Getting married in the UK as a non-EU national
Step 1: Applying for a marriage visitor visa
A different version of the following was first posted on http://spuddings.net.
I want to go to the UK in July. While there, I’m going to meet up with friends and family, and attend the graduation ceremony for my Masters degree, which I did at Cardiff University. I’m also going to submit papers to the registry office, get fitted for my wedding gown, and get married in the cathedral in the town my fiancé grew up in, surrounded by people we love and who love us.
We’d decided on the date sometime last July; we knew it was around graduation time, and wanted as many of our university friends to be there as possible. It was important to us, because Calum and I had met at university.
In fact, we were among the first people either of us had met at Cardiff University, first in a pub quiz, then a Meet & Mingle, then a pub crawl (I was simultaneously being introduced to pub culture). It didn’t take very long for us to become inseparable; a single unit to be found wandering through town and showing up at gatherings.
So having the friends who saw us come together like this is important to us. Being married in Calum’s hometown, in the cathedral that forms the anchor of the community, is important to us too, not least because we know it would mean a lot to his family.
All in all, this won’t take more than a month. It’s well within the restrictions of a UK tourist visa, which is three months for Singaporeans. In this time I will have no recourse to public funds. After our wedding Calum and I will not be settling in the UK; we know we can’t.
Yet this weekend I am still scratching my head over this 11-page form (and it’s accompanying eight-page guidance notes), asking me to list my income and finances in detail and with supporting documents. I need to declare my monthly expenses. I even need to explain who is going to pay for my food while in the UK. It seems like a huge effort to make absolutely sure that I would at no point in time at all ever even have to consider the possibility of applying for benefits (which I would not be eligible for anyway).
I also need to give them my parents’ names and nationalities, my spouse’s name and nationality, and list all the places I’ve travelled to in the last 10 years (I hope the box for this bit is really big). And of course there are the regular questions about whether I have committed any terrorist acts, war crimes or crimes against humanity.
This form is the marriage visitor visa, which apparently exists solely to allow non-EU nationals to get married in the UK, even if you could have entered, got married and got out of the country within the time limit of a regular tourist visa. You need this marriage visitor visa even if you’re not a ‘visa national’, i.e. people who need to apply for visas before they can enter the UK.
From what I’ve gathered from talking to an immigration lawyer and other people who have kept close tabs on the UK’s immigration policy, you need this visa even if you already have some other visa that allows you to be in the UK. Yesterday I was told of a Bangladeshi man who had got married while on his five-year visitor visa. The next time he tried to go to the UK, he was detained for hours at the border, told that he didn’t have the right visa when he got married, then put on a plane back to Bangladesh. The UKBA can be lovely, chatty folk at the immigration counters, until they aren’t. So you don’t really want to take any chances. The registry offices might not tell you about this visa — they certainly didn’t mention a thing to me when I went in to get the necessary forms — so it’s best to check for yourself as well.
Fortunately the application process for this visa looks more like a hassle rather than an impossibility (unlike the spousal visa with its outrageously high financial requirement). You have to pay £80 (S$168) for the application, but at least I can apply online from Singapore.
I suppose I should count my blessings: since Calum and I know we won’t be settling in the UK, this is hopefully our one-off encounter with UKBA. For many other couples, this is only the first step towards a bureaucratic nightmare of paperwork and financial thresholds, just so that they can be allowed to live with their family.
It’s all part of an effort to make it as troublesome and difficult as possible for British citizens to marry people outside of the European Economic Area (EEA). The Home Office is trying to find ways to prevent as many foreign spouses from settling in the UK as possible, so that they can keep immigration numbers low. Actually, they’re taking it even further, suggesting that British citizens can leave the country to settle in their spouses’ countries instead — if more British citizens leave, that helps net migration figures too! It’s really very clever, except for the bit where it rips families apart. The websites BritCits and Love Letters to the Home Office have no shortage of stories of couples and families separated by this policy.
I can understand that the British government is facing a tough challenge: having to reduce its net migration figure and keep the nationalist anti-immigration UKIP at bay. I understand that there are many voters who just want to see the numbers go down, which is why policies like these have been put in place. But a sound immigration policy is not as simple as pushing numbers down.
