The problem with family immigration policy: real people’s real lives
What are the real world effects of Britain’s family immigration rules?
When I was writing my book Welcome to Britain, I tried to explain the impact of immigration laws and immigration policies on ordinary people’s lives. I used real examples from my own work as well as cases from the law reports. Many of those people were migrants: non-citizens from foreign countries. One of the main themes of the book — and of this Substack — is that how migrants are treated matters not just for “them” but also for “us”, the existing citizens.
On a practical level, this is because “they” actually are “us” once they have arrived. Migrants in many immigration categories will inevitably become long term members of British society and it is therefore important for all of us, if we want to live in a fair and equal society, not to penalise them and hold them back from integrating.
The idea that, once they are here, many people can ever be forcibly removed or persuaded to make a voluntary departure is a myth. The size of the ‘unauthorised’ (lacking legal status) population has been estimated at anything between 600,000 and 1.2 million. As this chart from Migration Observatory shows, forcing people out of the country has only ever happened at relatively small scale.
Governments can physically prevent entry and impose strict visa conditions to manage arrivals; but the reality is that once people are here, they are here to stay. Immigration and integration policies can either ignore this fact or accommodate it.
Involuntary separation
Kylie and Ryan had been married for nearly ten years and had three children together when I spoke to them for Welcome to Britain. Flynn was six, Foster was three and Donovan was 11 months old. Kylie lived with the children in Omagh in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, Ryan lived in Wisconsin in the United States.
She and Ryan lived together for nearly ten years together in the US, after meeting at a hostel in Ocean Beach, San Diego when Kylie was traveling. When they decided to move to the United Kingdom they had thought it would be straightforward for a genuine couple with children like them to live together. They were wrong.
They wanted to live together in the United Kingdom but they couldn’t because they could not meet the strict terms of the minimum income requirement for a spouse visa. They had no idea how they could live together as a family in future and their upcoming ten year wedding anniversary was to be spent apart. The children would grow up knowing their father mainly as a face on a video screen.
What were Kylie and Ryan supposed to do? Jobs earning £18,600 were hard to come by in rural Omagh, even if Kylie were somehow able to juggle full time work with being a single mother to three young boys. She would probably need to work in Belfast, which would be a four hour round commute. That assumes that she would be able to find a job paying sufficient wages even there. Moving to Belfast would be impractical, because who would look after the children if she moved away from the rest of her family?
Her hope had been that Ryan could come to the UK on a visit visa to look after the children, allowing her to go to work so that she could then sponsor a proper spouse visa for him. But Ryan was detained and turned around by immigration officials in Dublin (who were effectively enforcing British immigration rules under the common travel area arrangement) when he flew in for a ten day visit on his 33rd birthday.
And Kylie could not return with the children to the United States because Ryan, who was discharged from military boot camp after injuring his ankle, works in construction and does not earn enough to sponsor a Green Card for her. So they lived apart, the visa rules of both their countries meaning their children must grow up without one or other of their parents.
Anti-integration strategy
Another couple I spoke to were living together in the UK but they were dreading yet another visa extension application. They were on the dreaded ten year route to settlement, which imposes heavy financial, emotional and social costs on the families effected.
It is a very effective anti-integration strategy. Although why any government would adopt such an approach is a mystery.
Caroline and Carlos met in Ecuador in 2015. They married over there and when Caroline, who is British, fell pregnant she moved back to the UK to work, build up some savings and give birth. She thought her stay would be temporary and she would head back out to Ecuador afterwards. Carlos came from a well-off family, had studied in the UK and USA, has a degree and would easily be able to support the family.
It all started to fall apart after Thomas was born, though.
Suffering from what she now realises was post natal depression, she found she did not want to leave the UK. Carlos came on a visit visa for the birth and they decided to apply for him to stay. With Carlos not allowed to work, no money between them, facing huge application fees and lawyer costs, they ended up living off credit cards in a caravan in a friend’s garden. Their application was refused by the Home Office but their appeal was eventually allowed another year later, after a thirty minute hearing.
That was years ago. Since then, Caroline had co-founded a support and campaign group, managed to secure funding for it and was back on her feet. Carlos still isn’t settled yet, though, and they have to resubmit their lives to the state for re-approval every two and half years.
They were one of the lucky couples who managed to qualify, eventually, under the ‘exceptional circumstances’ discretion in the rules. But they did not feel lucky. They dreaded every contact with the Home Office and they were being financially, socially and emotionally penalised by the ongoing cost and uncertainty.
Kicking people when they are down
Where a couple are separated by these cruel rules, you might hope that at least they could visit one another. Carlos was very fortunate indeed to get his visit visa. Normally a UK visit visa application by the foreign partner to come to the UK is refused.
Officials assume that the partner will break the rules and refuse to leave at the end of the visit. This is what happened when Ryan tried to visit Kylie; he was interviewed by immigration officers and they refused him entry, detained him overnight and put him on a plane back to the United States the next morning.
