And I know plenty of folks who wound up in sham marriages that they entered totally voluntarily and without ulterior motives such as obtaining residency. ‘Sham marriage’ is a meaningless criterion, especially when discussing legal matters where precise language is vital.
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Aah you got the dig … and I thought the sarcasm wasn’t obvious enough…
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Indeed. “Xenophobia” is the word you want, I think; it’s really only cosmetically different from racism.
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People who take low-paid jobs in Starbucks are generally going to be young - in their 20s or thereabouts.
People in this age group are unlikely to need much in the way of medical attention - do you have any evidence that they will need an average of £2000 worth of care from the NHS? If so Johnny Foreigner must be a remarkably unhealthy chap.
Inflation of house prices (and hence also rents) is a consequence of the insanity of selling off council houses, whilst refusing to build new ones, and a culture which views houses as an investment rather than somewhere to live - a fantasy which makes a great deal of money for the financial sector (whose denizens are probably paying less tax than our putative Starbucks employee).
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Isn’t racism the belief that one racial group is superior to another while xenophobia is a fear of those who are different (racially, culturally, etc). Couldn’t one be xenophobic without being racist and vice versa? While they do often came hand-in-hand, it seems like the difference is more than cosmetic.
“Sham marriage” is a concept in terms of immigration because marriage to a citizen used to automatically confer indefinite leave to remain in the UK, and it likely did when MacInnes married his wife in the story we’re discussing here. If you got someone to sign the marriage paperwork, you could then live in the country and never see them again (in principle).
That’s no more the case. Today, you can marry as a foreigner in the UK, but it will have no influence on your right to live in the UK unless you jump through the legal hoops beforehand (courtesy Theresa May and her gang of thugs).
At present, if you’re a foreigner and you want to marry a briton that you’ve met in the UK, you have to first leave the country and apply for a Fiancee Visa from your home country. Then, if you’re granted that visa, you get 6 months to live, but not work, in the UK - during which time you can lawfully marry with the prospect of getting a married persons visa to stay here - so you marry, leave the country again, and apply for a married persons visa back in your home country, which, if granted, provides you another 2 years to live, but not work, in the UK. As soon as you arrive on the married persons visa you have to file initial paperwork for indefinite leave to remain, and then after the two years on the marriage visa, your application for indefinite leave to remain and the right to work can be progressed. They might extend your married persons visa while they process your request, or they might ask you to leave the country again, and come back if the leave to remain is granted.
It’s deliberately hard to use marriage as a way of getting to live in the UK. You have to be able to afford the transport costs - three trips home and back to the UK - and the time to make three visa applications from your home country, then when you’re in the UK there’s no guarantee that you will have the right to work during the initial stages of the process - so your partner has to be able to afford to support you for a couple of years whilst the application process takes place. When you apply for these visas, you (the foreigner) can be asked to demonstrate that you have a £36,000 lump sum in the bank as security, and/or the equivalent of sponsorship/income of £18,000/year from sources other than employment in Britain, and also excluding the resources of your partner. If you’re poor, forget about it. The right to come to the UK and marry is only for the rich.
You might think these terms are rather punitive and would prevent plenty of legitimate couples from marrying, for the purposes of catching the occasional ‘sham’ - and the High Court might agree with you. Currently the UK’s immigration policy for married couples is under judicial review, with the effect that the Home Office has halted all applications for marriage visas / married couples, until the results of the judicial review are known.
PS. It’s interesting that the threshold for getting a marriage visa is an income of £18,000 a year (which is the ‘living wage’), whereas the minimum wage in the UK is ~£12,000 a year. This tends to indicate that the government is acknowledging via it’s immigration policy that you can’t expect people to live on the minimum wage. Personally I think the judicial review should conclude that the £18,000 income threshold is valid, and that the minimum wage is obviously set at 2/3 the level that you could reasonably expect someone to live in Britain, that therefore the minimum wage is unlawful; then order the government to raise the minimum wage.
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Clearly, the solution is to deport anyone working at Starbucks. Citizen or no.
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Don’t forget to deport the sick!
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So lets follow the logic through.
It’s ok if you don’t use the NHS, so you get charged nothing. However, if you do use it, you are going to charge people the full cost. I see. you want a pay per use system, not an insurance system.
Or perhaps you want an age adjusted price for the NHS. What price does a 20 year old pay, and what price does a 70 year old pay? Do you want to charge extra for women, because they become pregnant?
