I don t know, I suppose there are two ways to look at this (and all that European austerity stuff in

I blogged the other day about the new restrictions the UK is planning to impose on would-be migrants, making it impossible for all but the super-rich to acquire permanent residency and forcing others into Gastarbeiter status (to be kicked out after five years). It gets worse. The government s Migration Advisory Committee has now recommended that anyone seeking to sponsor hotels in norwich ct a foreign (non-EU) spouse to enter the UK has to be in the top half of the income distribution (I simplify slightly). Read Matt Cavanagh on the topic here and the Free Movement blog here . So think through the implications. A British student goes to grad school in the US (for example), meets an American and marries: such a person would, under these proposals, be unable to return to the UK with their partner to live as a couple. hotels in norwich ct If two countries were to adopt such rules and their nationals met and married, they would have the right to live as a couple in neither country. Iniquitous and unjust.
This policy directly affects me. I am a British citizen, in a long-term relationship with a Canadian citizen. We met in a third country, where we were both working. hotels in norwich ct Our jobs both ESL teachers place us comfortably in the bottom 50% of the income distribution (in fact, my Chinese wages probably place me in the bottom 10% of the income distribution, although above the current bottom limit according to the Guardian article).
The US already has such rules. They re much less restrictive you need to prove household income above 125% of the poverty line (which is frighteningly low, for better or worse) and you can compensate lack of income through proven assets and you can have a third party vouch for you, but there are certainly scenarios in which this makes things hard.
And that s precisely hotels in norwich ct the article that various people in the UK government have explicitly pledged to repeal or revise out of existence hotels in norwich ct as it s interfering with their wish to throw people out of the country. Cue absurd hotels in norwich ct myths about pet cats.
Fire and water: two things you never refuse another human being, a stranger at your door. When you re not strangers anymore: ius commercii and ius conubii, legally protected relationships in trading goods and of marriage. Pretty basic stuff. The barbarians are at the gates, indeed.
hotels in norwich ct The somewhat similar US rule mentioned above by Sebastian (2), does have some real bite, though a lot less than this proposed one seems likely to have. I don t have immediate access to up-to-date hotels in norwich ct or clearly broken out figures (it s hard to get completely specific hotels in norwich ct figures), but, for example, in 1999, about 39,000 immigrant visa applications were turned down on the grounds that the applicant hotels in norwich ct hadn t shown that he or she was not likely to become a public charge . That s a big number, and bad for the people involved, hotels in norwich ct but a very small percentage of the total immigrant visa population.
When I applied for a visa for my wife, and had to show that I could support a household of our size (2) at 125% of the poverty level, I was able to do that on my graduate student stipend- I think $17,000 at the time (2001). This was just barely enough, and I suspect the amount is a bit higher now, but it s still much below that being recommended in the proposals above. (If my rough recollection of exchange rates is right, the lower end proposal that might pass is close to $30,000, so significantly more than in the US. (In the US immigrants are not eligible to use most public benefits for at least 5 years, though, too.) I m not convinced that all such rules are necessarily unjust, though there is lots of room to go wrong, and this proposal seems pretty clearly to be in the wrong spectrum, especially if the high-end proposals are followed. At the risk of engaging in self-promotion, I wrote a paper on just this subject, hotels in norwich ct published in Law and Philosophy, and available free here:
It isn t watertight because even though you can t get British citizenship by marrying into a poor family you can still get it by being born into one. How long till compulsory sterilisation is back on the agenda? At a stroke it would also solve the problem of benefit claimants having more than their allotted number of children, which as we all know is the cause of all the treasury s woes
2) That said, and mostly out of curiosity what s the score on British passport-holders bringing their spouses to other EU countries? AIUI, every EU country has to apply the same immigration rules to other EU nationals hotels in norwich ct as to home citizens, so the hypothetical Anglo-American hotels in norwich ct couple above could at least go and live in Ireland. But I may UI wrongly.
