What happens if you mistakenly apply for British citizenship?

Yep, I'm on the same boat. I've lived here for 8 years but I can't apply for permanent resident status(and hence for citizenship) because I didn't have private health insurance while I was a student.

I have also played this game with home office - you ring them up and ask "can you remain in the UK as an EU citizen if you are not exercising your EU free movement rights" - the answer will be no, you cannot. Then you can ask if you can be an EU student in the UK without private health insurance - the answer will be "yes, but you are simply not exercising your free movement rights". Then you can follow with "so is an EU student without private health insurance here illegally?" And the answer will be "no".

I've spoken to several immigration lawyers and they all said that what the Home office is doing is strictly illegal - they cannot require presenting proof of private health insurance for the years of studying in order for those years to count towards permanent residence rights. But good luck taking them to court and winning. I'm simply waiting 5 years from the moment when I started working, but it's an incredibly frustrating process. To add to this, I know from my friends that for my particular nationality(Polish) the process for applying for citizenship looks like this - send the application, wait nearly a year to find out it's been rejected, appeal, have the appeal date set 6-8 months in the future, no one from the home office turns up at court, the application is re-reviewed and approved.

It's absolute nonsense, and like you said, it only exists to make the entire process as hostile as physically possible.

I think you can also look at things aside from money. Education and wealth also tend to correlate with individuals that are able to peacefully integrate into a society. Granted there are exceptions -- Osama Bin Laden came from a billionaire family and was well educated, but they are indeed the exceptions. By contrast people that are impoverished, have little education, and especially that may hold more extreme religious views or have different cultural views than the countries they're migrating to, can result in major issues.

For instance in Germany the numbers vary from 75%-90% of immigrants expected to be unable to find a job within 5 years. And crime among migrant has also been increasing. This is something that has been neglected in most left leaning media though the BBC did run a piece earlier this year [1]. As the article states, in one area regarded as "an average state" violent crime increased by more than 10% in a single year, with more than 90% of that increase attributable to migrants -- with migrants being twice as likely as German nationals to face reports of violent crime.

I mean these are unpleasant facts, but they are absolutely true facts. This doesn't mean you should refuse all migration or even that migration is bad. But it does mean that you can't simply claim selective migration policies are just about money. Germany took in well over a million migrants. With the vast majority of these individuals not finding work in society that means society will be paying for them. How much is a fair amount of money to care for these individuals? Each $10,000 costs Germany around $10 billion per year. There's some irony referencing money here, but the point is that if you carried these policies out, without end, you'd eventually destroy your own nation, hurting countless individuals in the process, all because you were reluctant to say no.

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What I don't understand is why nobody wants to consider this issue objectively. I expect the above is mostly downvote bait, but that's ridiculous. It's like people on the right want absolutely no migrants because all migrants are evil. And people on the left want open borders because all migrants are amazing and loving people that will integrate fully and peacefully with no meaningful negative impacts whatsoever. This sort of dichotomy is idiotic, but people on both sides are so scared of being seen as being partial to the 'other side' that they become increasingly radicalized meeting in some horseshoe of mutual stupidity. Bah to it all.

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42557828

Not sure about the UK, but here in the US, there’s been a consistent (since ~ WWII, at least) bipartisan effort to make sure those sorts of leaders run countries like yours.

It’s unclear how voters here can make a difference:

Arguably, things were worse under Obama than W. That was while Hillary Clinton was running the state department.

Trump seems to be intentionally blowing up the entire federal foreign policy apparatus, which could help in theory, but he’s also doubling down on military policies that lead to indefinite wars. Also, he hasn’t ended any wars or cancelled funding for any of the things the US does to destabilize foreign nations.

Sorry.

Home Office delays are a deliberate political choice...

Home Office visa requests all require the payment of substantial fees, certainly enough to pay for the staff to process them. So you would have thought staffing levels would increase in line with applications without any recourse to annual fixed budgets. (Actually from memory, over the last few years, pax numbers are up 20%+ and staff numbers down 15%...)

Similarly for Heathrow etc not having enough immigration officers to process incoming arrivals... I estimate the average passenger costs less than £2 to process [1], while outgoing flights pay Air Passenger Duty at rates starting from £13 per passenger (economy/short haul) and £78 (economy/long haul). More than enough to pay for higher staffing levels.

[1] £2 is my quick estimate, based on 130m passenger movements in 2016, Border Force having 7670 staff in 2016-17, with annual FTE costs around £32k for base salary, NI, and associated variable employment costs.

This is indeed not a new question. The Economist is currently running a series on classical liberal values. From a piece on John Stuart Mill:

> Democracy itself threatened the free exchange of ideas in a different way. Mill thought it right that ordinary people were being emancipated. But once free to make their own choices, they were liable to be taken in by prejudice or narrow appeals to self-interest. Give the working classes a vote, and chaos could result.

> The upshot was frightening. Paradoxically individual freedom could end up being more restricted under mass democracy than under the despotic sovereigns of yore. Mill famously refers to this as “tyranny of the majority”. But he worries just as much about middle-class “respectable” opinion as working-class ignorance.

https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2018/08/04/against-t...