[TERPELAZIUN] Immigration Minister (8 July)

[Mic’haglh Autófil, O.Be]

Estimat Túischac'h, I rise today with a Terpelaziun for the Immigration Minister, @Baron Alexandreu Davinescu .

Per the Government's numbers, since January 1st of this year, Talossa has received 135 applications for citizenship. Of those, nine have resulted in successful naturalizations, a success rate of 5.88%. Per Infotecă, the previous Government term saw 101 applications, 13 of which resulted in successful naturalizations, for a success rate of 12.87%.

Earlier in this term, the Minister has argued that an increasing number of applicants would naturally lead to an increasing number of new citizens, an argument that appears to be based on the assumption that the percentage of successful applications would remain constant. Given that the success rate has fallen under this Government to less than half of its previous figure, it is obvious that such an assumption was untrue. As the nation still has yet to break even on citizen count from when the current Government took office, can the Minister explain how the Government plans to correct from the unsustainable path they have led us down, with what little time in office remains to them?

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

I thank the MZ for the question, and I am happy to answer it. 

Let's first get some useful numbers, if we can.  The MZ is comparing the first six months of this term with nine months from the last.  I am sure that was an accident, so let's get out the information that we need.

The month after the election was January, and it's been six months since then.  We have had nine successful naturalizations, and that was with a pause in our promotional strategy to see if it was working.  During the previous term, the month after the election was April, and six months after that was September.  In this period, the Government in which the MZ served saw a total of three successful naturalizations.

So then, how have we been so successful that we've tripled the immigration rate?

First of all, we've actually implemented almost all of the recommendations of the bipartisan Royal Commission on Immigration.

• The TalossAssistant program has restarted, with six inaugural members who have dedicated themselves to the effort: King Txec, Françal I. Lux, Moinul Moin, Sir Lüc, Barclamïu da Miéletz, and myself.  We have had a lot of great success to start with, but we need to make sure that the efforts continue past immigration to include new citizenship.
• We have restarted the Pretz Pätriotic del Seneschal and made it into a physical award.  It looks like there will be three recipients for the inaugural awarding.  But while this might help spur some similar activity, we haven't seen a lot of fruits yet.
• The New Citizen's Guide has been updated and put onto the website, and then sent to our two newest citizens.  Previously, it was a PDF and not really very much used... we think this new version will be a lot more successful (and a lot easier to improve and update).  This also is recent, though, so it might not be the cause.
• His Majesty has made it clear he'd like to issue Royal Charters to anyone starting a new effort.

But as you can see, it doesn't seem like this explains our success.

Similarly, the threefold improvement is probably not a result of our changes to the immigration system:

• Obviously, it's still a good thing we closed the hole in our security.  We're no longer exposing the personal information of hundreds of people, including every citizen who'd immigrated in recent years, to anyone who gains access to any account with edit rights. 
• And obviously, it's a good thing we're able to look in detail at what's working and what isn't working.  A secure and easily-analyzed database of our immigration data is a very important tool. 

But neither of these things are likely to be very relevant.

No, we think it's most likely down to our promotional efforts.  In January and February, we posted on Reddit in interested communities (just a couple of posts, actually... not a lot!) and we posted a promotional video on social media.  Then we didn't do it for a couple of months.  And now again this past month we resumed.  And during that span when we didn't do any promotion?  Zero new immigrants!

This is great news, since it means we're not entirely trapped by secular forces or luck.  I mean, it's still going to be great if we get lucky... remember when the viral language Tiktok video that happened to get made that spiked a lot of interest last term near the end?  But we don't have to just cross our fingers and hope!  We can do things to make it better and get more interest!

So to answer the MZ, we plan to build on this success.  Frustratingly, I can't make new videos right at the moment, but that should hopefully be remedied.  And we can definitely still promote other ways, which we will do.