only a relatively short time ago. When critics accuse British governments of opening the door to migration, they regularly overlook the importance of this historical legacy.

But another enduring legacy is regulatory. As immigration legal scholar Gina Clayton notes, the 1962 Act formalised ‘the heavy reliance on formerly unpublished instructions, guidelines and concessions’. These sometimes informal sources had previously provided internal guidance on how immigration officials should exercise discretion, unbeknownst to the people seeking entry. When the guidance was formalised, the rules grew in their size and complexity. Yet, the Act also made what was a somewhat mysterious process for some applicants more transparent – and it was an important step towards different migrants receiving equal treatment and avoiding racial prejudice.

Seneca, the great Roman philosopher and statesman, famously declared himself to be ‘a citizen of the world’. He was a national of no single state – his citizenship was shared by humanity. Probably the closest this ideal has come to being realised in practice is in the British citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies. To that extent, it has historical importance as a real achievement that has never been matched.

The first seeds were laid by Tory governments, the first led by Edward Heath and the second by Margaret Thatcher. Heath’s Immigration Act 1971 replaced existing border controls and established the new concept of ‘the right to abode’ in Britain. This right is still in place today. The right to abode is simply the right to live, work and settle in the United Kingdom. All British citizens have this right and are thus free to return to the UK at any time after travelling abroad. The 1971 Act neatly divided the world into those who had a right to abode and those who did not.

However, British citizenship as we know it is a child of the Thatcher years and is enshrined in the British Nationality Act 1981. The Act modernised citizenship legislation, bringing it much closer to what most other European countries and the US had had in place for decades. The long transition of British citizenship from a subject to a citizen was complete. At last, modern UK citizenship was born and Britons became British. Taking effect on 1 January 1983, the Act came a mere 917 years since William the Conqueror led the Norman Conquest, fully embedding a status of citizens and discontinuing use of the term ‘British subject’. By contrast, the United States set out its first laws on citizenship in legislation like the Naturalization Act of 1790 – but better late than never.

The British Nationality Act was a major break from the past. But this transition came with several strings attached. What was once a simple system now became much more complex – and it created a very British problem.

The new law made anyone born in the UK prior to 1983 a British citizen. Not a subject, not a ‘citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’, but a British citizen. It did not matter if they were a citizen of somewhere else in 1983 – they now had a right to recognition as a British citizen.

For everyone born in the UK after 1 January 1983, individuals were British citizens only if their father or mother was also UK-born. This was an important change because previously British citizenship could be passed down only by the father, and was not passed down to children born out of wedlock. Now, citizenship could be handed down by either mothers or fathers, to children born in or out of wedlock.

The Act sounded the death knell for the British subject status that had been a hallmark of citizenship since 1707. Only thirty-six people became British subjects between 1983 and none since 1991 – the difference is that they lack the full rights and duties held by the then new status of British citizenship. We’re all becoming British citizens now.

The British Nationality Act also set out the fundamentals for becoming British by naturalisation. Anyone wanting to become British must possess full capacity and be able to understand the importance of the decision to take on a new nationality. New citizens must have an intention to live in the UK if citizenship is granted. Most are required to satisfy a residency requirement of at least five years. These are all governed by guidelines that allow for exceptions and discretion.

It has long been expected that new citizens should demonstrate a knowledge of English and of ‘life in the United Kingdom’. Later chapters explore how these requirements have changed into formal hurdles to be passed, including the introduction of the ‘life in the United Kingdom’ citizenship test in 2005. Finally, there is the wide-ranging ‘good character’ requirement that demands that anyone applying today has no unspent convictions or serious offences in the UK or abroad, that all British taxes are paid, that they have not been bankrupt while in the UK and that their presence in the country is not contrary to the public good. These ideas about good character are discussed further in the next chapter, where we look at Britishness.

