12
Examination of witness
Professor Randall Hansen.
Q52 The Chair: Welcome to another evidence session of the Justice and Home Affairs Select Committee, looking into our inquiry into settlement, citizenship and integration. We are delighted to have our witness with us, online from Canada at 6 am, his time. I would be very grateful if, for the record, you introduced yourself.
Professor Randall Hansen: I am Canada Research Chair in Global Migration at the University of Toronto.
The Chair: Thank you very much. To kick us off, I call Lord Anderson.
Q53 Lord Anderson of Ipswich: Welcome, Professor Hansen. I am afraid I have two difficult and rather broad questions to ask you, so please be as selective as you like in how you choose to answer. The first question is this. In the historical context, what is the distinction between nationality law and immigration policy? The second question is: what have been the key legislative milestones, or perhaps the directions of travel, in the UK since 1948?
Professor Randall Hansen: They are important questions. On the first, in most countries the distinction is very clear. Immigration policy is the laws and rules governing the entry of immigrants—that is, people who leave one country, enter another and spend more than a year—and citizenship policy is the rules governing the naturalisation of such people, so when and how they become citizens. In the United Kingdom they are hopelessly intertwined, because it was through an imperial citizenship scheme—citizenship of the United Kingdom and colonies—that the UK experienced its first waves of large-scale non-European migration in the 1950s, chiefly West Indians and then later South Asians.
On the legislative milestones, the first was the British Nationality Act 1948, which created this imperial citizenship—citizenship of the UK and colonies. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 controlled for the first time the right of British subjects to freely enter and remain in the United Kingdom. The Immigration Act 1971 which put, with a few exceptions, foreigners, if you will, aliens and British subjects on the same legal footing for the first time. That Act remains the foundation of UK immigration policy today. Finally, the British Nationality Act of 1981, which introduced, for the first time, a British citizenship—a UK citizenship for the British Isles, less the Republic of Ireland: for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich: That is a list of Acts of Parliament, for which I thank you very much. But of course, during the period 1973 to 2020, we were members of the European Union, and there were consequences of that for immigration policy. How significant were those consequences by comparison with the measures that you were describing?
Professor Randall Hansen: The year 1973, when the Immigration Act 1971 took effect, was also when the rules were adopted giving free entry to what became citizens of the European Union. The UK experienced relatively little immigration in the 1970s and 1980s. We described it as a zero-immigration country in the literature. But after Labour came to government in 1997, immigration policy was changed. Also, after the accession of Central European countries in the early 2000s, EU immigration really took off and was about 280,000 net per year at the time of the 2016 referendum. You are absolutely right: the legislation I mentioned governed non-European immigration, but a huge part of the story—and the story of Brexit—was European immigration.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich: Having said that, I have one more question, if I may, Chair. We have been shown a very helpful graph which shows levels of actual net migration being, I guess, between 200,000 and 300,000 fairly consistently for the first 20 years or so of this century, until we reach the pandemic. What then happens after the pandemic is we have levels, I think, in excess of 800,000 per year, and this was after we had left the European Union. Was that anything to do with laws, or was that simply to do with the implementation of policy by the Government at the time?
Professor Randall Hansen: It was mostly policy. I think it peaked actually at 930,000. We should take two one-offs out of that: Hong Kong refugees and Ukrainian refugees. None the less, the numbers were massive. What happened was, after free movement ended, this easy supply of low-skilled migration—which basically served the same function as Irish immigration for many, many years; which is to say, coming in boom times to the UK, fulfilling labour shortages and then going back—was cut off. Business lobbied the Government aggressively, and Home Secretary Patel, after promising to turn off the tap of “cheap” foreign labour—her word, not mine—actually expanded all the categories. She lowered the income thresholds quite dramatically for people to migrate to the United Kingdom, allowed people working in the social care sector from 2022 to apply for skilled visas—that is the old tier 2, the old work permit system under 1971. You saw a huge upsurge, peaking at, I think, around 423,000 net of non-European labour migration. It was very much policy or adjustment of policy.
Q54 Baroness Buscombe: Professor Hansen, my question dovetails quite nicely from that reply. At the turn of the century, you wrote that the UK and comparable European countries had seen a convergence in nationality policy, albeit based on different historical trends. How has that position changed since then, and is the UK diverging from the European norm? Indeed, is there a European norm?
