The whole Windrush affair was mostly caused by just ridiculous and cruel policy, not digitisation.
There was nothing requiring the home office to start investigating these people in the first place, or to have these extremely stringent requirements for proof they had been living in Britain before 1973. Who has these kind of papers? Most of us don't – other than my passport, I don't really have any documentary proof from before I was in my 20s or so.
The home office horrendously botched the Windrush issue - possibly maliciously - but a key factor is that Britain has historically had an unusually laissez-faire approach to immigration, residence and proof of identity. Windrush couldn't have happened in France or Germany, because they require people to register their residence and have an ID card or passport. It's really quite unusual to be able to move to a country, rent a house, get a job and use public services, all without identity documents or any real proof of your right to live in that country. We have only comparatively recently introduced a requirement to perform identity checks on prospective tenants or employees and it's still relatively straightforward to access most public services without any real proof of your identity.
There are obvious risks and downsides to identity cards and other kinds of national databases, but Windrush highlighted the downsides of not having them; Britain's decentralised and ad-hoc approach to identity allowed a lot of people to slip into a kind of legal limbo.
> Britain's decentralised and ad-hoc approach to identity allowed a lot of people to slip into a kind of legal limbo.
That can definitely be a problem, but it's also a problem with more strict identity systems, where certainly in my experience slipping in "legal limbo" can be just as easy if not easier, albeit under different circumstances. Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37239713 – there's a lot more detail to that by the way I won't bore you with, but eventually the easiest "solution" was to just leave the country.
While British-style systems are somewhat chaotic and messy and clearly imperfect, on balance I think they're profoundly better than strict registers. What was it again, "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero"? If you try to be air-tight about these sort of things you're going to end up excluding a lot of non-fraudulent people, and it's better to have a bit of fraud.
Another important factor is that a lot of the Windrush generation weren't immigrating so much as British citizens moving from one part of the country to another part of the country. I believe that was more or less the situation legally, but that's also how many felt as they were raised to be British; if you listen to people talk about their childhood in Jamaica and whatnot then they were raised and always thought of themselves as British (whether the white people in Britain also saw them as such is a different matter – rivers of blood etc.).
A bit of a pedantic point perhaps, but I do think it matters and is an important reason why people didn't have much documentation, because would you keep detailed documentation if you were moving from Glasgow to Bristol?
Other than the school diploma that wouldn't really prove anything for the Windrush people because it was about residency rather than nationality. The immigration laws changed in the early 1970s so you had to prove you were in Britain before the change (and, IIRC, in some cases provide evidence for every single year you were in Britain for it to be considered valid).
I could perhaps get some records from the school I attended, maybe? No idea if they still have records from decades ago. I certainly don't have anything from that lying around. Who still has records from their elementary school or high school? Some probably do, but I don't think it's uncommon for people to have nothing at all from that when they're in their 60s.
You can lose it, it can be stolen, burned, flooded - you name.
The thought of having to keep every one of these objects because some government bureaucrat ejaculated a thought prematurely to now require various forms of evidence you were in the country is ridiculous.
In the UK, they return your old passport with a corner clipped off if you make a paper renewal. You don't have to return your passport to renew it, because passports can be renewed online in most circumstances.
The US sends back the old passport with hole punched after renewal.
I would never get rid of my old passports, they are reminder of travels. Also, expired passport can be used as identity document for driver's license (but not Real ID) or passport. You be able to bootstrap identity from expired passport.
I do. I have most of my old passports (all of them since I was an adult). My wife also has all of hers (she might even have a childhood one).
You are supposed to send them back on replacement, but both countries with whom I maintain passports return them to you in an "unusable" state (mutilated).
For a person without passport, just citizenship - none of that would prove anything.
You need to prove continuous residence for 5 years, the only accepted form of evidence in utility bills, bank statements and council tax.
You need 1 document per 3 months of residence, so at the very least 15 documents, and they have to be from 3 different organisations, without gaps. Do you have that?
That's intense. And a lot of fucking companies won't give you any documents more than about 18 months old and even that's assuming you still have an account you can log in to.
I love digital records, but historically people have been wrecked by the destruction of physical records.