Premium News
AMERICANS APPLY IN RECORD NUMBERS FOR UK CITIZENSHIP AFTER TRUMP’S RE-ELECTION
Americans are applying for UK citizenship in record numbers, according to fresh Home Office data released in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election to the White House.
The government figures show more than 6,100 US citizens applied to call Britain home in 2024, more than double the number of applications submitted in 2004, which is as far back as public records show.
The last three months of 2024 were also a record of any quarter in the past 20 years, with 1,708 applications submitted between October and December, the period covering Trump’s 4 November re-election.
The release of the data comes amid a period of fractious relations between the Trump administration, Ukraine and Europe over the Ukraine war as the US dramatically on security and trade.
University of Glasgow professor Sergi Pardos-Prado, also a member of the Migration Advisory Committee consulting the government on key issues, said the political situation in the US “seems to be the most likely explanation for the record levels of applications in 2024.”
“We know that the situation of the country of origin is an important determinant of naturalisation decisions in the destination country.
“The perception of uncertainty of the political situation by American workers, and their perception of Trump’s rhetoric and election is the most likely explanation for this surge,” he said.
“Citizenship is a low-cost insurance for US workers for whatever the political situation in the US may bring.”
Madeleine Sumption, director of Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, said the data showed a longer-term uptick with “a slightly larger increase than usual in 2024”.
Some immigration lawyers say the increase was in part fuelled by Trump’s presidential campaign and victory last year, with Elena Hinchin, partner at law firm Farrer & Co, telling the Mail Online: ‘We’ve definitely seen more interest in citizenship from the US since the lead-up to the election campaign.”
However Ms Sumption said the longer-term increase was likely driven by the fact that there are more Americans in the UK who are eligible to naturalise after having lived in the country for several years.
“So we should also expect some increase in the number of citizenship applications regardless, and we do,” she said.
“The fact that the increase in citizenship applications is steeper in 2024 suggests that Americans may have become particularly keen to naturalise in 2024, although the data themselves do not tell us why, and whether this has anything to do with current US politics.”
She said the data did not reflect people “voting with their feet” but rather people who entered the UK on visas choosing to stay for longer.
“There is currently no evidence of an increase in US citizens getting visas to come to the UK, in these or other visa types,” she said.
“While it is too early to say what will happen next year, I wouldn’t necessarily expect a massive impact on the migration of Americans themselves. For people moving from safe countries, politics tends to be a third or fourth order factor, not a key reason for moving on its own.”
Earlier this year it was reported some Democrat voters in the United States were looking to leave the country for the UK since Donald Trump’s re-election.
Michelle Call, 53, from Littleborough, Rochdale – who has been living in the US since 1998, said in January she hoped to return home to the UK with her family due to concerns about the political climate under Mr Trump.
Mrs Call, who has a transgender child, said that following the Republican president’s “two sexes” policy, she felt the US was not a safe place for her family.
“We lived through a Trump presidency before, and we fought and we protested,” Mrs Call told the PA news agency from her home in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
