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[Warning: contains swearing]
For context: Today's news features a story about the UK's Home Office threatening to deport a generation of Commonwealth citizens who came to the UK decades ago and were never issued with what is now required paperwork. The UK government is now making out that it is all a terrible mistake, cannot possibly be their fault, rather than a direct result of the increasingly hostile immigration policies it has been introducing for the last eight years or so. I am particularly incensed by Theresa May's "apologies", because the rules being used for the deportation orders were implemented by her when she was Home Secretary. These policies are not just hostile toward illegal immigrants. They are hostile toward all immigrants.
I say this as someone with direct experience of those policies. I came to the UK in 2004 on a domestic partner visa which cost about £300. I became a citizen in 2013. Indefinite Leave to Remain, the immigration exam and the citizenship fee cost me £2200. But it was not just the financial cost of legal immigration that ballooned during those ten years. When I first arrived - in London, which admittedly gives one a warped perspective on how much of a melting pot the rest of the country is (top tip: most of it isn't) - I experienced a good deal of stress. Most of the stress was cultural. I learned to navigate social cues, try to make friends, figure out the bus routes, cook with different ingredients, speak in the correct vocabulary, smooth out my accent, apologise constantly, etc. The cultural stress diminished as time went on. However, there was an element of stress that got worse the longer I stayed, and that was a direct result of the increasingly bureacratic, rigid, and expensive visa renewal process.
It took four weeks to switch from the domestic partner visa to my first Tier 2 (employer-linked) visa. I swopped to an HSMP (the now-defunct Highly Skilled Migrant Programme) visa as soon as I could, and from there to a Tier 1 visa (now inaccessible unless you're a millionaire or City banker) because it gave the holder the flexibility to work for any employer.
By the time I applied for Indefinite Leave to Remain, the waiting time for a visa renewal or switch was a minimum of six months. Perhaps that doesn't sound too bad if you've never been through the process. Let me tell you why it is that bad.
You cannot apply for a visa renewal until you're within six months of the expiry date of your current visa. The chances are, therefore, that your visa will expire whilst you're waiting for the renewal. You are, magnanimously, allowed to continue working at your current job while you wait for your expired visa to be renewed, and you'd better pray you don't lose your job during that period because you can't apply for a new job until the renewal comes through. Even if you are not particularly at risk of losing your job, allow me to assure you, it is deeply fucking stressful to go to work every day knowing that you are entirely at the mercy of your employer in order to remain legally in the country.
The Home Office has your passport. For six months. Obviously you cannot leave the country during that period. You can't travel for work. (This was a pain in the butt for me more than once at my job). If, heaven forbid, one of your non-UK-based relatives has the audacity to become ill or die while you're waiting for your visa renewal, you cannot go to them. Or rather, you can, but you have to somehow get the Home Office to answer a plea to return your passport. When they do, this will invalidate your renewal application. You will have to start over. Now imagine a scenario in which you are five months into the six-month wait. Your visa is about to expire. You have to arrange and attend a funeral for one of your parents. Then you have to return to the UK, hope that you'll be allowed back in, return to work, and resubmit your 150-page visa renewal application. And wait another six months, five of which will be spent working on an expired visa. Oh, also, one of your parents has just died. That doesn't sound stressful at all, does it.
This is all deliberate. The visa application system has been crafted to be convoluted and unwelcoming. The Home Office has been under-resourced to deal with the volume of paperwork it requires immigrants to generate. If you do manage to navigate the bureaucracy, to fill out the right forms and afford the fees and complete the path to settlement or citizenship, the experience leaves you permanently scarred. The feeling that you are second-class, that because your citizenship was earned rather than inherited, it is somehow still precarious and worth less than a native-born person, will never leave you. Not even when your children are born UK citizens. I know because I live this daily.
