Price on Love: The Government’s Attack on British Families
The protection and sanctity of the family was a commonly-discussed plank in the Conservative party’s platform a decade ago. As then-Shadow Justice Secretary David Burrowes said in 2008, “Britain has one of the highest rates of family breakdown in Europe. 70% of offenders come from lone-parent families.” In the lead-up to the 2010 General Election, the party promised time and time again to keep the British family at the center of their policies.
Despite these claims, the government has not only abandoned policies that support family welfare but has deliberately implemented policies that force families apart. This has come about because there was another campaign promise that outweighed family rights and most other policies at the time: the commitment to reduce the number of immigrants in the United Kingdom. In 2010, voters said that immigration was the fourth-most important issue facing the country. With the appointment of Theresa May, the country had a home secretary who took the party’s “tens of thousands” pledge extremely seriously.
As a result of the policies brought in since 2010, the UK now ranks dead last of the 38 developed countries in regards to family reunification rights for immigrants. Nor is it only immigrants who face the repercussions of these policies; British citizens with non-EU family members are also subject to the strict rules. Indeed, the most impactful of the changes brought in by May — the salary threshold — is a barrier specific to British citizens.
As a result of current immigration policies, there are thousands of separated families. This number includes more than 15,000 British children who live in single-parent households solely as a result of one of their parents having been prevented from moving to the UK. These families have come to be known as Skype families because they are forced to maintain their relationships online. Indeed, the Home Office has told many couples in their rejection letters that modern technology makes it so that it is not necessary for families to be physically together in order to maintain their relationships.
The main barrier for these families is the aforementioned salary threshold. Introduced in 2012, this policy requires the British partner to earn more than £18,600 in order to have the right to bring their non-EU spouse to the country. If a child is involved the salary is then raised to £22,400, with each subsequent child increasing the salary by £2,400. The non-EU spouse’s salary is not included in this calculation, so even if the foreign partner is an engineer they will be prevented from coming to the UK if their British spouse is, say, a hotel housekeeper.
According to Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, 41% of British citizens do not earn enough to have the right to live with their non-EU spouse, while more than half cannot bring their children to the country (if those children do not hold British passports) — with women, younger people, and those outside of London being the most impacted.
It is difficult to know how many couples have been kept apart due to this salary requirement, but in 2012 the government itself estimated that upwards of 17,800 couples would be separated annually. Prior to this threshold, the government denied around 15% of marriage visas annually. As of 2015, that percentage had risen to 34%.
If this is not harsh enough, the initial proposal from May had been a minimum salary of £25,700.
The main justification for this policy is to ensure that immigrants are not a burden on the welfare state. However, printed on the visa of every single non-EU immigrant are the words “no recourse for public funds.” Immigrants are not a burden on the state, for they have no access to it. Indeed, recent non-EU immigrants pay more into the system than they take out, most notably with the recently doubled NHS surcharge that every non-EU immigrant must pay regardless of whether or not they already pay taxes. However, with an era of increased hostility towards immigrants coinciding with strict austerity measures it is of little wonder that the government was able to claim welfare protection in order to reduce rights for British families.
Brexit, meanwhile, will make the impacts of these policies felt more widely. Under European Union law, family rights are protected. Thus, EEA citizens who move to the UK with their non-EU spouses are exempt from the £18,600 threshold. The numbers vary by year, but approximately 30–35,000 non-EU spouses of EEA citizens arrive in the country annually via this route. As the British are — for now — EU citizens, many have taken advantage of this policy which has come to be known as the Surinder Singh route. If the British spouse lives in another EU member state for at least three months, they are then theoretically eligible under European law to move back to the UK with their family. However, as immigration lawyer Alex (who wished to keep her last name anonymous) said, “you will still need to battle them as a Surinder Singh migrant. For instance, the Home Office will require evidence that you have made the EU country the centre of your life and that you didn’t move there just to get around the immigration rules” — this despite a European Court of Justice ruling that allows EU citizens to do just that.
