I met my British husband in 1986 while in the Caribbean. He was studying for his PhD and I was doing a semester of field study through my US university. I pretty much decided that I was going to marry him after sitting next to him on a boozy night out. After a long distance relationship, we got married in 1989 and settled into a super-cool, but relatively poorly paid, tropical lifestyle at the West Indies Lab on St Croix in the USVI. Unfortunately, Hurricane Hugo arrived five weeks later, destroying nearly all of our wedding presents (except the ugly ones that remained untouched in the closet that we'd hidden them away in) and leaving our lives in tatters.
Eventually husband got a job offer from Newcastle University. Again, the pay wasn’t great, though it would have met the threshold of £18,600 currently required for British people bringing their non-European Economic Area spouses. Just.
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| Eventually I'll be flower fertiliser |
We arrived at Heathrow on a chilly November morning in 1991. Blithely, I handed over my US passport to the immigration chap as I had several times before while travelling as a tourist. This time, I was immediately escorted away from my puzzled husband by a female immigration officer. Dropping me off in a waiting room, she told me not to worry – the medical examination that I was about to undergo wasn’t really for people like me but rather for “wives from the sub-continent”. Around the room sat mostly unaccompanied women – some of them obviously Muslim. Eventually I was examined without an escort by an old fat while male doctor with cold hands who asked me to remove me shirt so that he could listen my chest. I had rarely felt so vulnerable. I can’t imagine how the others felt.
Around a year later, we were doing field work abroad. A couple of days before we were set to travel home I looked at my passport and realised that my temporary visa had expired. We found a pay phone and rang the UK embassy. I was told that I had to stay outside of Britain for an undetermined amount of time while a new visa was processed. Their advice was “stay in a hotel until it’s all sorted. It may take six weeks”. Very helpful if you’re wealthy, otherwise, not so. Hundreds of pounds and gallons of tears later it was sorted.
Eventually I was the proud possessor of a “Indefinite Leave to Remain” visa. This allows you to reside and work in the UK indefinitely. We had two children who, both being born in Newcastle, are technically Geordies. Our little corner of Northumberland became home in the deepest sense of the word. I worked for a university and the NHS, paid my taxes, volunteered at the children’s school – in short I was just an ordinary mum. Occasionally I thought about applying for UK citizenship, but spending the approximately £1000 seemed like a luxury that we couldn’t afford.
I never doubted my right to stay here and felt that I could speak my mind. On one occasion, I arrived at Newcastle Airport on a flight from Amsterdam. It was September and an Emirates flight full of students from all over Asia and Africa arrived at the same time. We lined up in the non-EU passport queue and waited - for 3.5 hours. There was no water. The room was hot and airless. A heavily pregnant woman fainted. An American man in front of me missed the keynote speaker at a conference he was attending. I gave out cookies that I had intended to give to family as presents to increasingly frustrated (and hungry) students, one of whom said that it was like I was from the Red Cross. I left my place in the line a couple of times to reprimand the immigration officer, telling him that the delay was bringing disgrace to the region. I had a well-spoken Chinese student in his third year at Newcastle University tell me that it had been getting worse every year and that “we can go to other countries that treat us better” to get their foreign university educations. And before anyone says that they should go somewhere else, foreign students contribute around £2.3 billion a year to the UK economy. Never during that experience did I feel fear that there would be any repercussions for speaking out in the limbo that is passport control. I'm not so sure that I'd feel the same way now.
In early 2012, we decided to move abroad for a few years. I rang the Home Office and asked about applying for UK citizenship. I was told that because I was planning to leave in six months’ time, I could not apply. So much for being honest. We moved to Fiji, which was transitioning from a military dictatorship to a democracy. For the first time in my life I experienced living somewhere where there was no freedom of speech. Besides being incredibly frustrating, it opened my eyes to what governments can do to individuals who disagree with or challenge them.
In late 2014 we were preparing to move back to the UK and I again rang the Home Office. I had gone over the two-year limit for my Leave to Remain visa. Their advice was to 1) apply for a returning resident visa or 2) return to the UK, show my old Leave to Remain visa and hope that I got a sympathetic immigration officer who would just stamp passport and wave me through. Well, I’m not crazy, so I took the first option. Bizarrely, the British High Commission in the Pacific has nothing to do with visa applications, so I handed my passport over to a privately-run company and was told that I could expect it back from Manila (with or without a visa) between 3-10 weeks later.
Eventually I made it back to the UK with a shiny new visa and three cats. But the atmosphere was different - the attitude towards foreigners more hostile. A reactionary anti-immigration ideology had spread like a pustulating rash and even mainstream politicians were covered in it.
If I had wanted to, I would not have been able to apply for my old job because most public health positions had migrated over to civil servant positions and being a non-EU citizen I am not eligible to apply. I paid a solicitor to confirm what I already suspected – despite my 21 years here without so much as a speeding ticket, my residency clock was effectively reset to zero in regards to applying for citizenship.
I recently took the Life in the UK test, which I sat without studying (my book didn’t arrive in time). Do you know what year was King Richard killed at the battle of Bosworth Field? 1485, 1490, 1495 or 1498? Or whether or not in Northern Ireland, cases are heard by a District Judge or Deputy District Judge, who is legally qualified and paid? Years and years of listening to Radio 4 paid off and I passed no problem. I seriously doubt many of my British-born friends and family would have.
So for now, I’m keeping out of trouble until 2018 when I can apply for my citizenship. If something should happen to me in the meantime, I’ve instructed my husband and children to dig my ashes into the allotment. Whatever happens, I’m determined to stay.