In real life, pretty much any Anglo-American / Anglo-Australian / etc couple are going to be capable of pulling gbp12.5k apiece, even if it means having to jump stupid hoops like dropping out of grad school and working long hours until the visa s granted. The same will be true much less frequently where one partner is from the developing world
It would be nice if this extreme hotels in norwich ct proposal in the UK were to draw attention to what I suspect is a widespread problem. It s certainly a problem hotels in norwich ct for US citizens who want to marry a non-US citizen and live in this country. (For instance, for my son and his Canadian girlfriend.) We re big on international treaties and such for commerce and finance. Why not for marriage?
Which makes it an absurdity. Suppose a female British expat in the US, married to a US citizen, hotels in norwich ct wishes for the family to return to the UK to raise their British citizen child? The American spouse may be capable of earning more than enough to support the family, but the mother s income, hotels in norwich ct diminished by maternity leave, is the determinant?
This is probably a failing of my analysis of Tories I should start assuming that they re solely a party based on lower-middle-class warfare, and that they have mostly given up hating people hotels in norwich ct on the basis of ethnicity.
While objectively this makes NuLab better, one can see why the people who re subject to the narrowing seek to burn Mr Brown in effigy, and are happy when the Tories throw the poor out of their houses to starve in the streets.
Yes Linca. One particularly bad Danish policy has an age threshold for sponsorship of 25, meaning that many young Danes with non-EU spouses have to live in places like Malmo. The British copied the Danish policy, with a threshold of 21, and this has just been found to be in contravention of Article 8 of the ECHR by the UK Supreme court. It follows that the Danish policy should also be in contravention, though it hasn t been tested yet. Generally the Danes and the British seem to compete (and copy) to have the most offensive policies.
The Tories have already brought in a minimum level of English reqiuired for Spouse visa. The level is very low, you need to pass a beginner level exam from the UKBA approved list of tests. The main effect is to stop people from the sub-continent coming over as they tend to be poor and can t access English lessons or the approved tests. The government justified hotels in norwich ct the policy by saying it would improve integration, at the same time they have cut funding for ESOL courses for adults. Theresa May has now become my most hated UK politician, I just hope this UK Border Force stuff backfires on her.
I mean the policy on professionals seems designed to piss off just about everyone, other than a few senile Tory backbenchers. Its not often you can unite the civil liberties lobby with big business, but she s managed it.
Thanks for sharing Chris. I don t know what to say, except that I m feeling increasingly surrounded by dark, dark clouds. What worries me most is that we may say that the Barbarians rule us, yet many of us voted for them, isn t it? (even in electoral systems hotels in norwich ct where it s not straightforward to buy votes with campaign spending). A celebrated Dutch photographer (whose name I forgot, sorry) mentioned the other day that the current public atmosphere is similar to the one from the interbellum: is it? (a few months ago, I d say that person was nuts, but I m no longer sure).
cian: not that Labour weren t bad in many ways they were but the question was whether or not people who voted for a party other than Labour in a marginal constituency with a head-to-head Labour/Tory contest were doing something stupid and counterproductive. At the time, people used the fact that Labour was nasty on immigration, benefits (and so on) to justify behaviour that ultimately helped the Tories win. They were wrong to do so, because the Tories have, as could reasonably have been predicted, turned out to be to the right of Labour at everything.
I don t know, I suppose there are two ways to look at this (and all that European austerity stuff in general). One is, obviously, the barbarians at the gates angle, but that assumes that neoliberal welfare states created in the last 30 years are still capable of functioning, hotels in norwich ct limping along somehow. But of course hotels in norwich ct another angle might be to say that these events simply indicate the utter failure of the whole third way idea, neoliberal welfare state. Time for something new.
British rules on this kind of thing have been horrible for a long time. Two of three of my children (whose father is British) have British citizenship. The eldest can t, because she was already over 18 when the European Court forced hotels in norwich ct the British to stop discriminating against the children of British men who were not legally married to the non-British mothers of their children. The two younger ones just scraped in. One of them is now trying to sponsor his Australian girlfriend into Britain. Why, I don t know, but there you have it.
Emma: horrible indeed, but not especially so. The United States, for example, is pretty hotels in norwich ct restrictive when it comes to unmarried men (rather than women) passing on citizenship rights to their offspring hotels in norwich ct born overseas.
Well there are many reasons for voting. I didn t vote for my local labour MP in a marginal seat because I didn t like her, I didn t like her politics, and didn t like the way that she was parachuted in. I s