Cute British husbands
May. 5th, 2014 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistAndrew has a tumblr friend who said "Do I have any cute male followers from the UK/Europe who want to get married so I can get dual US/European citizenship and you can get a green card. Just throwing it out there."
His reply has taken a fair bit of time and furious typing to compile, and I swear his blood pressure's higher than when he started.
It follows, with comments from me.
His reply has taken a fair bit of time and furious typing to compile, and I swear his blood pressure's higher than when he started.
It follows, with comments from me.
Sadly, even if you were serious, getting UK citizenship wouldn’t be that easy. You’d have to get married (in the US, because it’s much easier over there than here),This surprises me. I wonder why it would be. Of course, it's easier to marry a same-sex partner here. I'm not sure how/if that's recognized in the U.S.
then move over here, after proving that your cute husband had enough money to support you or that *you* were earning £18600 a year in the job you’d managed to arrange in the UK without a visa,
How in the hell are you supposed to have a job waiting for you BEFORE YOU GET A VISA? Not to mention during a recession.
waiting eight weeks and paying £601 for a spousal visa (or £1001 if you wanted the decision on the same day — you’re lucky enough to be able to do that, being in Chicago, one of the three cities where you can do that).
Yeah. I still remember wandering around Chicago in tears because I couldn't get enough cash out of an ATM, I had no credit cards, and they wouldn't accept debit cards or checks because they expect people to be closing their American bank accounts (I still have mine). At least if you were from Chicago, there'd probably be a branch of your bank you could go to to withdraw the money.
After two and a half years you’d then have to apply for another visa, with another £601 cost, and again providing the proof of income, as well as proof of residency. Two and a half years after that you can apply for indefinite leave to remain
This shocked me. This has changed a lot since I did it. My spouse visa lasted two years, and by the time it was up I had to have arranged my indefinite leave to remain. That's it. Two years, once visa paid for, one ILR application, coasting about £1250 altogether if I remember correctly (five hundred for the visa, seven-fifty for the ILR).
which requires another £1000 payment and a test which proves you know about life in the UK by asking you such questions as what year women were originally allowed to own property and when the Act of Union was.
When I was practicing for the test (learning facts out of a book I had to buy myself, practicing with old test questions from another book) everyone around me was fascinated by the process. A lot of them tried practice test questions. The native Brits among my co-workers and Andrew's family shook their heads, saying "who knows?" to all these things. I was once in a pub where questions from this test were being used as the quiz, so random and arcane do British people think them to be.
And while there were some questions on the test when I took it about things like how to claim benefits and the Human Rights Act, Teresa May has scrapped these in favor of stuff about what a great and Christian country Britain is.
The textbook on "Life in the UK" and the book of practice questions cost me a tenner or so each, no small sum of money to me at the time. The test itself was about forty quid when I took it; no doubt more now. You could re-take it as many times as you needed to, paying the forty quid each time. It was only available in English and on computers, so you'd better be good at English and reasonably proficient on a PC.
And while there were some questions on the test when I took it about things like how to claim benefits and the Human Rights Act, Teresa May has scrapped these in favor of stuff about what a great and Christian country Britain is.
The textbook on "Life in the UK" and the book of practice questions cost me a tenner or so each, no small sum of money to me at the time. The test itself was about forty quid when I took it; no doubt more now. You could re-take it as many times as you needed to, paying the forty quid each time. It was only available in English and on computers, so you'd better be good at English and reasonably proficient on a PC.
People call this a ‘citizenship test’, but it doesn’t make you a citizen, just lets you stay in the country. You would also at that time provide the British government with biometric information like your fingerprints and the distance between your eyes.
A year after that you can apply for citizenship, which has, yes, another £1000 cost, and which can be revoked by the Home Secretary at any time with no right of appeal.
My wife can’t vote because we don’t have the spare thousand pounds to get her voting rights. People don’t believe that she’s not allowed to vote, because “of course” she has citizenship — we’ve been married eight years and together for ten, after all.
A year after that you can apply for citizenship, which has, yes, another £1000 cost, and which can be revoked by the Home Secretary at any time with no right of appeal.
My wife can’t vote because we don’t have the spare thousand pounds to get her voting rights. People don’t believe that she’s not allowed to vote, because “of course” she has citizenship — we’ve been married eight years and together for ten, after all.
Especially the people who heard about the not-citizenship test I had to take, but others too, have expressed surprise that I was not already a citizen. They thought it happened automatically and immediately when I married a British person.
The most popular political party in the UK at the moment is campaigning against Britain’s “open-door policy” towards immigrants.
I always say that I had about as easy an immigration process as possible at the time I had to do it, and it still left me with something that feels a lot like PTSD sounds. The process is antagonistic, punitive, racist, expensive, disruptive, stressful, almost incapacitatingly awful...and it's meant to be that way. I don't believe any of those consequences are unintended.
I really believe I'm in a country whose government and politicians would rather I am not here, and plenty of its residents too. My job would otherwise have gone to a nice girl from Bradford. When I'm waiting at the GP's surgery, I'm making some British person wait longer than they'd otherwise have to. Neither I nor my British spouse were allowed any benefits we'd have otherwise been entitled to in the first two years I lived here, so he couldn't even go on the dole when the company he was working for went bankrupt. And I imagine that's true for the five years now.
I can't imagine living with five years of the unsettled insecurity that I had for my first two here. I barely survived them, and my mental health improved once I didn't have that sword of Damocles hanging over me. Which made me a better worker, a payer of more taxes. Putting that period off would probably mean that, eight years in, I'd still now be recovering.
The funny thing is, UKIP and their ilk exist because of the premise, so basic and axiomatic that it's never made explicit, that foreigners desperately want to come here. That Britain is so great they're flocking here in hordes. That, basically, everyone everywhere should want to live here. We need restrictive policies to keep them out.
