BBC News - Couples 'devastated' by migration visa rule changes
New rules will make it harder for British citizens to live in the UK with a foreign partner.
www.bbc.co.uk
Absolute fucking joke. People have made long-term life plans based on the current rules. I'm sure everyone would have accepted an increase in line with the minimum wage, but more than doubling the threshold with less than 6 months notice is just cruel. They just don't give a shit and neither do any of the racists that voted for them.
This is after years of the costs of the visa itself and NHS fees increasing well ahead of inflation and are expected to go up by another 15% this year.
The NHS fee was brought in in 2015 and was £200. In just eight years, this has increased by over 500% to £1035 a year. And the thing that pisses me off is that when you tell people about this one, even left wing people, they say "fair enough" because they've fallen for the propaganda that all foreigners are freeloading and the hospitals are full of foreigners coming here to have their baby for free or whatever. But what this ignores is that those same people will already be paying National Insurance if they're coming to the UK to work, so they're effectively being charged twice.
The reality is already that any British citizen looking to move their foreign spouse to the UK already has to go there by themselves for 6 months to prove that they earn a certain amount. That's before they even apply, and it takes 2 months to get a decision. So a minimum of 8 months living apart from your partner and kids. The only way to avoid this is by having £62,500 in savings (based on the current rules, so no doubt that will go up too).
The final issue is just how precarious these new rules make things. Bear in mind that if successful, you will have to reapply in 2.5 years, and meet all of the same requirements again. Under the old rules if you lost your job, I reckon you could be pretty confident of finding another one that paid £18,600. If I was working for a couple of years in a job that paid £40k, brought my wife over, and then lost my job just before the new application for her to stay (and bearing in mind that she could be earning £50k and it wouldn't even be taken into account), how confident could I be that I'd be able to find another job that paid a similar level to that?
The spousal visa requirements used to be about showing that it's a genuine relationship, because we lived in a country that recognised the rights of its citizens to live with their husband/wife and children in their home country. With this government, it has become tied up with this idea that anyone on a low income is a burden on society (low income now being defined as the bottom 75% of earners, btw). The idea that you, earning £30k a year, is actually a burden on society. Never mind that your hard work contributes to the profits of a company that makes a fortune. The only measure of your worth to society is how much your company is willing to pay you out of the profits you help make. God forbid you're a mother working part-time. The biggest burdens of them all.
And the absolute kicker in all of this? Someone on a spouse visa has no recourse to public funds. They have no right of housing benefit, child benefit, council tax reduction, disability living allowance, income-based jobseekers allowance, working tax credit, universal credit, etc, etc, etc. The only 'benefits' they can access are ones directly linked to the National Insurance they've paid, which I believe typically kick in after a minimum of 2 years of contributions. It's literally impossible for them to become a burden, because they're not allowed to be.
A lot of people might hate the Tory party, but it hasn't stopped them for falling for this narrative that people on low incomes are burdens on society. The idea that the person working in Tesco for minimum wage is a burden because they claim child/housing benefit, even though they're contributing to a company that paid or collected £5.3 billion in tax last year. About £15,000 for each employee they have. Or that the foreigner who is working and paying National Insurance is a threat to the NHS, even though they're already paying many times the amount, more even than private health insurance, than you ever will to use it.
