12
Examination of witness
Professor Elspeth Guild.
Q41 The Chair: Welcome to another evidence session of the Justice and Home Affairs Select Committee on settlement, citizenship and integration. We are delighted that we have before us our first witness. I would be grateful if you would be kind enough to introduce yourself.
Professor Elspeth Guild: Thank you, Chair. I am a global professor of social justice at the University of Liverpool in the law school. I am also a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. I am emerita at the Radboud University in the Netherlands and at Queen Mary University of London.
The Chair: There are lots of things that you do. Thank you so much for being with us. To kick off, it would be helpful for you to say what in your view should be the purpose of our immigration and nationality laws. Similarly, given that we have to look at the impacts of what happens around us, what do you think is the purpose of the EU’s immigration and free movement laws?
Professor Elspeth Guild: This is an interesting question. We should start with Section 1(1) of the Immigration Act 1971, which is of course the source of all immigration law in the United Kingdom. In it, we see that the purpose of the Act is to determine who has “the right of abode in the United Kingdom shall be free to live in, and to come and go into and from, the United Kingdom without let or hindrance except such as may be required”, and so on. The purpose of the Immigration Act is to define who are British citizens. That is the first and foremost thing that the Act does, thereby defining who is entitled to enter and then subsequently determining who are the others and what particular sets of rules should apply to them.
The question of defining who is British is complicated and difficult. Remember that British citizenship came into existence only in 1983 with the 1981 Act coming into force, so the idea of citizenship for the UK is quite novel. That is why the Immigration Act 1971 talks about the right of abode. These are all hangovers from decolonisation. The question is: who are we, and how do we define who we are so that we can then define everyone else as other and therefore subject to this particular set of rules?
EU free movement law starts from a completely different point. In the initial treaties in 1957 we said—I am sorry, I mean “the EU said” since we are not part of it now, but I shall leave that aside—there will be four pillars: free movement of goods, persons, services and capital. Free movement rules in the EU are all designed to achieve that end. The result is that the individual chooses where he or she wishes to live—anywhere in the EU. The reduction of obstacles is a key part of EU free movement law. States’ interior ministries are prohibited from interfering with that choice of the individual unless they can come up with very good reasons on the basis of public policy, public security or public health. A whole series of measures were put into place to facilitate and encourage nationals of the member states to exercise their free movement right, including co-ordination of social security so that no one will pay social security contributions without getting the benefit—the principle of aggregation and non-discrimination—and mutual recognition of diplomas, so that when someone moves from one member state to another they take their expertise with them and it is fully recognised in the destination state. That is a completely different scenario—night and day—in the perspectives of what these laws are for.
The Chair: Thank you. That is incredibly helpful. We will pick up some of those issues in a bit more detail in a few minutes.
Q42 Lord Henley: Could you explain what constraints are placed on UK migration and citizenship policy by international law?
Professor Elspeth Guild: That is an interesting question and I am glad I was allowed an opportunity to prepare for it. The first constraint on citizenship that I will start with is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the UK has been a party from 1966. Article 12.4 says: “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country”. That includes the entitlement of citizens to enter, reflected very clearly in my answer to your previous question about what Section 1 of the Immigration Act says, which is that citizens are entitled to enter and entitled to leave. This is the most basic of the limitations of international law and it has been accepted in domestic law.
We have two conventions against statelessness. The UK has been a very strong supporter of the elimination of statelessness, keen to ensure that everyone has a country to which they belong, for many good reasons, including practical ones that I will not go into.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is slightly more recent, from 1990, provides an entitlement for a child to acquire a nationality, and that is quite linked with statelessness. The convention does not require a specific nationality for the child to acquire, but the child must acquire a nationality. That is also very much reflected in domestic law.
Article 34 of the refugee convention requires states, under their duty of sincere co-operation, to facilitate as far as possible the assimilation and naturalisation of refugees, so we have a requirement in refugee law regarding those who are recognised as refugees.
We have a Council of Europe Convention on Establishment, which the UK has ratified and has not resiled from, which has been the basis of the 10-year rule in UK immigration law. Once you come up to the 10-year point, because of the undertakings in the Convention on Establishment, you should get a permanent residence right.
Much more recently, from 2018, we have the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, of which the UK was a strong supporter in the General Assembly, which contains commitments to respecting, protecting and fulfilling the human rights of all migrants, non-regression and non-discrimination.