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Yah. As a UK citizen who lived and worked in the USA for a while, I have to say that while dealing with US immigration was dreadful, the experience of people going the other way seemed noticeably worse, involving routine humiliation, huge expense and arbitrary refusals after years of waiting. And that was ten years or so ago; I can’t believe it’s got any better.
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18K a year for two people. That raises £2,942.24 a year in tax and NI.
The state spends 722 bn on 63 million people. 11,500 a year per person on average. [Ignoring the growth in the debts such as pensions]
So are you going to make up the difference between 3K and 23K a year, 20K a year out of your own pocket?
This illustrates the core problem. We are importing people who are making the situation worse, not better. The result is that existing people lose and lose big.
That’s what politicians won’t tell you. They will tell you look they are making a contribution. What they omit is the contribution you are forced to make to the migrant who doesn’t earn enough.
It is intrinsically racist by most definitions of the word to say that people should be treated differently due to their country of origin. There really isn’t any getting around that. We don’t ban people from Newcastle coming down to get jobs in London (yet - give it time).
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Interesting.
We got the “She needs to go back to her own country and apply for a Fiancé Visa and then come back …” (In the middle of a University course? Yeah, right …) advice from the shits at Immigration & Nationality in Slough 22 years ago. So our local Anglican vicar applied to his Bishop and we got married under ‘Special License’ —which saw us both registered in my local parish and Banns read in the local Anglican churches. Once the formalities were over we went back to Immigration and told them what we’d done. They weren’t best pleased and didn’t get off our backs for 2 years, but it worked without needing to resort to leaving the country. And we’re still married.
Has that useful little loophole been closed as well?
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18K a year for two people.
I may misunderstand the situation, but I believe the current policy is £36K up front, or £18K a year for the immigrant alone, deliberately excluding his/her partner from the assessment, which is the main reason why there is a judicial review going on.
So are you going to make up the difference between 3K and 23K a year, 20K a year out of your own pocket?
I’m not sure where the £23K figure comes from, but my understanding is that if I marry a foreigner, in principle, then between us we have to be able to front the money.
Effectively what may happen is that there will be one or more roving bank accounts in the UK with £36,000 in it, which will be transferred between immigrants for the purposes of passing the solvency test. I think the same scheme (a frequently transferred bank account with £100K in it, putatively for investment) has been used to get people ‘entrepreneur visas’
Maybe we should partition an unfashionable part of Cornwall as an independent nation, and then deport anyone we don’t like the look of across that border.
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Has that useful little loophole been closed as well?
That’s a good question. Thanks for the tip 
Many states have anti-immigration policies intended to exclude the poor, the sick, people with disabilities, and people fleeing violence. Why are so many people so eager to deny that anti-immigration policies are anti-humanity, besides being racist, ableist, and so on?
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OK. I’ll run with your numbers. 18K a year income yields 3K a year in income tax and NI.
Cost of that person here, on average, is 11.5K a year if you ignore the pensions.
Now if you think that is a great idea as an investment, I’m more that willing to offer you even more generous terms. I double the tax paid by the migrant, and you pay me the cost of them being here.
ie. I pay you 6K a year, and you pay me 11.5K a year. It’s a great deal isn’t it barring the scams.
I’ll give you another scam. 2K a year for the NHS is the true cost. The numpties are thinking of charging people 200 for a years visit to the UK. ie. You can legally use all the services of the NHS for 200 quid. What do you think is going to happen? Yep, adverts in papers. For the cost of a plane ticket, 200 quid, and our fee you can get your treatment for free. We will ship you over, and put you in a taxi to the nearest A&E. All legal.
[By the way the solvency test is 18K a year in income, not 18K in the bank]
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Xenophobic. Racist means something different. Among many reasons why, if I have a stick up my (white) bum regarding (white) Canadians in my (very white) American town, you are going to have a really hard time stretching the definition of race to explain the differences.
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I appreciate the point, but there is a big problem in that there’s no definite definition of what discrimination is “racism” and what isn’t. (Given that “race” is socially constructed.) Is discriminating against the Irish racism? Are they a different “race”? It’s generally thought that it is.
In the instance of giving people different rights depending on where they were born, I reckon “racist” works.
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That might be your idea of logic but it’s not mine.
All insurance schemes (including NI/NHS) make probability-based calculations, so it’s entirely legitimate to consider the odds of a particular group claiming or not claiming; insurance is when it comes down to it, a form of gambling.
If the odds are small that immigrant workers in Starbucks will claim treatment, then it’s inappropriate to use the argument that they will be costly users of medical attention - they won’t. This doesn’t have anything to do with pregnant 70 year olds. They will have their own odds and NHS financing will have to take the relevant probability into account.
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