Moving back to UK with spouse....visa issues....

[Angelina]

安全感。

[DernierVirage]

Deleted

[XiaoXi]

@Nath I didn't realise there had been more replies. Thanks for your extensive response. The income thing is impossible to deal with. I don't currently live in the UK so hard to have a job there in advance. Not to mention I'm currently self employed. The income and savings don't really seem to make any sense I have to say. £18600 a year is below the average salary for the UK but £60k in savings is crazily high. I've never met anyone who has that much in savings....in fact most people from the UK don't have any savings since its a our culture to spend all our monthly earnings in full and even beyond that into debt and credit cards.

 

No idea who came up with those numbers but they certainly don't go together. If you earn £18600 a year you would barely be able to save anything, it would take you 20 years to save £60k and in fact you probably would never get there so why is the alternative savings proof so high?

 

Actually relatively cheap! It's $7000 in Australia, or £4000 for the visa alone. If I wanted to live with a foreign national I'd just leave the country/not return to the country.

 

Its not cheap, its really expensive. In Australia is extraordinarily expensive.

[roddy]

Supreme Court has upheld these rules as lawful, but with enough criticism that the Home Office might make some changes. I wouldn't expect a complete turnaround though. 

[roddy]

In the name of...

[Lu]

Quote

...and the income of the non-European partner does not count towards the threshold.

This is just blatantly anti-foreigner. I can see how a government doesn't want people to bring in a family they can't support, but why wouldn't the foreign spouse's income count towards that? It goes towards the same spending. The Netherlands has similar rules, but from what I know the minimum income counts for the family as a unit, not just the Dutch spouse.

[roddy]

It doesn't count *while they're abroad*, on the assumption that once they move to the UK they would lose that job and have to find a new one. See here for more info

http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/reports/the-minimum-income-requirement-for-non-eea-family-members-in-the-uk-2/

 

I don't know how things work if, say, you marry a student who has no income, but a student visa, and then graduates. I suspect May turns up to beat you both to death with copies of the Daily Mail. 

[Lu]

18 hours ago, roddy said:

It doesn't count *while they're abroad*, on the assumption that once they move to the UK they would lose that job and have to find a new one.

Ah okay, that makes sense.

If you marry a student who then graduates... they have to renew their visa I suppose, which they then can't? Or maybe you won't be allowed to marry a student at all? Apparently in NL they can forbid a couple from getting married if the immigration stuff isn't in order.

[XiaoXi]

On 2017/5/18 at 11:39 PM, roddy said:

In the name of...

 

Wow.....I didn't even know they'd just changed it again. It actually makes a little more sense now since the savings requirement and the salary requirement didn't match up at all before. They still don't match since £22,400 is below the average wage and £60,000 savings is something almost no one achieves on average in the UK. But I think it would have been better if they'd lowered the savings requirement rather than raise the salary requirement. Otherwise it looks too much like a Donald Trump impression.

[roddy]

@XiaoXi, did you get anywhere with this?

[roddy]

On 2/22/2017 at 11:18 AM, roddy said:

Supreme Court has upheld these rules as lawful, but with enough criticism that the Home Office might make some changes. I wouldn't expect a complete turnaround though. 

Ha. Six years later, they're almost doubling the salary requirement, to £38k+. That's a few grand above median earnings for the UK, and an even bigger ask if you're not going to be in London/south-east. Utterly appalling.

[Guest realmayo]

I'm surprised they lumped visas for the spouses of UK citizens together with visas for the spouses of foreigners living/working in the UK. Maybe it would be unlawful to discriminate? Unless it's actually the case that spouses of UK citizens do in fact make up a big chunk of long-term immigrants. Family dependents do make up about a third of immigration so it's natural it would be targeted, but I'd assumed the UK-citizens-marrying-foreigners part of it would be very small. Perhaps not.

[roddy]

ONS says "Family visas: Family accounted for 6% of non-EU long-term immigration in 2022, with an estimated 51,000 arriving for family compared with 62,000 in 2021." That's obviously offset by some leaving: "Family accounted for 16% of non-EU long-term emigration in 2022, with an estimated 42,000 leaving for family, compared with 29,000 in 2021."

 

It's hard not to see it as a 'tough on immigration' stance, rather than actually being tough on immigration.

[highlander Iain]

My wife just received confirmation of her indefinite leave to remain approval a few days ago, which I'm obviously happy about, but it seems very clear to me the current UK policy is very much driven by a very misguided and out of touch sense of optics and what can be done to appease sections of the media that will try and keep the current government in power. It's messed up for anyone starting the process now. Where I live there's also a decent sized Chinese community who contribute a lot. So sad.

[Guest realmayo]

On 12/5/2023 at 11:04 PM, roddy said:

Family accounted for 6%

Yes that's kind of what I mean: 6% on family visas, but a further 12% on dependent visas (i.e. the other type of family visas). A shame but the government's got to get a grip on the numbers somehow I suppose, they're pretty mind-boggling. Roll-on the referendum to leave the ECHR!

[roddy]

Looks like this applies to people already here. Once you’re in country the threshold is household income, not that of the UK half of the couple, so it’s more achievable, but…

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/foreign-spouse-visa-uk-migration-crackdown-b2459168.html

[Tomsima]

I think the question on most people's minds is, at the very least why is such a revision not being implemented over say a 4 year period, so that couples have time to plan properly. If this goes ahead as planned, it will 100% be punishing innocent people for falling in love with non-UK citizens. 

[Guest realmayo]

https://archive.ph/jxpxW

 

This article seems pretty clear: there's immigration that most people are OK with, and immigration that most people aren't necessarily OK with, but because it's not acceptable to admit this, we have a situation where it may be easier as a non-UK citizen to bring their spouse over than it would be for a UK citizen to do the same.

[Guest realmayo]

Better news, threshold to be raised only to £29k for now: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12891197/Government-abandons-plan-hike-earning-threshold-Britons-need-bring-foreign-family-members-UK.html

 

[roddy]

So it’s a little like me making plans for 2124, but there’s a stated intent to have the requirement increase to the original £38k level by early 2025. 
 

https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2024-01-30/hcws222

 

I’m not sure how publicised this has been. 
 

> The Immigration Rules we intend to lay on 14 March will set out that from 11 April we will raise the threshold to £29,000 - that is the 25th percentile of earnings for jobs which are eligible for Skilled Worker visas. We will incrementally increase the threshold to the 40th percentile (currently £34,500), and finally to the 50th percentile (currently £38,700, and the level at which the General Skilled Worker threshold is set) by early 2025.