Q43 The Chair: I want to ask a little more about the impact of the ECHR. You are well aware that some people are suggesting that we get rid of it, find a clever way around it or whatever. How serious an issue is this for our own policies?
Professor Elspeth Guild: I had the pleasure of listening to our returning British judge from the Strasbourg court at an event at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law. He was reflecting on his two periods at the court, and immigration in particular was a very important part of it. I must say that after his hour and a half presentation on the court, with a strong emphasis on immigration and impacts regarding the UK, he had me completely convinced that there was no impact. I believe the lecture was recorded by BIICL and can be watched online.
The Chair: What is your view?
Professor Elspeth Guild: My view is that the ECHR forms a very low baseline, a threshold that is particularly low, which is tied in with the prohibition on torture, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment. It was designed, negotiated and interpreted to ensure that there is a floor below which one cannot go. If one looks at some of the activities in the field of deportation taking place in our great ally on the other side of the Atlantic, one can see why it might be helpful to have a baseline.
Q44 Lord Dubs: May I go to a point that you made earlier about the right of a citizenship to enter their own country? How does that relate to where the British Government say, “Oh, but you have another citizenship so we will take yours away”, as they did to Shamima Begum?
Professor Elspeth Guild: Indeed, Lord Dubs—may I call you Alf? I have known you for quite a long time. There is a whole area of international law, which is in much discussion, about the idea of what is your active citizenship and what is your passive citizenship. It all goes back to a 1955 decision of the International Court of Justice called Nottebohm, but we are not going to go back there. The EU has rejected that approach and said, “All citizenships you have are equally valid, and you may rely on them as and when you wish”. I understand there is a pending case where the court may refine its opinion, but we do not need to discuss that at the moment. For the moment the UK is not bound by any EU law, although it is party to the charter of the international court. We should fall back on the Nottebohm judgment and whether it is the active citizenship that the person is relying on or the passive one that they are not using. That will then affect the entry and exit rules.
Q45 Baroness Hughes of Stretford: You have referred to the importance of the definition of status of various sorts and some of the difficult issues around that. Could you help us to understand how the terms “migrant”, “alien” and “citizenship” are legally defined, both domestically and internationally?
Professor Elspeth Guild: These are complicated terms. I am glad I had the opportunity to prepare for your question because it is quite complicated. First, “migrant” is rarely a legal term, although I will come to the point where it is one.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: Sorry, did you say “rarely”?
Professor Elspeth Guild: It is very rarely a legal term. It is usually used pejoratively and is potentially nationality specific. For instance, we rarely speak of US nationals as migrants but we rarely speak of Moroccans as other than migrants. It is defined in the Palermo protocol against smuggling of migrants, a 2000 instrument in international criminal law, as a person who is not a national or a permanent resident of the state. The one definition we have excludes anyone who is a permanent resident from being a migrant, which might seem somewhat unexpected.
Then there is the concept of the “alien”, a term used in international law. We still have it, for instance, in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. An alien is anyone who is not a citizen of the state where you are applying the law as such.
The third concept, the citizen, is very much a matter of state decision-making. States decide who their citizens are—as I said at the start, they decide what rights they have and can deprive their nationals of citizenship as long as they do not make them stateless—but the question of what a citizen is falls under national law.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: So although, from your expert knowledge, you can root each of these terms in a piece of legislation of one sort or another, is it fair to say that “migrant” and “alien” are used in all sorts of ways that do not necessarily reference their legal origin? The term “migrant” is used colloquially and not necessarily in the way that you defined it—for instance, in the press.
Professor Elspeth Guild: That is certainly the case. As a jurist, if I could control the press’s use of legal terms then I would probably be a much happier person, but that is not within my remit.
Q46 Lord Tope: Elspeth, you have spoken about the fluidity of identity. As a migrant progresses from migrant through to citizenship, what is the effect on them? How do they feel about it? Equally, how does the state regard them?
Professor Elspeth Guild: This is a very interesting question and I am going to be slightly provocative in my answer. I am going to take as an example of our migrant a Canadian national who applies for, and is selected to be, Governor of the Bank of England. This Canadian national comes to the UK and is a migrant. He or she is of course still a citizen of their country of origin; they did not cease to be a citizen of Canada when they came as a migrant worker to take up a rather well-paid post. How did the state see that individual? It gave them the necessary immigration status to carry out his or her activities as Governor of the Bank of England. That was undoubtedly subject to the normal rules that apply to any highly-skilled migrant coming to the UK and, in theory, came absolutely within the Immigration Act, the immigration rules and the guidance.