For context: Today's news features a story about the UK's Home Office threatening to deport a generation of Commonwealth citizens who came to the UK decades ago and were never issued with what is now required paperwork. The UK government is now making out that it is all a terrible mistake, cannot possibly be their fault, rather than a direct result of the increasingly hostile immigration policies it has been introducing for the last eight years or so. I am particularly incensed by Theresa May's "apologies", because the rules being used for the deportation orders were implemented by her when she was Home Secretary. These policies are not just hostile toward illegal immigrants. They are hostile toward all immigrants.
I say this as someone with direct experience of those policies. I came to the UK in 2004 on a domestic partner visa which cost about £300. I became a citizen in 2013. Indefinite Leave to Remain, the immigration exam and the citizenship fee cost me £2200. But it was not just the financial cost of legal immigration that ballooned during those ten years. When I first arrived - in London, which admittedly gives one a warped perspective on how much of a melting pot the rest of the country is (top tip: most of it isn't) - I experienced a good deal of stress. Most of the stress was cultural. I learned to navigate social cues, try to make friends, figure out the bus routes, cook with different ingredients, speak in the correct vocabulary, smooth out my accent, apologise constantly, etc. The cultural stress diminished as time went on. However, there was an element of stress that got worse the longer I stayed, and that was a direct result of the increasingly bureacratic, rigid, and expensive visa renewal process.
It took four weeks to switch from the domestic partner visa to my first Tier 2 (employer-linked) visa. I swopped to an HSMP (the now-defunct Highly Skilled Migrant Programme) visa as soon as I could, and from there to a Tier 1 visa (now inaccessible unless you're a millionaire or City banker) because it gave the holder the flexibility to work for any employer.
By the time I applied for Indefinite Leave to Remain, the waiting time for a visa renewal or switch was a minimum of six months. Perhaps that doesn't sound too bad if you've never been through the process. Let me tell you why it is that bad.
You cannot apply for a visa renewal until you're within six months of the expiry date of your current visa. The chances are, therefore, that your visa will expire whilst you're waiting for the renewal. You are, magnanimously, allowed to continue working at your current job while you wait for your expired visa to be renewed, and you'd better pray you don't lose your job during that period because you can't apply for a new job until the renewal comes through. Even if you are not particularly at risk of losing your job, allow me to assure you, it is deeply fucking stressful to go to work every day knowing that you are entirely at the mercy of your employer in order to remain legally in the country.
The Home Office has your passport. For six months. Obviously you cannot leave the country during that period. You can't travel for work. (This was a pain in the butt for me more than once at my job). If, heaven forbid, one of your non-UK-based relatives has the audacity to become ill or die while you're waiting for your visa renewal, you cannot go to them. Or rather, you can, but you have to somehow get the Home Office to answer a plea to return your passport. When they do, this will invalidate your renewal application. You will have to start over. Now imagine a scenario in which you are five months into the six-month wait. Your visa is about to expire. You have to arrange and attend a funeral for one of your parents. Then you have to return to the UK, hope that you'll be allowed back in, return to work, and resubmit your 150-page visa renewal application. And wait another six months, five of which will be spent working on an expired visa. Oh, also, one of your parents has just died. That doesn't sound stressful at all, does it.
This is all deliberate. The visa application system has been crafted to be convoluted and unwelcoming. The Home Office has been under-resourced to deal with the volume of paperwork it requires immigrants to generate. If you do manage to navigate the bureaucracy, to fill out the right forms and afford the fees and complete the path to settlement or citizenship, the experience leaves you permanently scarred. The feeling that you are second-class, that because your citizenship was earned rather than inherited, it is somehow still precarious and worth less than a native-born person, will never leave you. Not even when your children are born UK citizens. I know because I live this daily.
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I am terrified by what it means for my inlaws, who arrived here from Germany before we were members of the EU, have lived here ever since, brought their children up here, and have indefinite leave to remain. Or thought they did. My mother in law has Alzheimers, and I'm scared someone will suddenly decide she can't even get what little treatment and support there is.