Any face to face visits will need to be conducted abroad, not in the UK, but that is very difficult because the British citizen might only have limited holidays and needs to earn money in order to meet the income requirements.
Where a family does apply and is refused, it is typical for civil servants to write in such a family’s visa refusal letter that family life can be maintained by magical ‘modern means of communication’. It is a phrase familiar to all immigration lawyers and judges and it is universally considered to be a joke in very poor taste.
It may be that the civil servants who use the copy-and-pasted phrase in their refusals really believe what they say. Maybe they think that a toddler and father can meaningfully engage on Skype, tell each other about how their day has been and tenderly articulate their love for one another. More likely, it is a fig leaf for a refusal that everyone knows will split a family. It is a lie that officials use to insulate themselves from the real world impact of the rules they enforce. As one family law judge said, rather more realistically, ‘you can’t hug Skype.’
What did the government expect to happen?
Reforms to family immigration routes introduced by Theresa May in 2012 have exiled or separated thousands of British families where one member of the family has the lack of foresight to be a foreign national.
The key reform was a massive increase to the minimum income that a British citizen needs to earn in order to sponsor a foreign spouse. Previously, the level had been set at around £5,500 per year, not including highly variable accommodation costs. It was more than trebled to £18,600.
On top of that
the money has to be earned for a minimum period of six months before an application can be made;
the past or potential future earnings of the foreign partner no longer counted towards meeting the total unless he or she was already living and working in the UK;
the period before a spouse or partner can qualify for settlement was increased from two to five years;
the language requirements were toughened up;
the cost of visa applications more than doubled; and
devilishly complex new rules were introduced that virtually forced an applicant to use an expensive immigration lawyer.
£18,600 was a lot of money. At the time, the minimum wage worked out at about £12,600 per year. Inflation and increases to the minimum wage have eroded the harsh impact of the threshold for many, although it still beyond the reach of some families. If you are young or female or part time or a carer or live outside London and the south east or are from an ethnic minority then, on average, you will be on a lower income than others. If you are two or more of these things there is a compound effect.
The Home Office’s own advance prediction of couples affected was in the range of 108,000 to 142,000 by 2020. The Children’s Commissioner estimated in 2015 that there were, after only three years of the new system, already as many as 15,000 children growing up in ‘Skype families’ where one of the parents was ineligible to live in the UK and instead had to try to stay in touch by Skype or similar technology. In 2016, Migration Observatory found that around 40% of British citizens working full time or part time did not earn enough to be able to sponsor a foreign partner. In 2018 they concluded that ‘tens of thousands’ of families had been affected.
‘Affected’ must mean one of four things:
They are separated but still in a long distance relationship;
They are separated and the relationship has broken down;
They live together abroad;
They manage to live in the UK but on the ten year route.
It is hard to see how any of these are good outcomes as a matter of public policy. Two of the possibilities literally split up families. One forces them to live in another country. Another penalises them for living here, making their lives harder than they would otherwise be.
When new rules on family immigration were introduced in 2012, the government knew that tens of thousands of families would be affected in one of these four ways. But they went ahead anyway. If a family member could be prevented from coming to the UK then this was a contribution towards meeting the net migration target. If a British citizen was forced out of Britain, all the better, as this was an even greater contribution towards the net migration target.
Separated families and exiled British children are not some sort of accidental by-product of the policy, they are the policy. Breaking families or forcing them abroad is exactly what policy success looked like under the net migration target.
And yet, at the same time, the 2012 reforms made very little difference at all to overall net migration levels. The chart below shows family visas issued compared to work visas, for example. Some families were severely punished but, in terms of intended policy outcomes, it was all for nought.
When we think of the consequences to those affected and to their children, families, friends and communities, is this really desirable? This is why immigration policy really needs careful thought as to the real world impacts of changes to the rules.
In a future post I’ll be posing some questions that policymakers ought to be asking themselves and trying honestly to answer when reviewing or designing family immigration policy and rules. The post is still incomplete at the moment but the ten questions, adapted from an old article by Hiroshi Motomura, are currently:
Will the number of family-based immigrants be limited?
Which family relationships will be recognised?
In what circumstances will family separation be justified?
Will citizens be preferred over non-citizens?
What categories of non-citizens will be entitled to sponsor family members?
What will be the procedures for deciding eligibility?
Will informal controls such as delay, cost or complexity be used or tolerated?
Will family ties affect the application of exclusion or expulsion grounds?
What rights will family-based immigrants have?
How will family-based immigration affect the integration of immigrants into society?
The questions are heavily interrelated. I may have changed things around by the time I finish writing, but that's how things are shaping up at the moment. Expect the finished piece the week after next. Next week is Refugee Week and I’ll be publishing a detailed look at the current state of the UK asylum system for that.
As usual, a clear and succinct statement of this cruel policy. My family is suffering under just this burden. I met my SA partner in SA, where I am living. As a UK citizen, I have been wanting to return but lack the job offer or the huge savings required to sponsor my husband. y Our son is 12
I had no idea about any of this. Enlightening and heartbreaking in equal measure.