There's an episode of Old Harry's Game where Satan, disgusted by a football hooligan, says that you have to worry any time you hear an English person describing their country as "the best in the world." England hasn't yet gotten over its idea of itself as an imperial, colonial power, and it shows in the arrogance of the assumption that everybody wants to be here.
The truth is that, while there are a lot of nice things about Britain -- the beer's good and the humor's dry; I love the BBC, and the NHS, for all their flaws -- I would strongly advise anyone against moving here if they had to go through this process. I couldn't logistically or emotionally get through it myself now (and I'm better than I was when I did it, so it's gotten that much worse since). How could I recommend all that stress and expense! And what do you get at the end of it?
The media giving all its time to people telling us that immigrants are ruining this country.
I really believe I'm in a country whose government and politicians would rather I am not here, and plenty of its residents too. My job would otherwise have gone to a nice girl from Bradford. When I'm waiting at the GP's surgery, I'm making some British person wait longer than they'd otherwise have to. Neither I nor my British spouse were allowed any benefits we'd have otherwise been entitled to in the first two years I lived here, so he couldn't even go on the dole when the company he was working for went bankrupt. And I imagine that's true for the five years now.
I can't imagine living with five years of the unsettled insecurity that I had for my first two here. I barely survived them, and my mental health improved once I didn't have that sword of Damocles hanging over me. Which made me a better worker, a payer of more taxes. Putting that period off would probably mean that, eight years in, I'd still now be recovering.
The funny thing is, UKIP and their ilk exist because of the premise, so basic and axiomatic that it's never made explicit, that foreigners desperately want to come here. That Britain is so great they're flocking here in hordes. That, basically, everyone everywhere should want to live here. We need restrictive policies to keep them out.
There's an episode of Old Harry's Game where Satan, disgusted by a football hooligan, says that you have to worry any time you hear an English person describing their country as "the best in the world." England hasn't yet gotten over its idea of itself as an imperial, colonial power, and it shows in the arrogance of the assumption that everybody wants to be here.
The truth is that, while there are a lot of nice things about Britain -- the beer's good and the humor's dry; I love the BBC, and the NHS, for all their flaws -- I would strongly advise anyone against moving here if they had to go through this process. I couldn't logistically or emotionally get through it myself now (and I'm better than I was when I did it, so it's gotten that much worse since). How could I recommend all that stress and expense! And what do you get at the end of it?
The media giving all its time to people telling us that immigrants are ruining this country.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-05 09:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-05 09:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 12:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 08:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 09:00 am (UTC)I gave them an answer that was both the literal truth and answered the question they really cared about with the truthful answer. It did also mislead them, of course, but I could have defended it were I asked to...
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 09:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 01:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 09:15 am (UTC)I would be more appalled by this, except that because of my own visa swaps, it also took me nine years to qualify for ILR since any time you spend here on one type of visa counts for nothing once you change to a different one.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 09:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 09:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 09:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 12:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 05:16 pm (UTC)To be honest, if someone really, *really* wanted to move to the UK, I'd advise them to move to an EU country with a saner immigration policy after investigating them all, live there long enough to become a Belgian (or whatever) citizen, and then -- and only then -- think about moving to the UK. It would undoubtedly be a lot simpler.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 05:54 pm (UTC)Nobody knows this (unless they or someone close to them have been through the process). This is why I feel the need to talk about it from time to time, even though it is at a pretty high personal cost to me, in reminding me of traumatic memories and often eliciting xenophobic or racist reactions if it's to an audience any wider than just-my-friends. It really surprises people, because the "open-door" "we're full up" "swarming with illegals" narratives are so pervasive in the media and politics, and you never the facts about how many immigrants there are or what the process of immigration is like.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 08:10 am (UTC)You have to prove you won't need recourse to the US welfare system for x years (I want to say 2). In my case this involved my prospective parents in law giving details of their income and legally guaranteeing to pay if necessary. It was illegal for me to work in the US until I'd actually moved there, got married and converted my K1 visa to a conditional green card (conditional on remaining married; if my ex had kicked me to the curb within two years of marrying, I'd have had to leave the country immediately).
Homeland Security interview you and your spouse when you de-conditionalise the green card to verify you've actually been married. If they think something's hinky they can and will separate you and grill both people on the other's taste in food, brand of toothpaste and whatever else you might be expected to know having lived with someone for a long period of time. Get it wrong and convince them it's a sham marriage, and it's deportation time for the cute Brit and jail time for the American.
I forget how much the fiancé visa and conversion to green card cost, but at least $600 (and several months waiting in the UK for the visa). This was over a decade ago now, mind you, I imagine it's gone up.
You can only get a fiancé visa for a legal marriage under US law (common-law marriage, civil unions etc don't count). A quick google suggests that gay marriages now count as far as US immigration is concerned - but only since the middle of last year!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_immigration_policy_in_the_United_States
It amazes me that the same sort of people who agitate to make it so hard for people to immigrate legally are also shocked and surprised that so many people immigrate illegally. :/
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 11:07 am (UTC)I cringe to think how awful Andrew would be at this, even now. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 11:30 am (UTC)I think I'd have to hope that they'd expect anyone trying to lie would put more effort into making their lies convincing. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 11:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 08:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 08:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 08:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 08:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 08:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 08:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 09:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 10:56 am (UTC)*including getting my CP visa in just in time to qualify for the two-year period instead of five. I can't even imagine having to wait another 3 years and pay even more protection money for the privilege of staying with my partner. Oof.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 10:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 11:09 am (UTC)And five years really does seem nothing but punitive. I can't imagine any justification for that. Two years is bad enough (and, of course, expensive enough).
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 11:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-07 12:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-07 02:04 pm (UTC)