Professor Randall Hansen: That referred specifically to a technical but important element of nationality law in the European Union, which is this: do you have a right to citizenship in a European country if you are born of someone who is a resident of that country? We identified that trend in Towards a European Nationality. That largely remains. However, if the current proposals are adopted, the UK will diverge from a north-western European trend… system of nationality policy. That effectively means in France, in the UK at the moment, and in Germany, which used to be an outlier, granting citizenship to people who have been permanently resident for five to six years—six years now in the UK. If these proposals are adopted, that will become 11 years effectively…indeed if you are low-skilled, 16 years. That takes the UK, which really had a model of inclusive citizenship—I once wrote an article called “British Citizenship after Empire: A Defence” in Political Quarterly—out of the north-west European mainstream and makes it much more like a southern European country, such as Italy or Spain with 10 years. So, under the current proposals, the UK may well diverge.
Q55 Lord Dubs: Thank you and good morning to you. What are the wider demographic and geopolitical trends which have affected immigration to western countries in recent decades, and which external factors—war, demographic, economic or climate change—are most likely to shape immigration in the coming decades?
Professor Randall Hansen: If we are talking about forced migration flows—refugees—by far the most important factor since the 1970s has been war. If you look at the major sending countries, with the exception of Venezuela, where you have total economic collapse, war has been the driver of those flows. That will remain and that will be more important, in my view, than climate change, although it matters as well. A secondary factor is economics. What we have seen recently is a fairly sharp upsurge in relative numbers—overall, they are still relatively small—of West Africans making their way to Europe. In field work I did in West Africa, what became abundantly clear, and which is plausible as a hypothesis anyway, is that an absence of economic opportunities for the young commensurate with their educations is leading them to get on to the boats to Italy. So war is above all the main driver, but economic inequality and corruption will be a secondary driver.
Lord Dubs: Just a supplementary: would you say this is the same as the 1970s or have things changed?
Professor Randall Hansen: What was distinctive in the 1970s—I argued this in my last book—was that the oil shocks unleashed two things. They created a kind of structural dependence in the West on cheap migrant labour; I hope we come back to that. Also, they destabilised regimes, leading to revolution and the oil wars later on; those drove migration flows.
Oil and energy are less of a driver than they were—although they are very much part of the story of the Russian invasion of Ukraine—but war, whatever the cause, absolutely remains a driver. Also, religious fundamentalism, such as Islamism, is playing a much bigger role now than it did in the 1970s.
Q56 Baroness Bertin: Good morning. Can I bring you back to our Home Office? You wrote a great deal about the poor record it seems to have in predicting the results of migration policy. Supplementary to that, what does the Home Office actually think will happen with the proposed reforms? Do you think that they will actually happen?
Professor Randall Hansen: That is an excellent question; I said that in the context of the Windrush scandal, I think. At the moment, the motivations for these proposals are clearly political. The Home Office has been quite explicit that we have to prevent the worst, and the worst is Reform coming to power. So they have a political aim, which may or may not work.
The danger is that, if you create these interminable periods during which people have to wait to become permanent residents and to acquire citizenship, what you end up with is, effectively the German problem of the early 1990s: a large and growing population of people who are resident, who work, who live in the country and do not plan to go anywhere else, but who have very restricted access to citizenship. That is a problem you will have to deal with.
At the same time, these proposals are so restrictive that you will, I suspect, see a large increase in the informal population. Let us look at refugee policy: if the 30-month renewals do not come through, people will simply go underground. You then end up with the Italian problem.
So you have the German problem: a large resident population without citizenship - citizenship used to be one of the UK’s great strengths - and a large and growing informal population that will eventually have to regularise. You will create immigration and integration problems by trying to solve a political problem.
Q57 Lord Filkin: Succinctly—it is a big question—the implication of what you just said extremely clearly is that, if the policy objective is really to reduce the number of people who are coming into the country without legal rights, it is going to have very little effect. I hope that I am not putting it too crudely, but that is what I understood from your answer. Is that, in effect, true?
Professor Randall Hansen: Yes. Sorry—I am trying to be succinct; academics are not very good at it, but I am doing my best.
That is absolutely right, because you are using policy on settlement and citizenship to tackle immigration flows. We have seen that, actually, net immigration has fallen quite dramatically—to 204,000, according to the most recent figures. Even if we accept the fact, which is true, that much of this is an exodus of EU nationals, which is a one-off, the numbers are much lower. Why did they fall? Because the Conservatives changed their own policy, removing the right of large classes of dependents to come and, in particular, increasing the income threshold under the skilled work visa—the old tier 2—to around £40,000.