How does that Canadian national, living and working in the UK, respond to his or her status as a migrant? Does that person feel like a migrant? Does that person feel like they are on a road? That person is probably going to acquire British citizenship at some point. Why do they acquire that citizenship? One can imagine there might be many different reasons.
There is one question that that individual can be asked, either by someone at a cocktail party or by the state, which will place the biggest question mark over the identity of someone who is naturalising or has naturalised, and that is: “No, where are you really from?” By asking that question, the society and the individual who asks the question are saying, “You aren’t really one of us”, and transforms the identity of that Governor of the Bank of England. When the state asks it, saying, “Are you entitled to child benefit for your children in the UK? Where are you really from?”, that transforms the relationship of the individual to the state. That person may remain in the UK for the rest of his or her life, or that person might go back to their country of origin and be elected Prime Minister.
Lord Tope: What is the state’s view of this?
Professor Elspeth Guild: Which state, Canada or the United Kingdom?
Lord Tope: Good question.
Professor Elspeth Guild: To whom does this person belong, and when did they belong to whom? For how long, and was it a good or bad thing? Those are moral issues that are beyond my legal knowledge.
Lord Filkin: I love it when witnesses ask us questions. We are totally stumped, are we not?
The Chair: My very knowledgeable committee clerk has just whispered in my ear that this hypothetical person to whom you refer had Irish citizenship as well as Canadian citizenship so, again, the question is: to whom does he feel a link? I have a follow-up question; I think I know the answer, but this is for clarification. In the case of this hypothetical person, at the time when he or she stopped being the Governor of the Bank of England, what would his or her status then be?
Professor Elspeth Guild: Unemployed and looking for work.
The Chair: But with the ability to remain within the UK?
Professor Elspeth Guild: It would all depend on whether or not this person had completed five years in what would then have been the tier 2 skilled scheme but would now be the skilled worker scheme. If the person had completed those five years, fulfilling the criteria—without someone failing to renew her work permit at some time and falling into irregularity, as sadly happens from time to time even with very highly-paid people—then she would be eligible for settlement and, hopefully, her solicitors would have made the application.
The Chair: One further follow-up, if I may. If someone makes the effort to apply for ILR—we will come back to the issue of how long that might take—and then decides to apply for citizenship, is there any evidence that taking that extra step is valued highly?
Professor Elspeth Guild: Once again, this is extraordinarily relational. Let us look at the statistics on one class of persons applying for British citizenship, EU nationals, from 2004 to 2008, before the debate about Brexit. Of those who completed their periods of qualification, receiving permanent residence under the EU system—the equivalent of ILR but with better rights attached to it—who then went on and applied for citizenship? The statistics are interesting: very few EU nationals did, except the Bulgarians and Romanians. So clearly it was people who thought that, in their relationship with the state and with the people, becoming one of the nationals was going to be an important way to diminish discrimination against them.
Q47 The Chair: Our inquiry is looking at issues around the integration of people who come to the UK. I suppose that one of the things that follow from your answer is whether or not acquiring citizenship, as distinct from ILR, is something that aids integration. From your answer, presumably it is on the basis of the individual rather than trying to persuade everyone to go for citizenship to help integration. Does that make sense? Sorry, I am not being very clear.
Professor Elspeth Guild: Indeed, though I shall answer the question slightly differently. If there is very little difference between the rights you have under ILR or permanent residence and the rights you will have as a citizen, and if the difference is not one that is terribly important to you, such as voting in national elections—look at the EU example—then there is little incentive to make the extra step. The minute that an individual is anxious that the entitlements of ILR and the access to equal treatment are going to be diminished along with the capacity to participate in society without endless questioning of your status—“Are you entitled to this?”, “Are you entitled to that?”, “Who are you?”, “Can your kids be on the Olympic team?” or whatever—then people get very interested in citizenship. So the rush to citizenship is based on, “What am I about to lose?”, “What may I lose?”, “How can I prove to this lovely country where I live that I really belong here?”
The Chair: Basically, the argument is that you have to make it worth someone’s while to get to citizenship from an earlier stage or they are not very likely to do it.