The newly established rules were confusing. The right to live in Britain was not restricted to British citizens alone. Commonwealth citizens born before 1983 from former dominions and colonies and who had a parent born in the UK also retained a right to enter the UK without immigration controls. This makes sense only given the new rules: the law recognised that anyone born previously in Britain had a right to British citizenship and so qualifying Commonwealth citizens with a British parent would meet this test. But there was a twist. Some countries, like Pakistan and South Africa, were suspended and then readmitted to the Commonwealth. However, their renewed membership did not revive a right of abode for their nationals. So, these countries were back to ‘normal’ in the Commonwealth, but their citizens held a different status.

That was not all. The right of abode could also be held by people deemed ‘British overseas territories citizens’, previously known as ‘British dependent territories citizens’. These were people connected to the dependencies from the empire like Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, the Falkland Islands and the Virgin Islands. Isles exotic and distant. They need not have a parent born in the UK to possess British overseas territories citizenship. All such citizens were granted British citizenship in 2002.

There were also ‘British overseas citizens’, who were different from ‘British overseas territories citizens’. This was largely a catch-all category covering individuals who were citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies in a colony that gained independence, but were unable to acquire citizenship of their new country. This was true for people of Asian origin living in former British colonies in east Africa. This category of British citizenship continues, although it applies to a small few. Between 1983 and 2000, there were 1,062 people who became citizens through this route.

A regular feature of statutes concerning immigration over the last few decades is the wide discretion they afford to the Home Secretary. This has increased legal complexity through the back door – and has contributed to immigration becoming one of the fastest-changing areas of law.

Successive Home Secretaries have expanded the immigration rules to help structure the exercise of discretion by officials presented in what has been called ‘the language of the administrator rather than the lawyer’. This is supposed to improve the advice officials give to the public concerning immigration queries and avoid similar cases being treated too differently. To some degree this has worked.

While these rules are binding on immigration officers, the Home Secretary can depart from the rules in appropriate circumstances to permit a migrant to stay in the UK who might normally be refused. Should someone fail to convince officials to decide a case in her favour there is always the hope – although in practice it is rarely satisfied – that this might be swiftly reversed should the Home Secretary be persuaded to intervene. It’s doubtless many will try, no matter how small the odds of success. Hope does that to people – as any chance is better than none.

The guidance issued in the immigration rules can be lengthy and complex. For example, the Home Office’s official guidance on grounds for refusing applications for leave to remain runs to over fifty pages and has changed six times in less than a year. That’s a change every other month on the official guidance for refusing one particular type of visa application. The full text on refusals is about 350 pages long. Margaret Phelan and James Gillespie’s Immigration Law Handbook containing all relevant statutes and rules is currently 1,912 pages – and it’s about 140 pages longer than the previous year’s edition (without including any relevant case law). That’s a lot of rules covering a lot of complexities. With the current Immigration Bill now at more than 200 pages, the rulebook looks set to grow further. Welcome to the world of immigration law.

Every facet, from pre-entry requirement to deportation and appeals, is covered. For almost a decade this has included an Australian-style points-based system used for granting visas. Points are earned based on salary, savings, satisfactory knowledge of English and other factors to determine whether a threshold is reached permitting entry, subject to qualifications and exemptions that are under review.

Possibly the biggest secret in British immigration policy is that this points-based system has been alive and kicking for several years now. I worked with Phil Wilson on his 2015 re-election campaign as the Labour Party’s Member of Parliament for Sedgefield, previously held by one Tony Blair. Phil and I were speaking to voters on the doorstep in his constituency and immigration issues would routinely come up. We would hear people ask why only Nigel Farage and UKIP were calling for a points-based system. The answer was that the points-based system had already been phased in, beginning in 2008. But there are so many rules, which are changed so frequently, that the public has a near-impossible task understanding it, not to mention navigating its increasingly complex web. It’s hardly any wonder that many who have experience of the system claim, ‘It is a lot more complicated than I had expected.’

