Marrying whomever you please has gotten a little too expensive for British citizens nowadays. New financial requirements for sponsoring a non-European spouse set the lowest threshold at £62,500 in savings, or a substantial annual income of £18,600. The new family’s income is judged solely based on the British spouse’s salary of the past 6 months, and self-employment is usually frowned upon. This means you must have almost £5000 more than minimum wage. And the numbers go steeply up come children.
Is Your Child In The Budget?
So if you have kids and cannot afford a spouse visa, what happens next?
The answer is, your foreign spouse is deported, and you practically become a single parent. And if an adult can hardly cope with the stress of a long-distance relationship with a loved one, imagine what it does to a child.
‘Thanks for coming to see me from America, mummy’ is how 7-year-old Vincent Bailey now greets his mother. His parents, Guy and Stacey Bailey, got married in 2006 in the UK. They used to live in Atlanta, but decided to come back to give their British-born child a British education. They are now forced to wait for the required six months of earnings to clear, so that mummy could come home. Guy, meanwhile, is furious: "When I met Stacey, she was an accounts controller and was earning six figures and has a degree – the implication that she’ll go on benefits and watch Jeremy Kyle is offensive as it is inaccurate."
The ‘happy family’ price tag itself is somewhat baffling – not only quite high, it has no consideration for different incomes and prices in various regions. "Assuming that "18,600" number is actually more than just a number pulled out of a hat, one could deduct with simple math that you could manage with an annual income just south of 12,000 pounds adjusted for cost of living in Derby"– says Brent Smith in an angry Facebook post. He is one of the many foreign husbands who were forced to leave Britain and their wives.
This threshold was protested in August, but with no result. And not just the direct victims of such harsh policy are opposed to it. Archbishop Vincent Nichols wrote in an article for the Guardian newspaper that anyone “who is truly concerned for the family as the building block of society, and is realistic about the mobility of British people today, must see both the folly of this policy and how it is an affront to the status of British citizenship.”
One British activist, Jessica Benchrifa, is married to Hicham from Marrakesh. They have a son, live in east London and both have a substantial enough income, but sympathize with less fortunate couples. “My right as a British-born citizen is to be with whomever I wish, however much I earn. I am lucky I meet the financial requirement. But if the rules change again, I could be without my husband and my son would be without his father."
"Meanwhile 4000 spouse visa applications are set to be refused on the basis that the UK spouse does not earn £18,600, with many more who are not applying because they know they stand no chance of getting their partner a visa. These are British citizens, born here, denied a right to a family life.”
Britain is indeed one of the hardest countries to ‘marry into’, due to current government policy on immigration in general. But such measures are on the verge of absurd. These restrictions are supposed to protect tax-paying, law abiding middle class citizens from benefit abusers, and yet these middle-class couples are the ones getting hurt.