There is actually quite a positive story there: if you want to bring down numbers, a change in policy can make a difference. That is where the effort should lie if you want numbers to come down in the UK, not in residency policy and citizenship policy—particularly as the changes to exceptional leave to remain are retrospective; they hit people who came in with reasonable expectations of work for five years and citizenship after six but that has now been taken away.
Lord Filkin: That is very helpful and clear. So there may be political objectives but, if it is a policy objective, it is not going to be effective.
I now turn to my next question, which is highly related to the question of discussions about migrants and the politicisation of those discussions. Does policy drive rhetoric or does rhetoric drive policy? There is a tripos question, or something like that, for you.
Professor Randall Hansen: Yes—a very difficult one. The literature on this is very divided. Many people think that it is driven by the media; the Runnymede Trust put out a report to that effect. People think that, if we just change the narrative on migration and our language is more positive, we will change the rhetoric and depoliticise immigration.
I am suspicious of that. I think that the media is responsive. To give you an example, you do not see the Daily Mail and its ilk ranting against gay people in the way it did in the 1980s because those sort of articles do not get the clicks — well, there were not any clicks in the 1980s, but you know what I mean; they do not get the readership that they had then.
Attacking immigrants — and trans people are a separate issue — does get attention though. Why? Because immigration is incredibly salient in the UK, politically speaking. Who has politicised it? I would say that it has been chiefly politicians and nefarious political actors such as Tommy Robinson, if we think of the marches. When politicians and the state decide to politicise immigration, they can turn it into a major political issue. In the 1970s, there was an agreement, a bipartisan consensus to be quiet about race and immigration because it damaged both parties. That is now gone.
I have one final point; I will try to be quick. You can politicise something only when it is salient. Why is it salient? It is not merely because the numbers are high. You can have hundreds of thousands of migrants without it being a political issue if the public believe that the system is managed and under control. However, once you lose that perception—this is true of Germany, the United States, the UK and even Canada—support for immigration collapses, the issue becomes politicised and the Nigel Farages of the world can step in.
I hope that was a reasonably clear answer. Losing control of immigration numbers makes it salient, and politicians politicise it.
Lord Filkin: That was incredibly clear. I suppose that I am putting words in your mouth, in a sense—so challenge me if you want to do so—but have the migrants on the channel boats, who are trivial in policy terms but absolutely dynamite in political terms, led to the big shifts in the attitudes of politicians, the media and, perhaps, the public? Is that fair?
Professor Randall Hansen: That is absolutely fair; I agree entirely. Home Office documentation shows that more people come to the UK on a visa then apply for asylum than arrive on the boats. Those visa-then-asylum applications are not a political issue at all; it is about the boats, despite the high rate of recognition rate amongst those on the boats, i.e., most of them are in fact refugees. It is a universal truth that nothing panics a public more than people arriving on boats. Ten people arriving off the coast of British Columbia becomes a political issue when hundreds of thousands of people arriving legally does not. I do not know what it is about boats. Perhaps it is just the symbolic violation of sovereignty: “You have rules, but here we are, arriving on a boat”.
Lord Filkin: I thought you said that it is expressive of the state looking as though it is not in control.
Professor Randall Hansen: Absolutely.
Baroness Bertin: May I ask a brief follow-up question? It is a big question for you to be brief on, but you are the expert. How can we stop the boats? Is there something that could be done on the other side? The Prime Minister has spoken about trying to break up the gangs. Quickly, what are your thoughts on a solution?
Professor Randall Hansen: I was slightly afraid that you would ask me that question because it is a difficult one; were there an easy answer, we would have found it a long time ago.
Smashing the gangs was good politics and a nice way for the Prime Minister, to his credit, not to demonise immigrants—although he did a fairly good job of that in one of his later speeches. Breaking up the gangs and the smugglers will not solve the problem, though. All of the evidence shows that, once you break up one smuggling ring, it simply dissolves then reforms; in the case of traffickers, who are quite distinct from smugglers, it becomes more brutal, not less.
Let us look at the boats again. Except for the Albanians, about 71% of the people on the boats are getting refugee status in the UK so, unlike the people on the boats arriving in Italy, they are mostly refugees. The only reasonable solution on this is co-operation with France. I would love to see a world in which France and the United Kingdom—or the United Kingdom, France and the rest of the European Union—agreed to take those refugees, to split responsibility for them and to process them, and to do all that before they got on the boats. That would be my suggestion.