“Thanks to having exercised EU treaty rights abroad already, [the Surinder Singh route] would take precedence over my vastly inferior (non-existent) family rights as a British citizen,” British citizen Alex, who did not want to use his last name, said. He lives in Malta with his Cambodian wife, Bee; the pair moved abroad specifically because Alex “knew our rights were better here than in [the] UK.”
For couples who live outside of the EU and wish to back move to the UK there are, of course, different requirements. The British spouse is not typically allowed to bring their non-EU partner or even children (again, if those children do not have a British passport) right away, but must instead move back to the UK alone for several months in order to produce enough pay slips to satisfy the Home Office. If they are unable to find employment that meets the £18,600 threshold, they will be prevented from bringing their family to the country.
For families who do meet the salary threshold, there are still astronomical costs that greatly decrease their ability to thrive in the UK. For example, despite the fact that it costs £252 to process applications for Indefinite Leave to Remain, the Home Office currently charges applicants £2,389 (which is 23% higher than it was even a couple of years ago). If a family is unable to pay these application fees, the spouse must leave the country.
When the Coalition government formed, the cost for ILR was £840.
To add to the “price on love”, as many call it, immigrants must live in the UK continuously for at least five years before being eligible to apply for ILR. Prior to 2012, they had been eligible for ILR after two years of residence. Nor do most people qualify for ILR after only five years, as there are other requirements that must be met. Thus, until immigrants can attain permanent residency they must apply for an extension of their visa every two and a half years. This currently costs a spouse more than £2,100 — a 238% increase in the last five years. As American citizen Jen (who did not want to use her last name), who lives in London with her British husband John, said after she recently renewed her visa, “this is more than I earn in a month.” In addition to being married to a British citizen, Jen has lived, worked, and paid taxes in the UK for nearly a decade.
Finally, if family members must leave the country due to a rejection of their visa extension or by being priced out — not to mention any personal or professional reason that may require them to leave the UK for a period of time — any amount of time they have already spent in the country is thrown out the window. When they are able to return to the UK, the family must start this expensive and complicated process over again.
As senior reporter Amelia Hill wrote in The Guardian, “while its standards plummet, the Home Office continues to make profits of up to 800% on immigration applications from families, many of whom are eligible to live in the UK but are turned down on technicalities and forced to reapply — and pay again.” Hill’s comment on the Home Office’s incompetency is rooted in the fact that of all rejected applications, 75% of them are later overturned. Not only are those wrongly denied and threatened with deportation not reimbursed for their troubles but they must pay for further application (and solicitor) fees in order to be handed the correct decision.
These rejections, so often made out of simple errors and incompetencies, have very real consequences on the people affected. After the Home Office denied Albanian Fatjon Ballmi’s visa after falsely claiming his British partner Paige did not meet the £18,600 threshold, she was so distraught that she attempted suicide. After spending a day in hospital, “I ended up losing my job having taken too much time off to visit my fiancé, for my health, and also for letting my personal life affect my work.” Luckily, Ballmi was able to secure employment soon afterwards and sponsor her husband. While the couple are now able to live together, Paige still suffers from PTSD from this experience.
British citizen Tony Duffy and his American wife Juli were also denied a visa because the Home Office incorrectly stated that he did not meet the income threshold. “Both Tony and I have been suicidal and Tony has gone back to therapy in order to cope. I, on the other hand, haven’t found a doctor to treat me in the US and have been struggling to cope,” said Juli.
To make matters worse, when a visa is denied the foreign spouse is typically denied any further entry into the UK until they can secure a spousal visa. The Duffys, for example, have not seen one another for ten months because the government does not believe Juli will return to the US when her visitor visa expires. “We have been separated for both of our birthdays, Christmas, New Years, and our wedding anniversary,” she said.
Juli continued, “we have already spent over £7,000, soon to be over £10,000 with the fourth application. To say we don’t meet the financial requirements due to his self-employed status when we’ve clearly spent so much money fighting to be together is ridiculous.”
