The 20-Year Settlement Rule: How Governments Steal Human Time and Dignity!

 

Time as a Human Right – No state has the right to steal decades of someone’s life!

Thirty-eight years ago, my mom and I arrived in Switzerland with two suitcases full of hope and absolutely no idea that it would take 15 years before we were allowed to live anything close to a “normal” life. Fifteen years of temporary documents. Fifteen years of not knowing if we would be allowed to stay. Fifteen years of learning a country we weren’t even sure would ever fully accept us.

This week, the British government calmly announced plans that would make 20 years of waiting the new normal for many people who come to the UK. Twenty years before permanent settlement. In some cases, even longer. On paper it’s called “earned settlement”. In reality, it’s the theft of a lifetime!

Let me translate the official language into something honest.

Right now, most people on a visa can apply to settle after five years. The new plan doubles that to at least ten. If you’re wealthy, an entrepreneur, or a well-paid doctor, you might still qualify earlier. But if you’re a care worker, a cleaner, a delivery driver, or any of the low-paid workers who actually keep the country running? You’re looking at 15 to 25 years before you can finally breathe - especially if you ever dare to ask for help in the form of benefits.

For refugees it’s even darker. Their status is set to become temporary, constantly reviewable, and their path to permanent settlement stretched to around 20 years.

Twenty years of living in a country that refuses to say, “Yes, you are welcome, Yes you belong here.”

What makes all of this even more obscene is the context. The same “mighty countries” that sign off on wars, arms deals, sanctions and interventions that shatter other people’s homelands now stand at their borders pretending to be shocked when human beings try to escape the wreckage. They light the fire - then complain about the smoke.

And when the survivors finally arrive, traumatised and exhausted, the answer is not sanctuary but decades of probation. As if war was not enough punishment, they add twenty years of paperwork, fear, and half or non-existence on top.

We all know that TIME is the most precious thing we have. That’s why we use time as punishment: when someone goes to prison, the sentence is measured in years. We instinctively understand that taking time away from a human being is one of the most serious actions the state can take. Migration policy pretends to be softer, more administrative. It isn’t!!!

Telling someone they must live ten or twenty years in limbo - unable to plan, afraid to travel, terrified of one rejected form - is a quiet, bureaucratic form of the same thing. It is stealing life. Not in one dramatic moment, but in thousands of tiny cuts:

every anxious night, every job you can’t accept, every goodbye you don’t dare say because you fear you won’t be allowed back in.

We lived through 15 years of this inhumane limbo once already. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone - not even my enemies. No one deserves to be treated like this. Watching a government propose it as standard policy, with a straight face, feels like being told that our suffering wasn’t a mistake, but a template.

So I want to ask a simple question: How many years of a human life does a government believe it owns?

If the answer is “twenty and more”, then let’s be honest: this has nothing to do with control, integration, or fairness. It is about reminding certain people - refugees, migrants, the poor, the brown, the disposable - that their time on this earth does not fully belong to them.  Why not? 

Who are you to decide who gets to live a normal life in dignity?

What gives the privileged the right to steal time from anyone?

What gives you the audacity to punish war survivors for decades?

This is a slap in the face of humanity - nothing less.

And that, in my view, is not just bad policy. It is a quiet, polite, well-dressed human crime. And sooner or later, those who design such cruelty will pay a price - if not in this lifetime, then in the next. Karma keeps the receipts. It never forgets.