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Regulating Marriage Migration Into the UK: A Stranger in the Home
Marriage migration is a controversial and problematic issue in the UK as elsewhere in Europe. This timely analysis is a comprehensive examination of the regulation of marriage migration into the UK. With international relevance.
290 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 28, 2013
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January 23, 2014
This is an example of an academic book which really deserves to have a much wider audience amongst people concerned with issues that range from human rights, family policy, the position of women, as well as the reception and integration of immigrants.
Wray argues that official policy with regard to family life has always been shaped by perceptions of the role families are expected to play in wider society. The bourgeois model of the self-reliant base unit of the national community had at its heart a vision of a strong male breadwinner leading the show, supported by a nurturing female whose prime field of operation was ensuring that the right values were passed on to the children.
For a long time, up until 1948 in fact, this influence the question as to whether women could properly be regarded as citizens of the country in their own right, as opposed to being appendages of the citizen-husband who controlled the female destiny. A woman who aligned herself with a foreign gentleman was presumed to have taken on the whole package of his identity, to the point she could no longer be properly thought of as British. The chap who hitched up with a foreign lady on the other hand, could be trust to take a firm grip on her alien ways and make some sort of an English girl out of her one way or the other.
The 20th century took a toll on these prejudices as it brought women more centrally into the public sphere, as wage workers acting in their own interests, and political beings capable of exercising the right to vote. Their contribution to the war effort in 1939-45 in particularly demanded acknowledgement of where they no stood in British society and the Nationality Act of 1948 put the seal on this by allowing them to retain their citizenship even after marrying a foreign national.
Immigration rights followed on from this. For the greater part of the last century the presumption was that anyone who had the right to live in the UK, whether on the grounds that they were a citizen, a colonial subject or an approved foreigner, automatically had the right to be joined by the immediate members of his or her family. This was the default presumption even during the decade of the 1960s and after, when immigration controls directed against Commonwealth citizens first came on the statute books. It was not until the 1971 Immigration Act that the UK government first thought to make the right to family life more conditional by imposing a duty to demonstrate the ability to ‘support and accommodate’ all dependents who were following the wake of the primary immigrant.
Even here, the position of male Commonwealth citizens who had been settled in the country at the date the act came into force – 1 January 1973 – was preserved so that even very poor immigrant groups, like the Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, were still able to bring in their spouses and children. This entitlement remained up until 1988 when another immigration act put an end to the reserved rights of the settled group, and henceforth everyone, other than citizens of other member states of the European Economic Area, had to show the financial means to support and accommodate.
Wray’s argument was that measures of this sort were possible because the family associated with migration could be disparaged in the population as not being quite up to the worth as a ‘genuine’ (white) British family. This was not a statement that could be made openly during decades when a black British community was establishing itself and showing its determination to fight of its rights, and actions that limited that registered the inequality of the two groups where generally buried away in the arcane details of the immigration rules and the administrative practices of the state officials involved in the management and control of immigration.
We get good examples of exactly what they were in this account. The sordid saga of ‘virginity tests’ imposed on Indian women coming to join sponsors as fiancées is given in this pages. What now seems something close to an atrocity committed against the dignity of these women was possible because immigration officials felt their job required the formulation of a sense of who was a ‘good’ as opposed to a ‘bad’ sort of immigrant. Any Indian woman (the fact that they were Indian implies a judgment on their proper status as an individual endowed with the capacity to determination her own future) who had engaged in pre-marital intercourse would be the sort of person that no self-respecting gentlemen would consider as appropriate to be the mother of his children.
From there we move on to learn more about the battles around the ‘primary purpose rule’, which allowed immigration officials to refuse visas to marriage partners who might have been influenced in their choice of spouse by the fact that the chance to settle in the UK was in the offing. A means to tackle cases of clear-cut marriage opportunism, in the form of marriages of convenience, acquired more general application to cover partnerships were the likelihood of life-long cohabitation was not seriously in doubt, but which had been tainted by the suspicion that access to a UK residence permit was on offer.
The rationale offered by government that stamping out abuse was at stake in this measure came closer to a drive to stamp out marriage to overseas partners itself. By the end of the 1980s refusal rates for some groups of Indian subcontinent nationals was touching the 50% mark.
Wray shows how constant guerrilla warfare involving government and legal activists worked over time to blunt the edge of the instrument and even to embarrass government when the extravagance of the situations they were creating in migrant communities were becoming clearer. This was a policy that demanded correction, and it was the Labour government of 1997 onwards that took on this task.
But rather than creating a new epoch of respect for human rights, Wray shows how New Labour developed its own logic of control, which also involved sorting out the ‘good’ form the ‘bad’ migrant. This time it was a reasoning that draws on utilitarian notions of economic efficient and social happiness (integration) as its guiding force. The good immigrant would be one who worked, paid taxes, spoke English, and accepted the values of the country she’d come to live in.
However innocent this measure of goodness and utility might seem, it actually provided sufficient purchase within the modernised New Labour system for immigration officials to arrive at the same outcomes as they did when they were testing virgins and doubting the reasons for marriage.
The book stops at 2010 so doesn’t go on to look at the way the Coalition Government has gone on to develop the system. If it had done it would no doubt reach the conclusion that many aspects of New Labour’s work, in particular the requirement that family partners demonstrate good English before arriving in the UK, and an increase in the level of conditionality that was imposed on people as they moved from their early arrival, through settlement and eventually reaching citizenship, have simply modernised the prejudices and discrimination which made black and Asian people into second class citizens back in the heyday of racism in the 1960s.
