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Comment by charlieyu1 | Hacker News Reader

Once you are living in the country for a while, you can pretty much do anything and people don’t care about your resident status at all. For my daily lives in UK I only need my address and driving license. You pretty much have the feeling that you’ll be fine without bothering to do the paperwork, that’s how things work in the last 20-50 years.

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This isn't true. I knew someone that lived illegally in the UK for almost a decade.

They could only get terrible restaurant jobs that didn't report anything to the government and were visited by immigration multiple times.

Even after getting an immigration lawyer couldn't help with citizenship.

What finally worked was having a kid and marrying a citizen.

What do you mean? Any major employer in the UK will need more than that for you to work there.

Yes my friend moved from Sydney to London for work and he said it was a nightmare. He had his job in London lined up but he needed a UK bank account. He couldn’t get a bank account until he had a UK residence. His apartment lease needed his proof of employment.

He had to use his friend’s address for the bank account and then changed it.

I also moved from Sydney to Britain and just paid my rent from my Australian bank account until I got my British bank account. Your friend may not have thought to do this because he probably expected the ‘prison guard LARP’ attitude that Australian real estate agents have to also exist here in Britain.

Oh for sure, he was working for the UK government in some capacity so wanted to make sure everything was by the book.

When? Renting is far harder now than it was 20 years ago, even without right to rent checks. References, guarantors etc.

So only a few times in many years, I think most need an NI number only

That's the case now.

A decade ago a bank account, passport and bill with your home address was all that was needed to work legally.

But that’s exactly the point. A passport (assuming it’s a British passport) proves you have the right to work in the U.K. The commenter above is claiming all you need or ever needed is an address and a driving licence, and that’s nonsense.

I presented a foreign (EU) passport and opened a bank account in one of the biggest banks operating in the UK.

That was almost everything I needed, I didn't even have UK driving licence at the time.

That is what many people think before risking deportation for no other reason than not taking this seriously enough.

This is true until the wind changes. After Brexit quite a few long-stay Europeans without full paperwork were deported from the UK. Some had stayed for decades.

Meanwhile Sweden has started deporting British citizens who didn't do the paperwork.

If you travel out of a country, your odds of being allowed in without a visa, residency, or a native passport are basically zero.

This is so wrong in pretty much all developed nations.

Are you American? Have you been to a Home Depot on Saturday?

And seen the disproportionate use of military style force to run down naturalized citizens in the parking lot with tanks and tear gas?

Picking up illegal immigrants who are hanging out in a parking lot and, ostensibly, are very honest about being unemployed, ultimately to pay them under the table and not hire them because they lack paperwork, is supposed to be some kind of gotcha with regards to how much you can get away with without citizenship in the US?

that's... really abd

The ICE headlines in the USA makes a severe counterpoint

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