The new assault on loving an immigrant
No-one is talking about it, but 70% of Brits are about to be banned from falling in love with a foreigner.
So just to be absolutely clear, I take this shit personally. The income benchmark on spousal visas isn't some distant technical aberration. It is a direct attack. You sit my family together and you get a grab-bag of different cultures - English, Scottish, Pakistani, Guatemalan, Arabic. If the policy was in place decades ago, I might not exist. I certainly wouldn't have been raised in Britain. The policy is a war on families like my own.
The children of immigrants don't have to be pro-immigration. There's something uncomfortably restrictive about those attacks on figures like Suella Braverman and the others, a kind of left-wing entrapment that demands minorities share their values or be faced with an additional opprobrium beyond that applied to white people. But to be clear: many of us children of immigrants are pro-immigration and the reason for that is because we damn well know better.
We were raised by immigrants and around immigrants. We know them as people, not problems, not numbers on a spreadsheet that need to go in a different column for presentational purposes, not as a byword for crime or terrorism.
The spousal visa benchmark constitutes a war on mixed-race families. It is also an assault on mixture, on those of us who find diversity beautiful in its own right, on its own terms, who seek out difference rather than insulate ourselves against it. The policy displays a sneering disdain for this idea, or at best a total indifference to it. After all, why not just find a rosy cheeked English girl to marry? Why not look for a British husband instead? Everyone in their own box, uniform and cosy.
But this isn't ultimately just a personal issue, or even a political one. It is ideological. It is an affront to the most basic elements of liberalism. And it is a demonstration of why liberalism remains, despite all its critics on the left and the right, the single most radical and humane programme in human history. It is the only functional defence against the power of the state and society, a project whose failure leaves the vulnerable without defences.
The full extent of what they've done is now clear. We've gone through the early confusion, the cock-ups, the baffled state of ill-preparation, the inevitable retreat, and the cynical repackaging. Now we can see what the government plans to do and how many lives they intend to mutilate. This week's report by the Migration Observatory lays it out clearly and in detail.
In July 2012, the government introduced a minimum income for British citizens bringing their partner to the UK - £18,600 a year, or £22,400 if they had a kid, with an additional £2,400 for every extra child. It doesn't sound much. It isn't. But then, lots of people in this country live on not very much, particularly people working part-time in retail or hospitality. Still, as inflation dragged up wages, those working full time at minimum wage hit the benchmark, so it became less of a problem.
And yet even then, it was still a pretty big problem, because of the arbitrary cruelty that results from inserting bureaucracy into the most intimate areas of people's lives. Even when they hit the income threshold, the policy meant young families were often separated for months at a time. Countries like Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden allow sponsors to include assets as a source of income. The UK did not. The US allows the partner's foreign income to count towards the threshold and for them to enlist a joint sponsor. The UK did not. So a young couple with a baby who had met and fallen in love in Kenya, say, would only be able to move back to the UK if the British partner came back first, found a job at the appropriate salary level, worked for several months to show the requisite income, and then waited for the laborious visa application process to go through. That often went on for years, during which time they were separated from their partner and child.
As obscene as all that was, it’s like a Disney story compared to what's being done now. On December 4th, the government declared the threshold would be raised to £38,700 by Spring 2024. There was some grumbling online, including from a few vaguely prominent conservative figures who'd only just realised these rules existed. Then James Cleverly stumbled around a bit, evidently unaware of the implications of what he was doing, and the Home Office published a fact sheet saying the policy would be 'phased'.
What did that mean? The same thing, but slower. The threshold would rise to £29,000 in Spring, then increase to £34,500, and then hit £38,700 in early 2025.
It will make no difference at all to immigration numbers. Family visas constitute five per cent of all entry visas. Indeed, that's the irony in all this, a further mark of their grotesque incompetence: it won't even save them. The income benchmark change was quickly formulated to get the Tories out of trouble for immigration numbers, but it'll barely make a dent in them. The only concrete effect is the senseless disfigurement of people's lives.
Around half of UK employees earn less than the £29,000 threshold. As of this Spring, they will be unable to live with a foreign partner in their own country. Around 70% of UK employees earn less than the £38,7000 threshold. As of next year they'll also be unable to live with a foreign partner in their own country. These numbers are generous to the government. If we included people who do not have work, they're much higher.
