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Comment by themihai | Hacker News Reader

I think that has always been part of the plan. The issue with EU was that the "immigrants" were acually citizens of the union which means the EU guaranteed them the same rights as british nationals.

There was also the issue that some EU countries(i.e Italy) were giving italian/EU citizenship to fresh immigrants from Africa so that they can travel to the UK. For some reasons a big part of the UK didn't like that for obvious reasons.

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> There was also the issue that some EU countries(i.e Italy) were giving italian/EU citizenship to fresh immigrants from Africa so that they can travel to the UK.

Source for this please? As far as I understood it is extremely difficult for such people to get Italian citizenship and had never heard of this as an issue

I can't find the exact article. For some reasons "everything" pre-brexit about immigration has been buried by Google. However the route of African migrants through Italy to the UK was well known before Brexit.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/uk-europe/news/african-migr...

You are mixing two things: Yes, illegal immigrants get into Italy from the Mediterranean sea. From there they move to north Europe, but this is far from getting Italian citizen and have the freedom to move in EU. However is sometimes very easy for many south americans to get Italian citizenship thanks to our dumb citizen law that grant citizenship to anyone who could prove to have kind of remote Italian ancestor

I know what you are saying but I'm not conflating these separate issues.

The argument was made that UK cannot control its borders from non-EU immigrants because Italy at the time was giving them enough papars so they could travel legally to the UK.

To be honest I cannot recall for sure if they were getting instant italian citizenship or just some form of residency. However in the end they could even get british citizenship because they would live in the UK long enough(i believe it's 5 years) using the EU papers. There was benefits fraud as well.

Unfortunately I cannot find the articles anymore. It's almost like a conspiracy that everything regarding immigration before Brexit is no longer search-able(I know it's just Google's algo discarding old news). Immigration was the issue number 1 for the british people before Brexit. I beleive it's not over yet as european politicians are still ignoring people's concerns on immigration.

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