Professor Elspeth Guild: Again, if we take our Canadian banker, did she apply for citizenship before she left the UK and went back to Canada? If she did, why?
Q48 Lord Filkin: I have two questions. Maybe take them in separate parts because they are slightly different. Can you tell us how free movement, particularly in the EU, has changed attitudes?
Professor Elspeth Guild: If I take the individual as the starting place, what is the attitude of the individual towards free movement? The example is best indicated by Brexit and the rush of British citizens to acquire EU passports. I was just looking at the latest Irish Foreign Ministry statistics on the issue of passports in a country of only 5.5 million. In 2024, it issued just under 1 million passports and, according to the press reports, more than a quarter of those were to persons in Northern Ireland. You can see that the loss of rights has led individuals in the UK to be very keen to continue the possibility of enjoying those rights elsewhere in the EU.
From the perspective of EU member states, we have just completed and sent in the manuscript to the OUP our textbook on the citizens’ directive, where we updated all the cases from the Court of Justice on its application. It was interesting—it had been eight years since the last edition of the book—how few cases have been going forward to the Court of Justice on free movement rights. EU member states have integrated pretty fully and satisfactorily the entitlements of EU nationals of one member state to live and work in another member state. The friction is increasingly simply about EU nationals living in their own member state who want to enjoy the same family reunion rights that they would have if they moved to another member state, without going to another member state.
Lord Filkin: We move on to the second question, which in many ways is highly relevant to the current debate about changing law and policy. Do more restrictive settlement rules prevent people crossing borders—to be clear—legally and illegally?
Professor Elspeth Guild: That question is quite complicated to answer. I want to compare the numbers of people who move in the European Union, citizens of the union, who move from one member state to another and are entitled to do so, in respect of whom all obstacles have been removed and measures have been taken to facilitate that. According to Eurostat, 3% of the population of the EU lives in a member state other than that of their underlying nationality. The difference in wages between Germany and Bulgaria is 4:1, yet only 3% have moved. So do restrictive or free migration rules increase the percentage of the population that moves or not?
According to the International Organization for Migration, the UN body responsible for counting migrants, 3.4% of the world’s population live in a country other than that of their underlying nationality. Those people, other than those living in other free movement areas like Mercosur or various bits of the African Union, are subject to extremely coercive rules on migration—for instance, the very famous H-1B visa, which leads to settlement in the US; the American authorities have now put a $100,000 tariff on any company wanting to sponsor someone. You can see that there are lots of restrictive rules. What is the end result? It seems to be pretty much the same thing.
Lord Filkin: That is incredibly relevant to public debate at present, is it not? Clearly, there are many reasons for legislation and policy changes but, implicitly, one of the expectations of the Home Secretary’s current changes is that they will, in some way, do what the British public want, which is to reduce the number of people coming into Britain without a legal right to do so. If I have understood you correctly, you are basically saying that the route to that objective—I am not debating whether it is valid, but it is an objective of policy—is to forget addressing it through legal means; you should probably therefore switch to physical means. Is that the implication of what you have said?
Professor Elspeth Guild: If a country does not want migrants, often the persons who are categorised as migrants may have been living a long time in the country—let us take the case of Myanmar and the Rohingya—the one way to get rid of them is to persecute them, torture them and engage in extrajudicial killing. That is quite effective, as Bangladesh has found.
Lord Filkin: I was not talking about people who are currently living in the UK. I was talking about people who may wish to come to the UK and, therefore, whether an object of policy was to reduce the number who come without a right to do so.
Professor Elspeth Guild: There is there is a lot of complexity in that question. If you talk to anyone who is engaged in your committee on tourism, and if you look at the reliance of the British economy on tourism, allowing foreigners to enter the UK is an extraordinarily important part of the economy. Hundreds of millions of people enter the UK every year. Over 300 million go every year to the EU, and the UK has a very active tourism industry. We have to remember that those people are entering and leaving. This is the big number and it is what we need to think about. The number of people who come as migrant workers is a few hundred thousand. The people who come here as refugees barely get over 100,000 a year. These are tiny numbers. The UK has a population of 63 million.
Lord Filkin: We will probably touch on it in later questioning, but that implies that the British public are wrong to be concerned about this issue.
Professor Elspeth Guild: It is not for me to say whether the British population are right or wrong or whether they are concerned or not. I am a jurist.