Incidentally, this comprehensively refutes the government's rationale for the policy. The Home Office says the new threshold is designed to prevent families becoming a burden on the state through benefits. If that's true, it is conceding that 70% of the British population is currently unable to financially sustain itself. Is it really suggesting such a thing? No, of course not. It's worse than that. They simply have no fucking idea what they're talking about. They're passing rules they have not thought through, grounded in numbers which do not mean anything, on the basis of arguments which make no sense. It's all a backwards tumble into ever greater states of half-arsed desperation, without the merest flicker of a thought about the people whose lives they are affecting.
Many of those people will have to live somewhere else. The government in their own country will have given them a choice: pick between your nation and the person you love. Most will probably choose the latter. I hope so, anyway. No country which demands such a choice is entitled to present itself as the answer to it. But an unlucky few will find that it is actually impossible to live with the person they love anywhere on earth.
These are people with the misfortune of falling in love with someone who comes from a country which is as draconian as ours in its immigration rules. Denmark, for instance, has highly restrictive rules which bar sponsors from having claimed social security in the three years leading up to the application. Other countries have income and accommodation requirements, or high visa fees, or strict language and integration tests.
Those who fail to satisfy the requirements in both countries will simply be banned from love. We do not allow countries to make people stateless. But they can make love stateless. The hysteria over immigration and the total lack of critical assessment of the limits of the state means that they will have nowhere they may live together.
For immigrants and the people who love them, this is personal. It is an affront to who we are, how we live and what we admire. Politically, it is also evidence of an administration with no basic idea of what it is doing or why it is doing it. And that carries a moral component too - it shows the human cost of governments who do not plan and merely react to events. It demonstrates with terrible clarity the way it mangles up their lives in its broken gears.
But it is ideological too. This is an affront to liberalism, because liberalism is a commitment to the freedom of the individual and what is happening here is the complete negation of that concept. It is the insistence that the most intimate and meaningful choices in people’s lives should be dictated by the whims of the state.
There aren't a lot of defenders of liberalism at the moment. On the right, you'll hear plenty of talk about liberty if the debate is about smoking or sugar taxes, but much less if it's about the fundamental rights of people they don't like. The left sees liberalism as some kind of wishy-washy Blairite contraption, designed to undermine the march towards socialism. Centrists usually jettison liberal values in an attempt to placate the imaginary reactionary core of England. Liberals are the bad guys in right-wing think pieces and left-wing think pieces, from the lowest rags to the most elevated academic articles. I read a pro- and an anti- book on trans rights a while back, and both of them positioned liberalism as the enemy. Where it is mentioned positively, it's by know-nothing halfwits at free market institutes with the addition of the word 'classical' at the front. This typically means two things: First, that they're not liberals, and second that they do not know what liberalism is.
'The individual' that liberals worship can sound cold. An isolated unit, adrift from society, lonely and atomised. Policies like this remind us of what it truly is. It represents people. And it therefore reminds us of what liberalism itself demands: to care about people. Not their country, or their race, or their religion, or any of the other groups they invent to give themselves a sense of belonging. People themselves. It is not cold. It is embedded in the human heart. It is a commitment to each person, as the start and end of moral and political calculations. They matter regardless of which country they're from. They matter regardless of how much money they earn. They matter regardless of who they love.
This policy caused a tiny spark of outrage when it came out. Now the government has phased the introduction and all the noise has stopped. There is no controversy about it. And that is the result of a political culture which has become truly alienated from liberalism and the values it stands for. In any sane world, this would be the source of constant and unremitting outrage.
Who will pay the price for that? It won't be the journalists writing cover pieces about liberal elitism. It'll be the same people it always is: those who are a little different. Those who didn't settle for a life where they grew up, who didn't settle for a partner who happened to live next door to them, who lived in a way that was a little unusual, a little adventurous. They deserve protection. And only a liberal society can offer it.
A very powerful piece and a shocking reminder of what is being lost here. And of course they actually don’t care about any of us, whether immigrants or not
My best friend moved back to the UK after a decade in Czech Republic, returning with his newborn and girlfriend, the miserable, grinding process they are suffering through, and the financial punishment, is ludicrous, depressing and enraging. What a way to treat our own citizens, never mind the people who want to make a life here and contribute to our culture. FFS.