Nigel Farage has said there is a ‘flood’ of migrants coming to Britain, but the real flooding is found in the rule books, which are now spilling over with statutes, official guidance, regulatory orders, European protocols and much, much more. Hundreds of pages have been produced spelling out ever more restrictions and complications. If only they were more comprehensible. Immigration lawyer and leading expert Sophie Barrett-Brown says the law is ‘horrendously complicated, with rules being made just for their own sake. There were a dozen major changes to the rules last year, often hastily drafted and trickling through in dribs and drabs. And there are updates issued virtually every day.’

When I prepared my own settlement application, I completed the application form and put together additional paperwork requested in the form’s guidance notes, such as past payslips, bank statements and proof of address covering at least five years – and I was advised to bring everything going back to when I first moved to the UK in 2001. This decade of documentation literally filled a small suitcase that I brought with me.

The issue was that not everything I needed in my application was mentioned in these notes that I had followed so carefully. I also had to have further paperwork, such as a statement from my then employer confirming that they would continue hiring me if my application for permanent settlement was allowed. This was only picked up by a brilliant solicitor and thank goodness it was – while I was not, in the event, asked to show any of my payslips, the employer statement was requested when my application was considered. This could have been overlooked easily. Another immigration lawyer remarked to me that, however useful official websites like gov.uk might be, the webpages were not always well organised and important information could be missing. Such is the result of a system changing more quickly than frontline staff or many lawyers can keep up with. While I had used allegedly ‘current’ documents provided online by the then UK Border Agency, there is a clear problem where the official documents and websites available are inconsistent, incomplete or outdated. It’s not only citizens who are left confused but, worryingly, those entrusted with implementing the rules.

If the purpose of this proliferation of rules is to lower migration and raise public confidence, the effects have been the opposite. The United Kingdom has long exported its citizens outward. Net migration in 1964 was minus 50,000 – i.e., more people were leaving than entering. A whirlwind of new legislation and rules later, by 2015 we had 212,000 more coming than going. ‘Policy is being driven by the matter of perception,’ one senior advocate said to me, ‘so that the government can claim it is clamping down even though in real terms the impact on numbers is absolutely marginal.’ This is not a recipe for success or for inspiring public confidence. And the government needs to hear this message loud and clear.

A sign that immigration policy was in flux can be seen in the swiftly changing ministerial posts covering immigration issues under the Home Secretary, who is directly responsible. In the beginning the post was called the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State with responsibility for the Immigration and Nationality Department. The name was not by any means elegant, but it remained unchanged from 1979 to 1997. So far, so good. But things were to change, and fast.

It started under New Labour. Michael O’Brien got the ball rolling as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Immigration. He was succeeded in 1999 by Barbara Roche and then Lord Rooker in 2001 as the newly renamed Minister of State for Asylum and Immigration. After starting as the Minister of State for Citizenship, Immigration and Community Cohesion, Beverley Hughes was rebranded Minister of State for Citizenship, Immigration and Counter-Terrorism from 2003 to 2004. Des Browne, Tony McNulty and Liam Byrne each served as what was now called the Minister of State for Citizenship, Immigration and Nationality. This changed again, while Byrne was still in post, to the Minister of State for Borders and Immigration, as it remained under Phil Woolas. In 2010, the coalition government renamed it once again to Minister of State for Immigration, a post held by Tory MPs Damian Green and then followed by Mark Harper. Today, James Brokenshire is what is called the Minister for Security and Immigration, with Sir Keir Starmer serving as Labour’s shadow minister.

In short, there have been eleven different ministers and eight changes to the post’s name in less than two decades. That’s a change almost every other year in one of the biggest areas of public concern. About the same timeframe as the average lifespan of a mouse. Or less.

Such high turnover is a recipe for potential disaster. Too many people are given too little time to come to grips with this difficult and potentially volatile area. Nor has there been any recent minister who had been an immigrant himself, experiencing the system first-hand, to my knowledge. Migrants I spoke with who became British citizens found this last point obvious: anyone who had been a migrant would not be satisfied with the system in place, whose complexity and constant changes benefit neither British citizens nor anyone else.

