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Comment by nujabe | Hacker News Reader

This is ridiculous. What next, residents of Crimea be offered citizenship? Tibet?

If I were a UK citizen I'd be extremely upset that my country's leaders are offering foreigners citizenship en mass with such careless expedition.

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Crimea wasn't a British colony.

So I guess that makes residents of Kashmir eligible?

Kashmir was a princely state, not part of the Raj, even though India ran the post and telegraph and collected octroi at the borders. That being said, when Mangla dam was built a lot of Mirpuris migrated to Britain with work permits

Thanks for those fun facts.

Collecting taxes is generally considered a sign of sovereignty.

Octroi is a tax collected when crossing a border between jurisdictions, in this case when entering J & K and leaving British India. In this case India allowed octroi to be levied (my mistake above) by J & K on departing goods.

Yeah, i'm not going to go into what makes a country eligible, but there's a clear difference between Crimea that has nothing to do with Britain and a British colony as recent as 23 years ago that had an agreement to keep relatively british levels of freedom for a few more years yet

But they aren't offering citizenship. They're simply considering offering a route to citizenship - which would typically take 10 years.

High quality sources of immigrants are hard to come by - the UK is right to extend a hand - particularly considering their strong historical ties to the region.

If you were a UK citizen you might have better awareness of Hong Kong's history.

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