The United Kingdom: changing statuses in a country of historical immigration

The legal context for those without immigration status has changed fundamentally in the United Kingdom in recent decades; in British legal terms, this is a very short time scale. The issue is perhaps a bigger one, though – until the later twentieth century, the British law of belonging was structured as befitted a country of immigration that had acquired an Empire. Its inclusive approach to belonging encompassed anyone who chose to make a life in the United Kingdom, and the formal nationality structure was also inclusive, encompassing anyone born in the territory. The principle that anyone ‘born within the dominion or allegiance’ of the monarch was British was affirmed in Calvin's Case in 1608 and confirmed by codification in the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914. Nationality by descent and naturalisation processes were gradually established. Anyone born within the British Empire, which at one point covered about 20 per cent of the world, was British and could come to and live in the United Kingdom. By the end of the Second World War in 1945, the number of British people who could come and live in the United Kingdom and exercise all civic rights there was about 600,000,000. After the Second World War, Britain began shed most of her colonies, and with them their people.