Freedom House and the impact of immigration restrictions on freedom

When journalists write articles about whether countries are free or not, as with this piece in the Financial Times by Martin Wolf about India, they often rely on the ratings from Freedom House. Reading Wolf’s article, my interest was piqued concerning what Freedom House says about the post-Brexit UK, and specifically for the freedoms that it classes as “civil liberties”. Given that one recent major study — Chandran Kukathas’s Immigration and Freedom — makes a compelling argument that immigration restrictions involve extensive restrictions on everyone’s liberty, I was interested to see how this would be reflected both in Freedom House’s criteria and in its use of those criteria in country reports.

First of all then, Freedom House’s methodology. There would seem to be several relevant parts:

F4. Do laws, policies, and practices guarantee equal treatment of various segments of the population?

Do members of such groups face legal and/or de facto discrimination in areas including employment, education, and housing because of their identification with a particular group?

As I’ve discussed before on Crooked Timber, and as is extensively documented by Amelia Gentleman in her book The Windrush Betrayal, the UK’s hostile environment legislation, pioneered by then Home Secretary Theresa May, had the effect of denying to many people, particularly of Caribbean origin, employment, housing and health. Many children born to immigrants in the UK are denied access to higher education because of restrictive nationality laws.

Do the country’s laws provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status in accordance with the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, its 1967 Protocol, and other regional treaties regarding refugees? Has the government established a system for providing protection to refugees, including against refoulement (the return of persons to a country where there is reason to believe they would face persecution)?

Any dispassionate observer, indeed anyone not actually making a statement on behalf of the ruling party, would have to conceded for the UK that this condition is not met, and that is the judgement of UNHCR. The UK government has introduced measures with its Illegal Migration Act 2023 that criminalize people entering the country by “illegal” means, despite the provisions of the Refugee Convention that gives them a lawful excuse for doing so. The government also intends to send people who may be refugees to Rwanda, without first examining their asylum claim, where there can be no assurance that the non-refoulement provisions are met.

Under section G, “Personal autonomy and individual rights”, we find

G1 Do individuals enjoy freedom of movement, including the ability to change their place of residence, employment, or education?

and

Are there restrictions on foreign travel, including an exit visa system, which may be enforced selectively?

In the UK, we find now that exit from the European Union has greatly restricted freedom of movement for British citizens, so that they are less free than before. They are no longer able to live and work in the EU without a visa. Also, concerningly, British nationality laws and their arbitrary application by th Home Office mean that some people, even if they were born in the UK and have lived in the country all of their lives, may be denied a passport and so are effectively locked in. Such people may also be at risk, if they commit a criminal offence, of being deported to a country they have never visited.

And then we find

G3. Do individuals enjoy personal social freedoms, including choice of marriage partner and size of family, protection from domestic violence, and control over appearance?

which includes

Do citizenship or residency rules undermine family integrity through excessively high or discriminatory barriers for foreign spouses or transmission of citizenship to children?

Here we find that in the UK, the minimum income requirements for spousal and family visas mean that it can be very difficulty for people to be with their partner and children in the UK, and in the case of other family members, such as parents, adult children, siblings, it is often hard for them even to visit, let alone settle, as Colin Yeo discusses in his excellent new substack.

And then

G4. Do individuals enjoy equality of opportunity and freedom from economic exploitation?

Is the trafficking of persons for labor, sexual exploitation, forced begging, etc., widespread, and is the government taking adequate steps to address the problem?

The UK’s Illegal Migration Act actually weakens the protection for victims of trafficking and “modern slavery”, making it impossible for those of them who have been brought into the UK from outside to seek help without being at risk of deportation.

To be fair to Freedom House, some of these facts are reflected in its UK report, particularly around the hostile environment and the Illegal Migration Act. and this costs the UK one point under section F4, scoring 3/4. The facts around loss of EU free movement are noted in section G1, but without penalty in the overall assessment. In section G3, the highly restrictive family migration regime does not even warrant a mention and the UK receives full marks. Under section G4 on economic exploitation, Freedom House mentions the inadequate enforcement of the “modern slavery” provisions but has not yet caught up with the legislation that weakens protections, so 3/4. Overall, the UK scores 54/60 for civil liberties and is judged to be “free”, with the migration-related deficits in the freedom having only a tiny impact on the outcome. So it seems that Freedom House, while not entirely unaware of the issues, doesn’t think they matter that much. Perhaps that’s because most of these restrictions don’t have an impact on people with enough money, while they do massively restrict the civil liberties of those with insufficient financial resources