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Comment by 317070 | Hacker News Reader

First, the author is actually wrong. The date is not 5 years before you submit, but is 5 years before the form is received by the home office! So there are a few days of uncertainty, depending on how fast Royal Mail was with the physical documents.

Additionally, I did a request for my information from the home office prior to filling in my form. After all, you have the right to request the information they have on you that will be used to verify your form. Kafka would be proud.

Let me tell you, Home Office doesn't have a clue where you were 5 years ago. It had approximately 50% of my trips, and frequently only had only one leg of the journey. Plane, ferry, train, sailboat, ... it didn't matter. It seems like they have not been keeping the information very well.

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> It had approximately 50% of my trips, and frequently only had only one leg of the journey

Relevant current news: Home Office denying child benefits to 1000s of people because they had incomplete data of people vacation trips, so people were thought to have emigrated and never returned [0]. Some people who never even left (due to cancelled flights, denied boardings etc.) were also affected.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/01/hmrc-likely...

This is because the UK doesn't have exit checks. They rely on airlines to submit the information to them.

I guess this makes sense when you consider that there's an open border with Ireland. Though you'd think that the UK and Ireland could get together to track exits...

The UK's borders used to be hilariously lax. In 2000 I travelled a lot. To leave, as you note, you just left.

To return, you'd walk past a man at Heathrow who was invariably reading the paper. He had his feet up on the desk. You were walking at a clip, passport held aloft, photo page ostensibly open towards him.

That was it. Immigrated.

In 2014 I landed on either Heathrow or another London airport I don’t remember coming from Spain after a vacation

I read on a sign “travellers from Europe this way” and I thought ok my flight came from Spain I’m going that way … when I saw I was out of the airport with no immigration whatsoever

In hindsight it obviously meant if you’re European (which I’m not), I was in shock how easy someone could get in the UK !

I don't know about UK, but my experience is the signs for EU and non-EU point different directions, but either way you just go through a door that leads to the exact same place. I've been told that when they are looking for "something" they will put extra checks at the non-EU door, but if you have a US passport (I presume other countries like Canada) in hand they will send you through the EU door.

Are you sure your passport wasn’t checked?

What you’re describing sounds like it was the customs check. Pre-brexit, if you were arriving from the EU, then there was no customs check since we were all part of the same customs union.

The usual flow is

immigration check -> baggage collection -> customs check

Yeah wasn’t checked. I’m pretty sure it was a smaller airport than Heathrow. I definitely went through the wrong path out

Perhaps your passport was checked on departure instead of on arrival? At least that's how it worked when taking the Eurostar train.

Even if they did check his passport, he didn't have an EU passport so probably shouldn't have been allowed to skip customs.

From a customs perspective, flying from one EU country to another EU is treated like a domestic flight.

If I (a British citizen) flew from London to New York, then on to Chicago; I'd expect to go through customs when I arrived at New York, but not when I arrived at Chicago.

Ah, good point.

No, you were good. You were already inside the Schengen Area so you actually took the correct path, though I can see how the sign seems vague now I read it from your perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area

The UK was never in the Schengen Area, though.

2 years ago I landed at London City (from Zurich), got off the plane and then we all walked all the way to the exit without being stopped by a single human to check passports or customs. I couldn't believe it.

I am not a British or EU citizen

* * *

Speak for yourself, not the Irish.

this is a genuinely awful description of Irish history

> The open border treaty was put in place because the alternative was either giving the territory back, or nonstop terrorism (look up the Irish Republican Army) until they gave the territory back.

The Common Travel Area's origins are in the the period 1923-1925[0], although it wasn't called that back then...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Travel_Area

> Ireland dislikes the UK since the UK invaded it

This was centuries before the UK. The Normans came to Ireland by invitation of Macmurphy, King of Leinster, to help him restore his power, in exchange for promises of territory. This barely counts as a conquest CB, but with certainty not as an invasion.

The Tudor conquest of Ireland involved the English and Scottish. It was before the UK existed, but was perpetrated by the constituents of the UK. At least, the ancestors of the contemporary constituents. Maybe not of Wales though, I don't know.

> Maybe not of Wales though,

The original Tudors were Welsh.

Huh, I'd totally missed that. I need to brush up on my history in this part of the world. It's way more interesting than I used to think. Thanks for that

Fwiw, in the time period you're talking about Wales was just a label for a group of English counties, each fully annexed to England like any other county. The rulers were of Welsh heritage, the Tudors being from Gwynedd in N Wales (I suspect originally Norse, possibly via Ireland).

Strangely, no 'English' people have ruled England since the latter Norman invasion.

Scotland and Wales often try to pretend they weren't part of the Empire and its horrors - in reality their were nobles/toffs/rich nobs from all across GB (at least) doing their part. Barely any of our ancestors were involved in any way other than servitude.

(My family are from both sides of the Anglo-Irish conflicts.)

This is such an interesting insight. Thank you. The part about barely any ancestors being involved apart from servitude is quite a common thread in history since empires began.

20+ years of lighting our hair on fire over immigration and we still have no idea who is in the country.

Starmer addressed this a while back, accusing the Tories of campaigning on reducing immigration while actually running an experiment in open borders. Having made this statement, he then proceeded to do nothing about immigration himself.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2024/nov/28/keir-...

