Post
by starkmonster » Tue Feb 28, 2017 2:52 pm
This law was the brain child of our new PM Theresa May. What is was designed to do is bring down net migration, you see the government facing pressure to reduce migration but knowing full well they can do nothing about internal EU migration or asylum applications started pushing a metric called "net migration". This means you subtract the number of people who leave from the number that arrive.
When you read the small print you see that this number includes British citizens that leave for more than 12 months, so that basically means all the Brits on this board. The income restriction is aimed directly at us, because the income needs to be UK income, not foreign sourced income. And you need to show UK tax returns at that income level for six months before your spouse can even apply. Then the application process takes 12-18 months, all of which time the Brit has to be earning the income requirement in the UK, and the the person applying must be outside of the UK for the application process. This means that the family or couple will need to be apart for at least 18 months.
So take this pretty standard scenario. Brit goes to work overseas, meets a lady, they get married and have kids. The kids get British passports, Dad has a British passport but Mum doesn't. For the family to return the UK they will need to be apart for 18 months. Most families can't accept that and choose not to return, the result, the government avoids four more names being added to its immigrant tally, three of whom are British citizens.
I can't find the website now, but there is a site that's collected stories of families that can't return and some of them are absolute shockers. The part that's worse is that if you are an asylum seeker family reunification is a right, but if you are a British citizen it's not.
And a lolly pop for the first person that can tell me the only UK political party whose immigration policy would rescind this nonsense.... I'll give you a clue, it's the "racist" one.