Q49 Lord Bach: This is a question about the push-pull theory of migration. Do you believe that it is correct and, if is not, what other factors explain migration if it is not push-pull, which there has been a great deal of publicity about in this country over the past few years?
Professor Elspeth Guild: Push-pull theory was designed by a researcher called Ravenstein in 1881, and it was designed around trying to figure out why people moved from the country to the city. He did not want to answer that question in the way that most people were at the time, which was, “How do you keep them down on the farm after they have seen Paris?” Instead, he tried to design a whole series of arguments about what pushes and pulls. This has been bowdlerised left, right and centre over the 150 years since he thought it up and is often applied to international migration.
Push, of course, is a theory. When I was answering Lord Filkin, I said that if you do not like the people who are living on your territory and you want to push them out, persecute them, torture them, subject them to extrajudicial killing. All of them will not leave but some will. That seems to be the most effective way in which to get rid of people. I used the example of the Rohingya in Myanmar and the headaches that this has created for Bangladesh in particular, but for the international community. So push works to an extent but never completely satisfactorily. You will have to become North Korea if you want really to control everything, but there you are.
Pull theory is where the whole thing begins to fall apart. Every time you ask, “What is a pull factor?”, someone says, “Family members”. They may be a pull factor at one point, when someone wants to live with their spouse, but, when they get divorced, they do not want to live with one another. Then family is not a pull factor; one of them might move two-thirds of the way across the world to get away from their spouse, as we see in many cases of people who do not want to pay maintenance to their spouses so move to Australia. We use the push-pull idea as if it is common sense but, in fact, it is an extraordinarily complicated process. You cannot simplify the idea other than by saying, “If you start torturing people, at least one or two of their family members will probably leave”, but, when you get to the rest of it, that is a very unsatisfactory way of looking at things.
Look at how free movement works in the European Union. Why do EU nationals move from one member state to another? The least satisfactory explanation is that they get better wages somewhere else, because they are all entitled to move but many do not; instead, they stay on the farm in Bulgaria, for example, growing potatoes and not making much money. Presumably, they do so because they like it. It is not because they do not know they can move. Their neighbours may have done so—who knows? These things are complicated and very difficult to explain. However, if the common-sense idea about push-pull actually worked, there would not be a single doctor left in southern Italy.
Lord Bach: Can I come back to you briefly on the pull factor? We read that one of the pull factors for this country—the United Kingdom—is the ability to get a job on the black market, for example, where you do not have to pay taxes, where you will not be found out and, if you want to disappear for a considerable period of time, you will be able to do so and the state may not take action against you very hurriedly. Is that not a genuine pull factor, at least in theory? I would be interested to know whether you think that that is a pull factor in theory and whether it actually is one in practice.
Professor Elspeth Guild: I am not sure that it is actually a theory. It might be a notion or an idea; whether it is a correct notion or idea needs some examination. If you look at the statistics on enforcement proceedings against employers for hiring irregular migrants without the right documents, because that is where the real problem is, you see that very few employers get fined. When inspections are done, there is usually some irregularity—someone missed a deadline or someone in HR forgot X, Y or Z—but, by and large, UK employers are very compliant. So our problem with this notion is exactly that: from Home Office statistics on immigration enforcement and employers, it does not seem that there is a problem.
Q50 Baroness Buscombe: I have two questions. On the statistics, we are finding at the moment that, when we table Written Questions on this subject, it is hard to get an answer because the Home Office statistics do not seem to appear in the Answers. So I do not know what your source is for those Home Office statistics and whether it is up to date, two years old or five years old. My other question is: do you lecture? I am interested. Do you teach at the University of Liverpool?
Professor Elspeth Guild: I do indeed lecture. Why do you ask, madam?
Baroness Buscombe: I am just interested, partly because of your point of view. Do you lecture to undergraduates or graduates?
Professor Elspeth Guild: Chair, I would like clarification on whether I am required to answer these questions.
The Chair: You have no need to answer if you do not wish to.
Professor Elspeth Guild: Thank you; I will refrain.
Baroness Buscombe: Okay. My first question was on statistics.
Professor Elspeth Guild: I use the Home Office statistics, which are, by and large, up to date to 2024. I am not sure why you are having difficulty. I had to do a number of freedom of information requests in respect of data sharing on migrants, in particular with the US; it took four or five questions before I got a good and full answer that was satisfactory and up to date.