There is one qualification: it might not work because the moment word gets out that France and Britain are working to divide up these asylum seekers, take some to the UK and process the rest in France, more people will come. That is a hard fact. So one must then go to a further southern coast and work with the Italians on trying to secure Europe’s broader borders, not merely those of the United Kingdom. Withdrawing from the Dublin Convention, because the UK left the European Union, makes all of this much more difficult than it would have been.
The Chair: Before we move on, one of the most depressing things I have ever read was the argument by Professor Hein de Haas—you will know him well, I am sure—who argued, basically, that our task is to try to deal with three competing issues. One is to fill employment gaps. The second is to protect the rights, through international and national legislation, of immigrants who come to the UK. The third is to respect the wishes of existing citizens, whether or not they have been whipped up by nefarious political actors, as you described them. His argument is that you can do only two at any one time, so it is an impossible task. How depressed should we be about that? Or has he got it wrong?
Professor Randall Hansen: I agree with Hein on many things, but I think that he overstated the case there slightly, though it is a useful way of thinking about it. Again, I come back to this issue of management. If you can create the impression—it is an impression, because you never have complete control—that the migrants coming to a country are being managed, that there are rules, that those rules are being respected and that they are not enjoying advantages over British nationals, i.e., whatever you do, do not put them up in hotels, such an impression can help temper public opinion.
You can also link the issue of low-skill demand. The UK has a structural dependence on low-skilled labour; it has the largest low-wage sector in western Europe. Interestingly, Germany comes in at number two. You have people entering the asylum system, partly looking for work, and you have a demand for low-skill labour. So one can try to link those two things, although the numbers might overwhelm it. What multiple NGOs are recommending is opening channels to the labour market for the labour that is demanded, getting people out of the asylum queues and perhaps even doing the immigration processing in the countries of origin. I am not saying that all of this will definitively work, but these are things that one can try.
Q58 The Chair: That is very helpful indeed. You are well aware of the Government’s latest announcements, I am sure. Increasingly, we are using phrases such as “earned settlement” and “earned citizenship”. In a sense, that seems to be moving us away from our historical past, whereby certain people had absolute rights and exercised them; they did not have to earn them. Is that as big a change as I am implying, or not?
Professor Randall Hansen: It is and it is not. I will start with how it is not. Under the system as it was and as it is, if you have a work permit and you want to naturalise after five years of residence, you need to be working and earning income. So, in a sense, there has always been an element of earned citizenship on the work permit path. Family migration and refugees are obviously different.
What has changed is the introduction of a class system for citizenship. If you are making more than £50,000 or are a professor—they often make less than that—you have a privileged track to citizenship. If you are earning £35,000 or are a low-skilled worker, you do not. That element worries me because it is fragmenting citizenship, which is based on equality, and creating different rules for different categories of people based not on whether they obey the law but on how much money they earn.
The Chair: One of the parts of earned citizenship, in particular, is the number of hoops that you have to go through, not least the “Life in the UK” test. Do you have any comments on that?
Professor Randall Hansen: Yes. You will find that I am one of the few academic defenders of these tests. When I naturalised in the UK, they did not exist; you mailed off a form and your passport arrived in the post. That was nice from a consumer point of view, but I am not sure that it is the ideal model of citizenship. I should say that there was a citizenship ceremony, which I went to and which I feel made a difference for me personally.
Coming back to policy, it is perfectly reasonable to say to someone who is naturalising, “You should have a sense, particularly if you didn’t go through our educational system, of how life in the UK works, such as how the institutions operate and what you do”—this was one of the questions—"if you accidentally spill a pint of beer on someone”; that is useful information for a Friday night. There is nothing wrong with asking these sorts of questions. There are other, more unreasonable questions, but that element of the citizenship test is absolutely fine. An element of volunteering is also fine. The only thing I worry about is this class or income-based conception of citizenship, almost, because it comes a little too close to buying passports.
The Chair: In your book, you wrote about one area where there is an absence in terms of issues around integration. Do you want to amplify your thinking on that?
Professor Randall Hansen: On whether there is an integration problem in the UK, as it were?
The Chair: What you said in your book is that, in some countries, you have direct, face-to-face interviews in which questions are asked about how much you have sought to integrate in society in this country—or in the relevant country that asked them.