The mixed messages are startling. First, there is every effort by current ministers to make clear their view that net migration must come down. Many migrants feel understandably unwelcome. If I had a pound for every speech that starts with a few words about the benefits immigration brings to Britain followed by a string of remarks about how their number can be reduced, I’d be a millionaire many times over.

But there is also another, very different, message from government. After I was approved for British citizenship, in 2011, I received an invitation to attend a citizenship ceremony – mine was in Gateshead, though more than half of citizenship ceremonies take place in London or the south-east.

You only become British on swearing an oath to the Queen and reciting a pledge that reads: ‘I will give my loyalty to the United Kingdom and respect its rights and freedoms. I will uphold its democratic values. I will observe its laws faithfully and fulfil my duties and obligations as a British citizen.’ The pledge is really an unnecessary restatement of the oath, more than anything else. Since I declared my loyalty to both the Queen (in the oath) and democracy (in the pledge), I continue to hope they don’t start moving in different directions. God save the Queen and Her Majesty’s democracy.

The ceremony lasted about an hour. New citizens were surrounded by friends and family while children from a nearby primary school sang us ‘local music’. I will never forget their choice of songs. They started off with ‘The Candy Man’ from the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and then followed it up with ‘The Bare Necessities’ from The Jungle Book, a choice that seemed especially far from appropriate. After all, many of us might have only the bare necessities left after paying the hefty fees to reach citizenship! To hear children sing, ‘It’s just the … bare necessities’ after paying a few thousand pounds in fees was bewildering at best. But, then again, what do you sing at an occasion like that beyond ‘God Save the Queen’?

The fresh pizza waiting to be devoured after our ceremony turned out to be for the schoolchildren – only the tea and biscuits were for the newly sanctified citizens.

The actual process of conferring naturalisation certificates and a commemorative gift – in my case a medal with Gateshead stamped on one side and ‘British citizenship’ on the other – following a signing of a register took all of five minutes. For all of us in the room. It was even timetabled in our booklets as lasting from 3.10 to 3.15 p.m. One naturalised UK citizen summed up her ceremony in one word for me: ‘weird.’ Not a ringing endorsement.

At the event, I received a greetings card with a message from the then leader of Gateshead Council, reading: ‘On behalf of the people of Gateshead, welcome to British citizenship’ and proclaiming: ‘We welcome the energy that new citizens bring to our borough.’ Now those are words of welcome you’ll not see strung atop any tabloid or billboard. Yet, this is the message that we who become British are given when our fellow British citizens aren’t paying close attention.

A letter in my citizenship ceremony pack from Theresa May, the Home Secretary, took me by surprise:

What a contrast from May’s government and its narrow focus on reducing net migration. Now I am someone to be welcomed – by order of the Queen, no less! That’s right, me! It’s enough to genuinely bring a tear to one’s eye. I am someone of value who is ‘very important’ to my new country.

Compare these words with a speech by May just over a year later, in December 2012, when she talked of the need to ‘bring down the numbers’. Reducing immigration, she suggested, is ‘in the national interest’, with benefits including improving social cohesion and stemming the negative impact of immigration on public services and jobs.

One minute migrants becoming British are praised and even celebrated by Queen and country, the next we are to be rounded up and stopped at the border. No immigrants allowed. The UK public are told one thing, but new British citizens are told another – in what many may see as confused messages if not rank hypocrisy.

It doesn’t help that the welcoming letter is written awkwardly: sometimes it refers to ‘you’ in the singular and other times in the plural, such as its talk of ‘your local communities’, as if migrants live in more than one at the same time. Not exactly a warm welcome with a personal touch – there is nothing personalised at all in this ‘Message from the Home Secretary’, and it at times reads like a press release written by some boorish committee. It turns out, as one former Home Secretary told me, that was probably exactly how it was written. At least the secret is now out.

