Priti Patel has unveiled a US-style digital visa system that she claimed would help the government to count numbers of people entering and leaving the UK accurately for the first time. The proposals to “digitise the border” are to be officially launched on Monday as part of Patel’s widely derided plans to change the UK’s asylum and immigration system. The digital system is being introduced after recent evidence suggesting that long-held estimates of migration data were significantly wrong. It was widely accepted that 3 million Europeans lived in the UK and would apply to the government’s EU settlement scheme. The Home Office hopes to make entry to the UK fully digital by the end of 2025.

Source: The Guardian May 23, 2021 06:00 UTC