Professor Randall Hansen: Yes. It might be something I wrote some time ago, and some malicious librarian is making sure that it is still on the public record; I do not recall what I said.
The Chair: It is in your book Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain. I do not have the page number to help you refer to it.
Professor Randall Hansen: I believe you entirely. Let me let me address that point. I am not sure that an interview is the best way, but looking for indicators of integration as a precondition for citizenship is perfectly reasonable. Indeed, I will go one step further and say that, in the Netherlands, when questions about attitude to sexuality were asked, this was widely denounced in the professoriate. It struck me as perfectly reasonable to ask people—I think this was the question—“How would you react to two men holding hands?” It is perfectly reasonable to say to people, “You might not like this. You do not have to, but this is acceptable in the United Kingdom. If you want to live here and acquire citizenship, you need to respect that”. It seems perfectly fine to me.
That said, the most important indicator of integration is work. As I have said many times, immigration works where immigrants work. What one should be looking for is whether people are employed. Are they paying their taxes? Are they making a contribution and, of course, are they respecting the law? That is the most important thing; it is far more important than segregation or cultural integration, however we measure it.
The Chair: Thank you; that is enormously helpful. Before I hand over to Baroness Prashar, given that one of the things we are keen to do is learn from international examples and experiences, since we have got you from Canada at the moment, are there any differences in the procedures to achieve citizenship there from which we can learn and which it would be worth us thinking about?
Professor Randall Hansen: There are. Canada is far more liberal, at three years—but, frankly, too liberal. What you see in Canada is that people stay here long enough to get citizenship, to get a wealthy country passport, and then leave. In 2006, when there was a war in Lebanon, the Government found that there were 40,000 Canadians living in Lebanon whom they had to airlift out. Those people claimed they had connections to this country but, frankly, they did not—they were tenuous. Whatever citizenship policy is adopted, the country should look at other comparable immigration societies and stay within that band. I tend to think—
The Chair: I am sorry to interrupt but I did not quite understand “stay within that band”.
Professor Randall Hansen: They should not have a citizenship that is far more restrictive or far more liberal than comparable countries. I think the ideal spot is around five to six years. I would not recommend three because then you will attract the sort of person who wants your citizenship because it is a wealthy country citizenship, not because they want to be British, Canadian or German.
The Chair: Is the notion of wealthy country citizenship, which can then be used to travel the world and be able to do other things, an issue that we should be looking at?
Professor Randall Hansen: Yes, but no more or less than any other wealthy country. After Brexit the UK passport is worth a little bit internationally than it once was, but there is definitely a market—and here the UK passport is excellent—for a passport that, first, allows you to come back to the country if you run into trouble abroad and, secondly, is good for visa-free travel internationally, probably more the former than the latter. Again, the trick is just not to be out of line with your partners, such as France and Germany.
Q59 Baroness Prashar: Good morning, Professor Hansen. I have two brief questions. Are the public more welcoming than the Government’s policy suggests, and does the UK have an integration problem?
Professor Randall Hansen: I would love to say yes to the former but I am not sure the evidence supports it. In the UK, as in every country except Canada to a degree, a majority wants less immigration than it currently has. It is rather difficult to find any public that is enthusiastic about immigration. But the question matters. If you say to the British people, “Are immigration levels too high?”, particularly at the moment, you will get a yes. If you ask the British people, “Do you support a policy in which someone who is working, contributing and paying their taxes cannot have citizenship, and their children cannot have citizenship, for 15 years, and they have to live in fear of deportation for that time?”, then I suspect you get a very different answer. So, without being too sentimental, I think there is a basic decency in the British people that politicians can reach if they try to.
Is there an integration problem? Short answer: no. The UK has a problem of managing immigration because the previous Government allowed the numbers to get out of control. Again, look at work: male foreigners are in employment in higher numbers than UK males. So work is not the issue. For foreign women, the issue is lower levels of employment, which again is true in all European countries.
The other issue that is always cited is segregation. Residential segregation does not matter, unless it overlaps with other forms of exclusion. Toronto is a hopelessly segregated city. If you go to the suburbs in the west then you are basically in India, and if you go to the suburbs in the east then you are basically in China—including all the signs being in Mandarin in shopping malls—but everyone is middle class, they own their own houses and their children are doing well in school. Again, it only matters if you have an overlap of segregation and deprivation, and the most deprived parts of the United Kingdom are not where the migrants live. They look for work.