It is not only spousal rights which have been demolished since the Conservative Party took office. The changes to the adult dependent relative visa, which allows elderly parents to join their immigrant children in the UK, is considered by many lawyers to be among the cruelest of the policies May enacted during her tenure as home secretary. The form of this visa which existed prior to 2012 allowed approximately 2,000 parents of immigrants to come to the country each year so that they could be looked after by their children and spend their last years with their family. As Alex, the immigration lawyer who wished to keep her last name anonymous, said, “ Theresa May…decided that 2,000 grandmothers was 1,900 too many.”
Under the current rules only about 100 elderly parents are able to immigrate to the UK each year. The cost of the application is so high and the likelihood of acceptance so low that most lawyers typically advise their clients not to even try. In fact, most have never met a client who has successfully brought their elderly parents to the UK since the implementation of these stricter rules.
As Alex said, “the post-2012 adult dependent relative route is barbaric, inhumane and cruel. Can you imagine choosing between leaving your 85 year-old dad to die alone far away and giving up your entire life in the UK to go and care for them in a country you haven’t lived in for 20 years? Can you even imagine the feeling of working in a country for 20 years, contributing to it, integrating to the point that this is your home and these are your people, only for that country to return the favour by not allowing your elderly mum to live with you before she dies?”
The Home Office uses the same argument with British citizens. In the rejection letter the Duffys received, “they…stated that even though Tony is the main caretaker for his mother, he could easily look after her from the US.” In these rejections, the British spouse is often reminded by the Home Office that they have the option to move to their partner’s country — including to developing countries — if the couple truly want to be together.
Finally, despite widespread alarm and anger amongst the British public at the family separations at the American-Mexican border, the UK also detains and separates immigrant families. While not nearly on the same scale as across the Atlantic, there are still hundreds of children separated from their parents every year. The charity Bail for Immigration Detainees alone works on approximately 170 cases annually, including examples in which a parent was deported from the UK without their child.
British citizen John Jackson, who lives in the UK with his South Korean wife Haemi, said that despite having spent as much as £8,000 to date in fees, “we’ve been the ‘lucky’ ones’” because they are allowed to be together. When asked about the fact that they would have to pay thousands of pounds every two and a half years in order to continually renew her visa, Jackson responded, “we’ve had to accept it as a technical tax on our lives.”
Meanwhile British citizen Benjamin Chadwick, who lives in France with his Chinese wife, said that “it’s largely thanks to the hostile environment and related policies, and the accompanying xenophobic climate, that we would now definitely not consider [moving to the UK]…We’d honestly be more likely to go to China — a country where I speak about 5 words of the language and we’d have nightmarish working hours.”
Despite it all, the past three general elections (not to mention the Brexit campaign) have seen the main political parties in England and Wales compete with one another in order to gain the anti-immigrant vote. As Diane Abbott recently said, “a lot of the talk you hear about Englishness and the British [is] about how they’re the ‘real’ victims” of the government’s treatment of immigrants. May even used the revocation of family rights to discuss the successes of her policies when she proudly told Parliament in 2012 that she had achieved “falls of…15% in family visas.”
Echoing Abbott’s sentiments, Alex — the British citizen who moved to Malta in order to be with his Cambodian wife — wrote in a succinct article that “political points-scoring by pandering to the anti-immigration rhetoric is punishing a demographic that cannot fight against it. And it is cruel.” His words serve as a reminder that immigrants have no say in the electoral process that dictates — and destroys — their lives.
The world is smaller than ever before. It has never been easier to meet and fall in love with somebody who was born thousands of miles away. But the Home Office —acting on the campaign promise to bring net migration numbers to the tens of thousands — has ensured that people in the UK have the least legal right to a family of all 38 developed countries. However, public opinion has begun to change. Today, just 26% of British voters say that immigration has a negative impact on the UK, compared with 64% in 2011. Perhaps with doorstep grievances about immigration ebbing, the Conservatives can get back to their long-forgotten promises to focus on the success of British families. While Paige Ballmi and others will continue to suffer the long-term mental health consequences related to the current policies, hopefully the changing winds can bring with them new, more humane policies that will prevent further families from this experience.
To conclude with a 2010 quote from Iain Duncan Smith, “when government abandons policies that support families, society can pay a heavy price.”
