Do ID cards help stop undocumented migrants from finding work?
Northeastern academics analyze whether the U.K. government is right in thinking a digital ID system could help tackle small boat crossings.
LONDON — One of the U.K.’s biggest political problems comes in a small size. The size of a small boat, in fact.
Successive governments have promised to put a stop to migrants crossing in dinghies from France and other northern European countries to Britain.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer pledged to “smash the gangs” behind the people smuggling network. However, more than 50,000 people have arrived via the English Channel since his Labour Party came to power in July 2024.
In a bid to answer his populist critics on the issue, Starmer has announced that every person in the U.K. will need a digital identification card in order to demonstrate their right to work. The government argues its mandatory status would make it harder for undocumented migrants to find employment via unofficial means and thereby remove a “pull factor” enticing foreign nationals to come to Britain.
Alexander Muir, a lecturer in digital business management at Northeastern University in London, knows well what it is like to employ transient and seasonal workers, having spent time working in the hotel and hospitality sectors.
He says that, if implemented in a secure way, a digital ID card plan has the potential to help employers feel even more confident about who they are taking on as staff, especially as, in the U.K., employers are legally required to ensure employees have a right to work in the country.
“Could it make for faster, more reliable verification? Yes, it could,” says Muir. “At the moment, you need to be manually checking IDs or passports, etc. It’s very unlikely, if you don’t have the technology or software, to know if it’s been forged or if things are expired.
“The plan is for this to be mandatory … it will be fairly important and will be a key HR check — it will become the main one.”
The concept announced by the government and planned to be in place by 2029 is that a new digital ID will be held on people’s cellphones in the form of an app, with the ID able to be added to the device’s “wallet” section. According to polling, the plan has a minus 14% approval rating, with 31% supporting and 45% opposed.
The proposed ID is set to include name, date of birth, information on nationality or residency status, along with a photograph. When used, government officials vowed that its data will be encrypted to help protect it against hackers or leaks. The digital ID will be mandatory as a means of proving the right to work.
For Muir, information about residency status could be useful to an employer so they have details about how many hours they can offer someone. Someone studying in the U.K. on an international student visa, for example, is only permitted to work between 10 to 20 hours a week during term time, depending on stipulations set by their college or school.
“I’m assuming from the digital ID card that you would be able to know whether or not the person is on a student visa or they have residency status,” he adds. “And then you’d be able to see who is eligible to work how many hours, so if you think about it, it could help with workforce planning to a certain extent.
“It could give you a little bit more protection as it takes the onus a little bit off the employer because you are verifying [an employee’s status] using what is a government-run scheme to a certain extent.”
Muir points out that there are industry drawbacks with the proposal as well as benefits, especially if digital ID readers need to be installed by HR departments and staff training is required to ensure managers are used to the new system for checking working rights.
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There are also wider societal issues with the digital ID card system, argues Andres Saenz de Sicilia, an assistant professor of philosophy on Northeastern’s London campus.
“I would be concerned about how [digital IDs] form part of a wider system of digital control and digital surveillance,” says Saenz de Sicilia, whose research interests are in social and political philosophy. “I think we should look at this proposal in the context of a wider erosion of civil liberties and rights to privacy.”
He points to developments in the U.K., such as the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act — dubbed the Snoopers’ Charter — that allowed security services to collect personal data online and also growing use of live facial recognition software by police, as evidence of an increasingly surveilled society.
“All of these things, when you start to link them all together,” continues Saenz de Sicilia, “they form, at least in principle, a kind of disturbingly omnipresent system of surveillance and intrusion. And that’s something which digital IDs would contribute to.”
There is also the question of whether digital IDs solve the problem they are being introduced to address — the number of migrants taking dangerous routes to come to Britain without visas.
The U.K. and Ireland are outliers in Europe in not issuing citizens with ID cards. Britain rejected the idea as recently as in the 2000s over civil liberty concerns. But close neighbors, including France, Italy, Germany and Spain, all currently require citizens to have physical ID cards. And from 2026, all 27 European Union countries, including Ireland, have agreed to offer digital identity wallets.
The U.S. is in the process of rolling out REAL ID, a federally compliant license that is required when boarding domestic flights without a passport. The measure was eventually introduced after being recommended as a way of boosting security after the 9/11 terror attacks.
Saenz de Sicilia says countries with ID systems still have “problems with irregular migration and undocumented workers” and, as a result, questions why 70 million people in the U.K. may now require ID cards to tackle the issue of tens of thousands entering the country unlawfully each year.
He says that “even if there was evidence to suggest it would help with that [tackling irregular migration], we are talking about very small numbers of people.”
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