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I was engaged at the time and I had a job offer. I attended an interview at the consulate (now defunct) in Birmingham and in the course of a short pleasant chat mentioned that I was engaged and would be sponsoring my fiancee as a Canadian immigrant as soon as I could. The immigration chap filled out her paperwork on the spot and said he would keep it in his desk drawer until I was able to fax back my "proof of landing", which I did about a week later. On which, he issued her immigrant visa. After four years, without further fee or fuss I became a Canadian citizen.
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I remain wholly unconvinced that the current paperwork-focused system where there is hardly any means by which to speak to a human working in immigration on the telephone, let alone see one in person, is in any way more efficient than having well-trained immigration officers making decisions based on a person sitting in front of them having an interview.
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I'm watching in distant horror, as my own country tries to make our immigration system even worse. Can we NOT.
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Totally agree on the CAN WE NOT [make things worse].
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I'm sorry. It's inadequate, but .. this sucks.
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It's looking more and more clear that the Home Office has succumbed to the same brutal Little-Englanderism.
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(I am pleased that it does finally look as though the Windrush children will be OK - probably, with continued vigilance - and I think David Lammy has been brilliant and am proud he was my MP for many years. But the whole system is deliberately wrong.)
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I won't bore you with my experiences with them in pre GRA days. :o(
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I used to work in an employment law team and I remember an immigration lawyer coming into the kitchen really sad one day - he explained the Home Office had become somewhere he couldn't understand anymore and made doing his job impossible. He was working on a case of a severely disabled woman who was being told she HAD to go back to her home country (Canada) to renew her visa. When he explained she couldn't fly as she was now severely disabled, the home office said she could get on a boat. Omgwtf. I can't even with these people - it's like droids have taken over government honestly (May is definitely a droid although that's mean to droids).
I know this may sound trite but I honestly don't know what's going on with this country at the moment.
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The government has now promised citizenship for all the Windrush generation (Guardian article. I want them to be held to that promise. I also want this horrible debacle to mark the turning of the tide against the hostile environment toward immigrants. I know, moon on a stick. But it could happen.
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Yesterday two local mums were having an argument and one said "you work in Government. This Windrush stuff, it's true, isn't it?"
"Yes."
Other mum: But surely xxx isn't really happening?
Yes, it is.
But it can't be true that xxx...
Yes, that's true.
But that would be terrible, people being told xxxxxx
Yes. It's true though.
Repeat for the next ten minutes. It was like Red Dwarf: They're all deported, Dave...
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Yep, I'm constantly reminded (and depressed by) how little most Brits know about how difficult and expensive the immigration process actually is for non-EEA migrants. Pretty much every time I have a conversation about it. :/
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My family went through the refugee-to-resident-to-citizenship pipeline in the US in the first half of the 90s, and then my husband went through Visiting Scholar visa to green card process when we got married in 2000, and I was pleasantly surprised by both experiences -- there was a lot of paperwork, but the then-INS seemed to actually want to be helpful (which is never my default assumption with a government agency), they were competent and even efficient, and although the applications fees and everything weren't cheap, it was definitely on the order of hundreds of $, not thousands for the process. (Really, the only bad thing from the entire two experiences (among a total of 11 people) was that part of my husband's green card application was a requirement for a medical exam/TB test which had to be administered by a doctor from some kind of shortlist, and the people there were all off B's insurance (which, fine) and the one he picked turned out to be terrible, and the blood draw he did left B with a massive bruise over most of his arm (when he's got probably the "easiest" veins of everyone I know) -- but that's not directly the INS's fault, obviously.)
It makes me so sad to know that Homeland Security is definitely not like that anymore, hearing the stories of what people are dealing with today. And that the US is not alone in this degradation.
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I'm glad the immigrant experience used to be much better, and that people still have recent memories of this. It's important to remind everyone that this slide is not inevitable, and that it is also reversible.