Love should not have a price tag
On the 4th of December Home Secretary James Cleverly announced an increase of £20k to the minimum income required for people to live in the UK with their foreign partner. Less than 30% of Brits earn the revised threshold of £38,700.
The Government have confirmed that those who are currently already in the UK on a spouse visa will not be immediately affected. However, when they come to renew their leave to remain, the new requirements will apply.
This heartless rule will not only make life harder for families who are currently separated by these requirements, it also means families already living in the UK who don’t meet the threshold will face an impossible choice between leaving the country or living apart. Some families, feeling they have no choice, may choose to simply let their status lapse, meaning that some will become undocumented. We expect more families to have to pay more in visa fees and wait longer until they can apply for permanent settlement in the UK, on what’s known as a 10-year route to settlement. We know from research carried out last year that this route to settlement leaves families at an elevated risk of poverty and homelessness.
Josephine Whitaker-Yilmaz, Praxis’ Policy and Public Affairs Manager, shared how her family are affected by these cruel changes with the Metro. Below is an extract of the article published on 6th December, you can read the full article here.
“I’d just got home from a family trip to meet Santa at our local farm park on Monday when a colleague messaged me to say that James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, was making an announcement in the House of Commons about measures to reduce net migration.
Needless to say, it was not the Christmas gift I was expecting that day.
As an employee at Praxis – a human rights charity working with migrants experiencing destitution and homelessness – I had been expecting some sort of update from the Government ever since record levels of net migration made headlines in November.
But this didn’t mute the shock I felt when I tuned in to hear Cleverly reveal that the amount a household needs to make if one partner is a foreigner was going up. Not by a couple of grand, nor in line with inflation, but by more than £20,000 (from £18,600 to £38,700).
When my Turkish husband, Medet, and I first met in Istanbul in 2010, it never crossed my mind that we might not have a choice about where to live.
Like many people with the luxury of never previously dealing with the UK’s immigration system, it simply didn’t occur to me then that – as a British citizen – I might not have the right to make a life together with my husband in the country where I was born and raised.
We settled in Istanbul after we got married in 2014 and had two children, but, a few years later – for a whole range of reasons – we began to think about moving to the UK.
The application for my husband’s first spouse visa in 2021 was eye-wateringly expensive, but we were lucky. We had the money to shell out the requisite £3,000 – made up of a £1,538 application fee and £1,560 to access the NHS for 2.5 years – and I had a job offer with a salary that met the minimum income threshold of £18,600 per year.
Over the last two years, we’ve slowly navigated all the adjustments that come with a big move. Our kids are enjoying school and nursery, and we were finally feeling settled in our new home in Leicester.
But Monday’s announcement has been a painful reminder that, because Medet and I dared to fall in love across borders, we can’t be sure of our future together here.
Unfortunately, when you marry someone not born in the UK and try to build a life with them here, you get used to the constant, low-level anxiety of not knowing what the Government will do next that might make your lives more difficult.
In my line of work, I know only too well how this Government uses immigration policy to casually devastate lives in the name of capturing headlines.
It hiked the NHS surcharge (a fee almost all newcomers have to pay for access to the NHS) by 66% so that it now costs more than £1,000 per year, and shot up fees that the Home Office charges for visas, after already increasing others by up to 35% in October. It’s clear to me that the Government has no shortage of ways to inflict pain on migrants and seemingly few qualms about doing so.
But this announcement brought home to me just how vulnerable my family and I are to having the rug ripped out from under our feet.”
What Praxis is doing in response:
We continue to work with allies to campaign and raise awareness of the detrimental impact of this policy for families across the U.K. We’ve published a joint briefing ‘Paying the price: the social and economic cost of increasing salary thresholds for family joiners’ with Greater Manchester Immigration Unit and the Institute of Public Policy and shared it with MPs. We’ve also been supporting people affected with sharing their story with media outlets.
What you can do today:
Sign the petition calling for a U-turn on the policy. Every signature counts.
Read stories of people affected and raise awareness with your friends and family.