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Foreign spouses could be told to leave UK under plans to cut legal migration
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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UK Politics
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As someone who’s wife is currently on a spousal visa (who coincidentally secured her further leave to remain about a week ago), I can see both sides to this, as can she.
As a British citizen, I feel like I have some right to live with my wife in my own country. I’m clearly lucky in that I not only meet the income requirement but can afford the exorbitant visa costs.
On the other hand, it makes sense that I can afford to support my family without recourse to public money and quite frankly, I don’t know how well anyone can support themselves on £18,600, let alone anybody else as well in the part of the UK I live in.
I can understand the argument of this being a ‘tax on love’, but there would always be an alternative to living in the UK - the other country. If living here wasn’t viable for my family, it leaves only the options of living abroad or ending the relationship. Expecting to receive support for my choice from public money doesn’t seem right when there are already so many other areas that need the money for the people already here!
Sucks if the other country also makes it hard to stay.
If so, then that's an admission that every British citizen should have the opportunity to earn more - enough to live on.
I suppose it's not an unpopular opinion here on Lemmy, but probably is in a lot of the UK: IMHO spouse and children of a citizen should always be admitted into the country and treated without prejudice. If supporting someone in poverty is a drain on the nation, let it be same for spouse as for born citizen. If we should help people become productive workers: same for spouse as home born. If... etc
I know people exploit that with fake marriage and other ways, but, like many good things we do in the UK, the fact some exploit them doesn't make them a bad thing, or worse than the alternative.
It definitely is an admission that we have failed with regards to lower incomes and we desperately need a living wage to replace the insufficient minimum wage. This increase in the minimum income to support a spousal visa is an admission that the previous amount was completely unliveable in parts of today’s UK.
I don’t believe it happens often, although I don’t have the numbers, that the system is exploited with fake marriage. From my experience, there are quite a lot of parts to the process that I would imagine being difficult to lie about. Opening the system up to allow all spouses entry without prejudice would absolutely mean it was abused though and while I am all for people bringing their foreign partners to the UK, relying on public money is not right. We simply cannot afford to support the influx of people - we’re failing the people that are already here! How can we manage to support more people that don’t meet these income requirements?
See, that's where I see it the other way round. If we can't support our own citizens, we still don't kick them out; we do our best. (Sort of, anyway.) I think we should see spouses the same way: welcome them, consider them part of us, and then ask the questions about how can they live, just the same as we ask those questions for our own citizens.
Because the spouse is part of the family unit. Husband and wife are not completely independent persons. (Though we're moving more that way as a culture, but I strongly disagree.) So we're either welcoming or rejecting the family. It's a bit like saying to a daughter in law, "you're not really part of our family because you're black. ... But we'll let you in if you're absolutely certain never to be a burden on us." And to the son (in this example), "If you choose to marry that... person, you're on your own. Don't count on your friends and relations any more. You can make lots of money and do what you like, or you can leave her and come back to the fold."
Edit to add: if the example using ethnic prejudice seems unfair, you can read instead, "You're not really part of our family because you're French..."
I think the point remains that our current public finances are crippled (for whatever reason) to the point that we are failing British citizens that are already here. Adding more strain to that, be it large or small, is only going to make things harder. We can’t complain about not getting a doctors appointment quick enough or that we have people living below the poverty line if we are going to admit yet more people that will be a burden on the state.
Like I said, there is another option in these scenarios on almost every occasion. I lived with my wife abroad for a period of time and we made the choice to come to the UK together. People, like us, choose this because things are better here than the alternative in a majority of the situations. Why does the responsibility lay on Britain rather than the other nation?
It’s a lovely ideal to suggest that we can welcome all to the UK with open arms, offer them help, training, work and all kinds of support. Once we no longer have people living in relative squalor who have no other choice but to live in the UK, I will absolutely agree with you.
Where does the responsibility come from in the first place?
Despite the many cracks and weaknesses, I love how our country tries to take care of every member to a basic standard of living, regardless even of fault or blame. And for all its struggles, I'm very proud of the NHS.
But I think membership in the UK community is prior to this. We don't kick citizens out - not even dual nationals. "Bugger off to your other country and come back when you're rich." (Ok, we did that a bit in the past, but that's a different story.)
Nor do we restrict, by law, people bringing new members of our community through childbirth. We might have opinions, but not prohibitive laws.
When we chose, as a nation, to care for people from a national level - of which I'm proud! - we make that choice to do that for the whole nation. To say to a family, one of whose members is a citizen, "your family can't be part of this because you're poor," seems quite terrible to me.
It would be. But we're not talking about welcoming everyone, we're talking about welcoming half-British families. Husbands and wives, where one partner is British.
‘…come back when you’re rich’…? Requiring a household income of £38,500 a year would not be ‘rich’ by any measure. In the south east of England, that’s two people scraping by. It’s also not about, despite you being insistent on suggesting, that we shouldn’t want poor people living here. It’s about ensuring that anyone who comes to live in the UK from abroad can be supported by their spouse until they can find employment. It’s about ensuring that public funds are used for the UK and its own citizens. We don’t live under a one world government and we do not have the resources to care for all of humanity. There is a limit. Each nation needs to care for its citizens basic needs and can’t be expected to do more unless there is some sharing of resources. It just doesn’t add up.
Of course we don’t kick citizens out. I don’t know why you’re mentioning this - why would we? Kicking a citizen out of their home and making them stateless contravenes the universal declaration of human rights. This is a completely different topic than requiring an immigrant to be able to support themselves, or be supported by their sponsor.
The UK does care for all of its citizens ‘at a national level’. However, until a person becomes a citizen, they are not a member of that nation state. My wife, for example, has leave to remain in this country on the basis of our marriage but she is not a citizen and she is not entitled to any public funds. She is, in her home country, of which she is a citizen, but she only has the right to reside and work in this country for the duration of her visa. She may apply for indefinite leave to remain and then subsequently, citizenship, but until that point, the UK has no more responsibility towards her than it does to a Japanese person living in Uzbekistan or a North Korean living in the jungles of Central America.
Basically my point is, in my opinion spouses of citizens should be treated effectively as citizens, and married couples be considered together as a family unit.
I think it's a weakness of UK policy that in this situation we consider a married couple more as two independent individuals than as a family unit.
…but it’s not treating them as two individuals. It’s treating them as a family unit and insisting that the person immigrating to the UK can be supported by their spouse.
I see your point and in an ideal world, perhaps you’d be right. With a finite amount of resources, however, it’s simply not realistic.