Wray argues that official policy with regard to family life has always been shaped by perceptions of the role families are expected to play in wider society. The bourgeois model of the self-reliant base unit of the national community had at its heart a vision of a strong male breadwinner leading the show, supported by a nurturing female whose prime field of operation was ensuring that the right values were passed on to the children.
For a long time, up until 1948 in fact, this influence the question as to whether women could properly be regarded as citizens of the country in their own right, as opposed to being appendages of the citizen-husband who controlled the female destiny. A woman who aligned herself with a foreign gentleman was presumed to have taken on the whole package of his identity, to the point she could no longer be properly thought of as British. The chap who hitched up with a foreign lady on the other hand, could be trust to take a firm grip on her alien ways and make some sort of an English girl out of her one way or the other.
The 20th century took a toll on these prejudices as it brought women more centrally into the public sphere, as wage workers acting in their own interests, and political beings capable of exercising the right to vote. Their contribution to the war effort in 1939-45 in particularly demanded acknowledgement of where they no stood in British society and the Nationality Act of 1948 put the seal on this by allowing them to retain their citizenship even after marrying a foreign national.
Immigration rights followed on from this. For the greater part of the last century the presumption was that anyone who had the right to live in the UK, whether on the grounds that they were a citizen, a colonial subject or an approved foreigner, automatically had the right to be joined by the immediate members of his or her family. This was the default presumption even during the decade of the 1960s and after, when immigration controls directed against Commonwealth citizens first came on the statute books. It was not until the 1971 Immigration Act that the UK government first thought to make the right to family life more conditional by imposing a duty to demonstrate the ability to ‘support and accommodate’ all dependents who were following the wake of the primary immigrant.
Even here, the position of male Commonwealth citizens who had been settled in the country at the date the act came into force – 1 January 1973 – was preserved so that even very poor immigrant groups, like the Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, were still able to bring in their spouses and children. This entitlement remained up until 1988 when another immigration act put an end to the reserved rights of the settled group, and henceforth everyone, other than citizens of other member states of the European Economic Area, had to show the financial means to support and accommodate.
Wray’s argument was that measures of this sort were possible because the family associated with migration could be disparaged in the population as not being quite up to the worth as a ‘genuine’ (white) British family. This was not a statement that could be made openly during decades when a black British community was establishing itself and showing its determination to fight of its rights, and actions that limited that registered the inequality of the two groups where generally buried away in the arcane details of the immigration rules and the administrative practices of the state officials involved in the management and control of immigration.
We get good examples of exactly what they were in this account. The sordid saga of ‘virginity tests’ imposed on Indian women coming to join sponsors as fiancées is given in this pages. What now seems something close to an atrocity committed against the dignity of these women was possible because immigration officials felt their job required the formulation of a sense of who was a ‘good’ as opposed to a ‘bad’ sort of immigrant. Any Indian woman (the fact that they were Indian implies a judgment on their proper status as an individual endowed with the capacity to determination her own future) who had engaged in pre-marital intercourse would be the sort of person that no self-respecting gentlemen would consider as appropriate to be the mother of his children.
From there we move on to learn more about the battles around the ‘primary purpose rule’, which allowed immigration officials to refuse visas to marriage partners who might have been influenced in their choice of spouse by the fact that the chance to settle in the UK was in the offing. A means to tackle cases of clear-cut marriage opportunism, in the form of marriages of convenience, acquired more general application to cover partnerships were the likelihood of life-long cohabitation was not seriously in doubt, but which had been tainted by the suspicion that access to a UK residence permit was on offer.
The rationale offered by government that stamping out abuse was at stake in this measure came closer to a drive to stamp out marriage to overseas partners itself. By the end of the 1980s refusal rates for some groups of Indian subcontinent nationals was touching the 50% mark.
Wray shows how constant guerrilla warfare involving government and legal activists worked over time to blunt the edge of the instrument and even to embarrass government when the extravagance of the situations they were creating in migrant communities were becoming clearer. This was a policy that demanded correction, and it was the Labour government of 1997 onwards that took on this task.
But rather than creating a new epoch of respect for human rights, Wray shows how New Labour developed its own logic of control, which also involved sorting out the ‘good’ form the ‘bad’ migrant. This time it was a reasoning that draws on utilitarian notions of economic efficient and social happiness (integration) as its guiding force. The good immigrant would be one who worked, paid taxes, spoke English, and accepted the values of the country she’d come to live in.
However innocent this measure of goodness and utility might seem, it actually provided sufficient purchase within the modernised New Labour system for immigration officials to arrive at the same outcomes as they did when they were testing virgins and doubting the reasons for marriage.
The book stops at 2010 so doesn’t go on to look at the way the Coalition Government has gone on to develop the system. If it had done it would no doubt reach the conclusion that many aspects of New Labour’s work, in particular the requirement that family partners demonstrate good English before arriving in the UK, and an increase in the level of conditionality that was imposed on people as they moved from their early arrival, through settlement and eventually reaching citizenship, have simply modernised the prejudices and discrimination which made black and Asian people into second class citizens back in the heyday of racism in the 1960s.
Displaying 1 of 1 review