43
Foreign spouses could be told to leave UK under plans to cut legal migration
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
43 points (97.8% liked)
UK Politics
3103 readers
338 users here now
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Where does the responsibility come from in the first place?
Despite the many cracks and weaknesses, I love how our country tries to take care of every member to a basic standard of living, regardless even of fault or blame. And for all its struggles, I'm very proud of the NHS.
But I think membership in the UK community is prior to this. We don't kick citizens out - not even dual nationals. "Bugger off to your other country and come back when you're rich." (Ok, we did that a bit in the past, but that's a different story.)
Nor do we restrict, by law, people bringing new members of our community through childbirth. We might have opinions, but not prohibitive laws.
When we chose, as a nation, to care for people from a national level - of which I'm proud! - we make that choice to do that for the whole nation. To say to a family, one of whose members is a citizen, "your family can't be part of this because you're poor," seems quite terrible to me.
It would be. But we're not talking about welcoming everyone, we're talking about welcoming half-British families. Husbands and wives, where one partner is British.
‘…come back when you’re rich’…? Requiring a household income of £38,500 a year would not be ‘rich’ by any measure. In the south east of England, that’s two people scraping by. It’s also not about, despite you being insistent on suggesting, that we shouldn’t want poor people living here. It’s about ensuring that anyone who comes to live in the UK from abroad can be supported by their spouse until they can find employment. It’s about ensuring that public funds are used for the UK and its own citizens. We don’t live under a one world government and we do not have the resources to care for all of humanity. There is a limit. Each nation needs to care for its citizens basic needs and can’t be expected to do more unless there is some sharing of resources. It just doesn’t add up.
Of course we don’t kick citizens out. I don’t know why you’re mentioning this - why would we? Kicking a citizen out of their home and making them stateless contravenes the universal declaration of human rights. This is a completely different topic than requiring an immigrant to be able to support themselves, or be supported by their sponsor.
The UK does care for all of its citizens ‘at a national level’. However, until a person becomes a citizen, they are not a member of that nation state. My wife, for example, has leave to remain in this country on the basis of our marriage but she is not a citizen and she is not entitled to any public funds. She is, in her home country, of which she is a citizen, but she only has the right to reside and work in this country for the duration of her visa. She may apply for indefinite leave to remain and then subsequently, citizenship, but until that point, the UK has no more responsibility towards her than it does to a Japanese person living in Uzbekistan or a North Korean living in the jungles of Central America.
Basically my point is, in my opinion spouses of citizens should be treated effectively as citizens, and married couples be considered together as a family unit.
I think it's a weakness of UK policy that in this situation we consider a married couple more as two independent individuals than as a family unit.
…but it’s not treating them as two individuals. It’s treating them as a family unit and insisting that the person immigrating to the UK can be supported by their spouse.
I see your point and in an ideal world, perhaps you’d be right. With a finite amount of resources, however, it’s simply not realistic.