Discriminatory citizenship laws certainly are one reason why the Roberts brothers are facing deportation after spending their whole lives here, but another is something we don’t really pay enough attention to these days, i.e. the unfairness of double punishment. (Short thread.) https://twitter.com/Zubhaque/status/1281481837752311808

TL;DR: if you’re imprisoned for an offence in the UK, you’ll face additional & often far more serious sanctions if you’re not British – it’s likely you’ll be deported unless your sentence was less than 1 year. (EU law has different provisions, but obviously…) 2/9

In fact even if you get <1 yr you can still be deported, if you’re ‘a persistent offender’ (which could mean as little as offending twice & may include v low-level crime) or you caused ‘serious harm’ (for which the threshold is also not that high). 3/9

The circs in which you can resist deportation are limited & usually involve an *excessive* impact on children, as it’s regarded as basically OK to deprive kids of their parents: I wrote about some of that here 4/9 https://twitter.com/AlasdairMack66/status/1222816128973594624?s=20

These sanctions apply, on the face of it, whether you arrived in the UK yesterday or have lived here legally for decades – even, as the Roberts brothers’ case shows, if you were born here but don’t have British citizenship 5/9

There’s nothing inevitable about linking rights of residence to offending. Once, transportation or exile was seen as acceptable even for British people, but we abolished it >150 years ago. Keeping it for non-Brits is an entirely political choice 6/9
https://www.tolpuddlemartyrs.org.uk/story 

The policy has been rationalised by the courts as based on 3 things: preventing re-offending by those concerned, deterrence of others & maintaining public confidence in the immigration system (sometimes called expressing “society’s revulsion”) 7/9
https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2015-0126.html

Ofc there’s no evidence that deterrence works & the “public confidence” argument is circular; as to re-offending, well, to return to the Roberts case, if they present a risk why shd it be the people of Grenada or Dominica who are exposed to it? Why are they less important? 8/9

So yes, these young men wouldn’t be deported if citizenship law was different or if someone had sorted out their status years ago. But the deeper question is, even if they aren’t British, why should their convictions lead to a different, harsher outcome than if they were? 9/9