| As a non Briton and non-EUer, I have limited sympathy for this woman. "Hawkins said the Home Office had overlooked vital information in her submission – she was unable to supply an original of her Dutch passport because her father had recently died and she needed her passport to continue to travel to the Netherlands to support her mother." British immigration policies have spent the last decades assuming EU residents are to be treated as UK residents. The article admits this by saying, "It is important to realise that in applying for permanent residency I am not gaining a right, I am only getting a document stating a right I already have." So what she has done is to enter the process that is applied to all of the rest of us, while expecting it to recognize her special status. And no, "because I want to travel back home" is not a valid reason for withholding your passport from a residency application. Over my career as mostly a contractor, I have frequently worked for companies who took some pains to ensure I knew I wasn't a real person, because back in the 90s some contractors sued IBM to get real employee benefits. This woman needs to sit quietly and wait for UK immigration policies to catch up to the new situation, which will likely require legislative work to decide which classes of EU residents can transition immediately to UK residency. And that will happen, because there are thousands of people in the same situation. |