And we migrants can see through all of this.

The most common motivation for becoming British reported to me was pragmatism. Let that sink in. Most migrants I interviewed simply wanted to end yet another round of increasingly expensive visas and surcharges to stop the uncertainty that has come with frequent changes to the immigration rules. One migrant told me: ‘They’re charging you for the privilege of being British’ – when all she wanted was permanent residency without the need for further visas. As the novelist Kamila Shamsie, a Pakistani national who became British, put it, immigration laws seem designed to keep migrants ‘perpetually insecure’.

The rising costs of applying for citizenship is the biggest sore point for people coming through the creaking immigration system. A three-year temporary work visa can cost £1,151 per person and another £1,328 or more to extend for up to another five years – as long as your total stay in the UK is not more than six years. These may be needed to fulfil minimum residency requirements of at least five years for most applicants. Prior to citizenship, migrants must obtain permanent settlement – the right to abode and the right to settle permanently. The application fee is currently £1,236 per person if submitted by post or another £500 if applying in person at a premium service centre. The cost of becoming British for a family of four, after factoring in annual health surcharges of £200 (£150 for students) and the fifty-quid fee to take the citizenship test, can be as high as £15,000, and possibly even more depending on individual circumstances. According to official records, it costs the Home Office about £2.80 to process each passenger at the border and £166 to decide each permanent and temporary migration application, whether made in the UK or overseas. The fees paid by migrants working or naturalising in Britain are far higher and disproportionate to the costs of processing their forms.

Several migrants I spoke with believed the increasingly high fees were designed to soak migrants as much as possible. This is perhaps the worst-kept secret in Westminster concerning immigration policy. Harley, an Australian hoping to become a British citizen, told me people like her were viewed as ‘money-making cash cows – it’s so blatant now’. Ed, an American who became British, agreed: ‘They keep milking us for cash.’ Another woman I spoke with whose citizenship application is currently under review told me the process seemed mostly like ‘a fee-grabbing exercise’. People like Harley and Ed are the migrants who could afford to enter the process. Many others cannot. Kwame, a Ghanaian living in London, told me, ‘If you can’t pay, then you go.’ He’s right.

The general consensus of professionals working in the field is that the system is a mess. They are not alone. Elena, who was Russian and became British, told me her British relatives were at first amazed and then angry at seeing all she had to do in order to earn citizenship and remain in the UK. Similar experiences were reported by most people I spoke with who had naturalised, too. For once, the lawyers are not to blame for it – so no need to recite Shakespeare’s comment about ‘the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’. Sorry, but it’s really not our fault.

We have a constantly expanding and changing system that few understand, at rising costs. A former immigration minister offers useful insights into how we got to where we are. Phil Woolas was a minister from 2008 to 2010. He told me that the UK seems a long way off managing the borders. Phil said that ‘you can’t get a grip on numbers until immigration is better managed’, a view he said Prime Minister Tony Blair had come around to by about 2005. But Phil stressed an important point: ‘Managing immigration is not the same as necessarily cutting immigration.’ While he admitted New Labour were ‘probably guilty of coming to this too late’, there was too much focus on the benefits to Britain overall and not enough to its effects on local communities, where there were growing concerns. Controls like e-Border entry and exit checks and biometric visas have been seen as ‘get-tough’ policies whereas, in fact, the real motivation behind them was to simply start managing a highly complex system – but which has evolved into a complicated machine few know how to operate effectively.

Britain’s continuing struggle with immigration and citizenship says as much about the challenges faced by the United Kingdom as a declining world power as it does about its difficulties with British identity. These twin struggles with Britain’s understanding of itself now, and its relation to its past, help explain many of the problems that British citizenship faces today. In the shift from subject to citizen, ‘British’ citizenship went from global coverage to a return to the British Isles, with lasting consequences. Perhaps the most significant dilemma is identifying what Britishness is. We turn to this now.