It seems to be a bipartisan thing in the UK to recognize that the electorate really doesn’t want immigration, and then not to fulfill the will of the electorate. Instead, the politicians use that will to accomplish unrelated goals like imposing a national digital ID.

> the electorate really doesn’t want immigration

Is that the case or is there just a significant minority that cares and the rest are happy enough as things are and would get mad if there was change - thus making their approach rational: get the votes of those who care but don't do anything because then you will be voted out next term.

I don't know myself, but this is something that I've wondered about a lot of issues that I care about where nothing happens. (I've long been on the side of more immigration)

Politicians like campaign on reducing immigration because it's an easy thing to campaign on. They don't like to actually do anything about it because (1) it's hard, especially when you want to comply with laws and treaties and (2) effectively reducing immigration could hamper the ability to campaign on reducing immigration.

> It seems to be a bipartisan thing in the UK to recognize that the electorate really doesn’t want immigration

Usually, it's not an "inner wish" of the electorate, but the electorate gets manipulated to feel that way by mass media, especially tabloids. Outrage sells, after all, especially when it can be laced to make it more effective.

The problem at the core is that immigration is vital for societies, especially the low-pay-hard-labor segment. Has the UK found a replacement for Ukrainian and Polish farm workers yet [1]?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/15/pounds-6...

> Usually, it's not an "inner wish" of the electorate, but the electorate gets manipulated to feel that way by mass media, especially tabloids. Outrage sells, after all, especially when it can be laced to make it more effective.

As you say, the tabloids sell what people want to read. Who's manipulating whom?

> The problem at the core is that immigration is vital for societies, especially the low-pay-hard-labor segment. Has the UK found a replacement for Ukrainian and Polish farm workers yet [1]?

Immigration is also good for the would be immigrants.

Though if you are only interested in cheap labour (and giving foreigners jobs which are better than what they can get at home), you can run a guest worker programmer without giving them the right to stay. Singapore has a few successful programmes like that.

Ie you can have cheap labour without permanent immigration.

I'm in favour of open borders; but if for political reasons you can't have permanent immigration, guest worker programmes are better than completely closed borders.

I think people who are against immigration usually also are against guest workers. They've negative sentiment towards seeing people not looking like them, without knowing whether they are permanent residents or only here for six months. It's a gut feeling based on stereotypes and prejudices not facts.

Maybe. But for better or worse, most people don't say this out loud.

See also https://laneless.substack.com/p/the-copenhagen-interpretatio... Basically, people don't like having to look at poverty, and rather have poor people stay far away (and even poorer).

He's done plenty (https://ukandeu.ac.uk/the-coming-collapse-in-immigration/), following on from the changes Sunak made, which are already showing up in the early numbers this year.

But of course it's never going to be enough for the noisily anti-immigration lot.

GCHQ has metadata on all digital communications - even among homeless and immigrant populations have near 100% mobile daily usage.

"We" surely have pretty good information about number of adults in the UK, and if the security services are worth their salt we know their names and associations.

Heck, the main supermarkets can probably tell you within a percent or two what the live demographics of the country are.

Well, that's what you get for not running a totalitarian country.

By and large, it's a feature, not a bug, that the government isn't sharing all the information it has between its various parts.

Eg GCHQ has lots of information it has (ostensibly) for keeping the country safe, but that doesn't mean that the prosecution in a criminal case should get access to all the same information.

Of course, that's a bit inefficient and duplicates efforts. But such is a price for restrained government.

In the context of the issue that doesn't really make sense. The issue is that the home office think you left and didn't come back. How would an exit check tell the home office you have come back into the country?

In a country that has exit checks, in order to go airside, a border agent will stamp you out and record your exit. If you were to get stamped out and then decide that you don't want to catch your flight after all, you'd have to get stamped back in again (often not a real stamp these days).

In the UK there's no exit checks. The only information they have is that you booked a flight. This is "Advance Passenger Information" which all airlines are legally required to submit. They don't know if you've actually boarded the flight, they just assume that if you booked a flight that it means you left the country.

The exit check doesn't tell them that you've come back, they know that already unless you cross the land border. But it does tell them that you truly left and stop the guesswork.

> I guess this makes sense when you consider that there's an open border with Ireland.

Weren't the other borders with the Schengen area open, too? Eg if you take a small boat from England to Denmark, no one needed to check anything.

As someone who's been through that dance twice, it's 5 years from the time (well, day) you press "Submit" if you're applying online, or $RANDOM days of Royal Mail nonsense if you choose to apply by post.

I agree though, the Home Office doesn't have a way of knowing where you were fore sure 5 years ago unless they got someone to go through your "days in and out of the UK" list and vetted/cross-referenced it. And even then it'd likely be incomplete and they'd have to guess.

My surmise is that they look at the level of effort you've put in to filling out that detail, and if the total days in/out isn't particularly a borderline case, then they just wave that bit through.

I would have thought that the point is that you're supposed to be there continuously for some considerable duration (and having worked through other processes of legal immigration) before applying for citizenship.

So the idea of trying to figure out exactly which day five years in the past you have to mention seems odd to me. If there's really no care being paid to the intervening time... well if you're trying to exploit a loophole like that I think I'd prefer that it's difficult... ?

i think they meant online, which could be different?

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