The UK Immigration System
I wanted to write this blogpost because I have recently been thinking about my own visa situation and how difficult it is to remain in the UK despite having been here for five years (but having zero years towards indefinite leave to remain). I have spent four years in the UK on a student visa and now nearly one year on a graduate visa, and I am still no closer to having any permanent residency in the UK. Clearly, the UK government does not want students to stay in the UK after their studies, and even when they offer an additional two-year graduate visa, they still do not want migrants to stay because the graduate and student visas do not count towards indefinite leave to remain. In order to stay in the UK after my graduate visa, I would have to find a workplace which would sponsor my work visa of which there are limited options. The other option is to obtain a family visa for three years, which I could get by living with my partner for two years or more. I will just barely miss that cutoff. The other option is to marry my partner, which I do not want to do at the moment. Of course, I have not even gotten into the prohibitively expensive costs of obtaining a visa in the UK. The UK government has announced staggering visa increases from 624 pounds per year for the health surcharge to 1035 pounds per year and application fees set to increase by 15 or 20%. This health surcharge is of course in addition to the monthly tax taken out of income each month as national insurance.
` The government has claimed that these visa cost increases are justified to pay for public sector pay increases. However, it seems more likely that the government is determined to use the increasing demonisation of migrants to fleece them of every pound that they can. After all, the government could cut spending on the military or the royal family to pay for public sector pay increases but it will not do that. A rather concerning thing about this vast increase to visa fees and the NHS health surcharge is the fact that this is how the government treats migrants it deems to be “skilled workers” who will supposedly contribute to the economy. It is little wonder then that the UK government has put asylum seekers onto barges with unsafe and cramped living conditions and threatened to withdraw any funds they do receive if they dare to complain. I know from speaking to an asylum seeker in London that while they have been provided with housing, they are not provided with enough money to live on, and they have to rely on their father to provide them with money.
These horrible conditions for asylum seekers as well as the efforts by Tory governments to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda are part and parcel of the “hostile environment” strategy first enacted by Home Secretary Theresa May. Of course, the hostile environment is a highly racialised tool which disproportionately targets people of colour from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria which was discovered by the government’s own evaluation of the policy. Thus, even the government itself admits that the hostile environment policy is racist, yet they continue to propagate it against asylum seekers to make their time in the UK as uncomfortable and unwelcoming as possible. I have recently been watching the show Top Boy on Netflix with my partner. In the show (minor spoilers), the mother of one of the characters loses her job as a cleaner in a hospital presumably because the Home Office asked the hospital to check her immigration records again and she was found not to have the proper papers. This targeting of a black woman cleaner who had lived for many years in the UK is emblematic of how the hostile environment cracks down on ‘racialised others’ who do jobs that many white people in the UK would not want to do. Another glaringly clear example of the racialised response to migrants is the better treatment of Ukrainian refugees compared to Syrian refugees because of how Ukrainians are constructed as white.
As a white migrant from the US and an affluent background, I understand the vast amount of privilege that I have within society and within the UK immigration system. Even so, I feel that the UK does not want me here because of how difficult it is to remain in the UK and how expensive it is. Even if I obtained permanent residency and indefinite leave to remain, it would cost me 2404 pounds. If I feel unwelcome coming from this background, asylum seekers and migrants of colour must feel the full weight of the hostile environment constantly bearing down on them. The ironic thing is that the UK government is in desperate need of workers in key sectors like nurses, doctors, and teachers. As of June 2023, there were still 112,000 vacancies within the NHS as the service has been battered by successive Tory governments and the continuing pandemic. I definitely do not think that only migrants from key sectors should be allowed to come to the UK, but it is emblematic of how the UK government is so anti-migrant that it is detrimental to the country itself.
Ultimately, I do not think that the UK will abandon the hostile environment policy even if a Labour government under Starmer wins the next election. In order to truly confront the hostile environment, the UK will need to confront its longstanding legacy of white supremacy, colonialism and racism as well as confront how colonial labour particularly in India created the wealth of the UK. The cruelty and dehumanization of migrants in the UK’s current immigration system can only be dismantled through addressing these interlocking systems of oppression.