Q51 Lord Anderson of Ipswich: You were asked a question by Lord Henley about the constraints placed by international law on migration and citizenship policy. Although you did not refer to the European Convention on Human Rights in your answer, you were then asked about it and you referenced a talk by Tim Eicke, the outgoing British judge, which I have read. You said that it was your view that the ECHR had no impact. I wonder if I could explore that a little further, bearing in mind that, if the reporting is to be believed, our Deputy Prime Minister and Attorney-General are going to Strasbourg today for tomorrow’s ministerial conference where all of the 46 member states will look at the convention and migration. As you will know, this follows a letter from nine states, with which others have since associated themselves, spelling out some of the difficulties that they say the convention puts in the way of their migration policies.
It may be that what you are saying—please clarify—is that the convention does not have much to say about who we let in. However, is it not the case that, when we are looking at who we can deport or extradite, Article 8 of the convention, which protects the right to family life, and Article 3, which stops us sending people not only to places where they might be tortured but to places where they might, for example, not have an acceptable standard of healthcare or acceptable prison conditions, say that we cannot do that? Article 3 is an absolute prohibition. So is it not right to say that, at that level, at least, the European convention has some impact on how we operate our immigration and asylum system?
Professor Elspeth Guild: Let me make a clarification. It is not my view that the ECHR has no impact; it was our former judge’s position, in that particular speech, that the ECHR has little impact on immigration and asylum in the UK. I am certainly not as well qualified as he is to comment on the impact of the ECHR in the UK.
It is a very good thing for heads of state to meet regularly in Strasbourg and exchange views. That is a valuable and important process, and is part of the development of any particular field of law. We have a push from some member states with concerns about respect for the human rights of migrants. I am a jurist, and I look at law. To some extent, I look at policy, but, in my daily life, I look at what the law says and how it is interpreted. I see a generally positive effect of international law around the world. There was a judgment of the International Court of Justice in July this year on climate change—where the international court took a position that was, perhaps, slightly different from the one taken by the law faculty at Cambridge—and the continuing importance of customary international law. In the view of that international court, non-refoulement appears to be a principle of customary international law.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: Professor, you referred in a previous answer to the push-pull factor theory and said that it has an attractiveness as seeming like common sense. I agree, although it was not devised for international migration explanation and it is very complex. Although it may be only a small subset of people who try to migrate here, you will have seen that a number of people appear to be willing to take great risks with their own lives and those of their families in order to get here. I do not know whether that is because they are being pushed out of their country or because of the attractiveness of our country—or, indeed, whether it is nothing to do with push-pull. Do you have any reflections on that particular subgroup of migrants in relation to the push-pull theory?
Professor Elspeth Guild: This falls into the category—as I say, it has some legitimacy—of the push side. When individuals are facing persecution at home, torture and extrajudicial killing, they may see leaving as a possible solution; that may be the alternative, even if it will be an extremely dangerous and expensive trip. Unless you can deal with what the person is fleeing from—through a regime change, for example, so that there is no longer persecution, torture and extrajudicial killing—you are probably not going to be able to do much about it, because the problem is not about whether the person should stay and be killed. It is their choice to flee, and that is protected by the principle of non-refoulement in the refugee convention. Blaming people for making dangerous journeys is a simplistic way of looking at—or, perhaps, avoiding looking at—what these people are fleeing from. Why are they making these dangerous journeys?
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: And you would not include extreme economic hardship, for example, alongside those other reasons that you cited—persecution, torture and so on. You would not necessarily see extreme economic hardship as a reason to push people out.
Professor Elspeth Guild: There was a time during the Cold War when we considered that a person was a refugee if they were fleeing the Soviet Union and were, say, a nuclear physicist who had been dismissed from their job and been made to clean toilets in a prison. We considered that a reason for providing that person with protection and that what they were suffering in the Soviet Union at that time was indeed persecution.
The Chair: Unfortunately, our time is up, as you could probably guess. We could have gone on for a very long time. As I have told you already, we would welcome any further thoughts that you may have. One thing that I certainly think we would all be keen to hear—if you would be prepared to do this, of course; I appreciate that we are asking you to do more work—is you sharing your thoughts on the recent announcements and how they tie in with the issues that we have been discussing. For the time being, though, we are going to have to draw this session to a close.
On behalf of the entire committee, I offer a huge thank you for coming here and sharing your expertise, as well as a thank you in advance for the further sharing of expertise that I hope you are going to give.