Q60 The Chair: We are in an awful position where time is running out for us but we would love to talk more. Just before we let you go, I cannot avoid asking you this: you have looked at all the announcements by our Government, and it would be helpful if you could run through your thinking on whether what our current Government seem to be proposing is going to be a solution to problems when it is not even very clear what they are.
Professor Randall Hansen: It is not. First, the framing is incorrect. The Prime Minister said that immigration has done incalculable damage to the United Kingdom but that is simply wrong. What has happened is immigration has got a little bit out of control. From my comments earlier, you can guess what I think has done terrible damage to the United Kingdom, and it is not immigration. Perhaps more importantly, this hammer will not solve the problem because it is not designed to bring down immigration flows; it is designed to solve a political problem, which is the rise of Reform.
If there is any hope in any analogy, it might be the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, about which I have written, and which I think was in many ways a moral abomination. When James Callaghan passed it—and the current Home Secretary is very much in the James Callaghan tradition—he cauterised the issue of opposition to immigration by stopping planeloads of Kenyan Asians arriving in the United Kingdom.
What might work is the adoption of this policy-, which is incredibly hard, to solve a political problem, and then it being applied liberally, which is what the UK did with the Kenyan Asians. Roy Jenkins quickly expanded the quotas and the Kenyan Asians arrived in the UK faster than anyone expected. If it has to be done, I would encourage any Home Secretary to use the discretion that allows earned settlement and earned citizenship more quickly and much more liberally. See off the far right with the policy if you have to, but apply it in a manner that is as generous to people who are working and contributing as is possible.
Q61 Baroness Buscombe: I am intrigued: I do not think I have heard you use the word “culture” once when talking about integration, for example. This may seem an off-the-wall question, but do you think the young people in their 20s and 30s today—more so the skilled workers—who are moving to different countries for work, and for all sorts of reasons, are as hung up on this issue of citizenship? Are we too hung up on the issue of citizenship? Should we be thinking, in a sense, to the future, whereby movement really does mean global movement without such powerful constraints?
Professor Randall Hansen: Those are interesting questions. On the issue of culture, you are right; I try to avoid it because it is murky, messy and easily misunderstood, but I will address it directly. Do I think that cultural integration matters? Do I think people who move to the UK should become more British? Absolutely. I said to the Germans for many years that: if you are constantly running yourself down and have no positive sense of inclusive German patriotism, how can you turn around and complain that the Turks do not become German? Whatever you say about France and the UK, there is certainly a model that people there would like to emulate. The world is full of Anglophiles and I am one, so there is something into which one can integrate, and that could be encouraged. That is everything from knowledge of the history and literature to knowing what to do in a queue—that is, respect it.
On your second question, in a sense the British have always been great emigrants, and the current movement is more a response to the stagnation of the British economy than it is to a radical rethinking of citizenship. Where you are absolutely right is that skilled migrants now have a right to move because every country is trying to attract them. There is a huge international movement of skilled labourers that almost recalls the pre-war period.
The lesson for the UK is that the last thing you want is a situation in which you are losing your skilled young and are a magnet for the low skilled, but I do not think you get there by attacking immigrants; you get there by doing something about your economy. Without saying it, the UK has a solution. Everyone is chasing growth at the moment, but the UK is the only country in the world that has an obvious solution that it seems desperate to avoid. I think you can guess what that is.
Baroness Buscombe: I think I also meant whether the young people that I am referring to care about citizenship. What do you think? I guess that was part of my question.
Professor Randall Hansen: Being 55, I have rather lost touch with what the young think but, speaking from my experience with my students, you are right: I have never heard of citizenship being a primary concern for the young, partly because they are mobile and partly because they live in this digital world that is inherently global, so there has been a huge shift. Even if the young are not worried about it, that does not mean it does not matter, but I take your point.
The Chair: I will just say, as someone who is slightly older than you, that my youth is even further away but I still feel young. We must come to an end. Professor Hansen, a huge thank you for the time that you have given to us and for getting up early to be with us. We really appreciate it. Your answers have been illuminating and, as ever, we could have gone on for very much longer than we have but time constraints at both ends make that impossible.
If there are further things that you think we could learn from, please feel free to contact us as soon as possible—you know how to do that—and we would love to hear more from you with any further thoughts on the issues that we are studying in our inquiry. With that, I thank you on behalf of the entire committee. We wish you a good day and a very happy Christmas and New Year as and when that comes.
