So, Twitter. In light of the ongoing clusterfuck that is #brexit, let me tell you a little about my white, Australian experience of dealing with the UK visa authority, a complete shitshow of a bureaucracy that is in no way prepared to handle what's coming.
My husband and I first moved to the UK in January 2011. He'd been given a position at a good university there - however, because the Tories had slashed the number of visas any uni was allowed to sponsor, they were unable to sponsor him even though they'd hired him.
Fortunately for us, my maternal grandfather was born in the UK, which meant I was eligible for an ancestry visa. A much more expensive visa than a sponsored one would've been, but it came with greater protections and my husband could work as my spouse. So we opted to do that.
Of course, in visa-language, "spouse" is code for "woman who does not work," so there was no designated space on my husband's spousal visa application to include his offer of work. We had to put all that info in as an extra detail and hope they noticed.
The whole process was expensive, labrynthine & nervewracking, but in the end, we got to the UK. Fast forward three years, and our son is born in England in 2014. Because the UK has no jus soli, he has no British citizenship; we have to apply to have him recognised as Australian.
This also means that we need to get him a passport so that he can one day leave the country. Which means travelling, in person, to a far-distant visa authority office, which is basically a warehouse, with an infant in tow.
We were there for about SEVEN HOURS.
We were there for about SEVEN HOURS.
Fun fact about visa authority offices: even though it's legally required for children and babies to attend under various circumstances, they contain absolutely zero provisions for people attending with small children. Seven hours in a warehouse with no baby change tables.
We were only able to get hot water to mix with my son's formula by asking to use the employee kitchen, and even then, the guards wouldn't let us in there; they brought us the water, with several frowning and lowkey chiding us as though we had any say in being there with him.
I'll note, too, that consulates are similarly restrictive about the needs of babies, but at least they have the excuse of actual security risks to consider and try to run smoothly and on time to compensate for it. The UK visa authority warehouses? Not so much.
Fastforward again to 2015: we're living in Scotland and considering applying for permanent residency, which means taking the UK citizenship test. The visa processing centre in Aberdeen had been closed, so we had to drive five hours to the one in Dundee after prepaying etc online.
We get to the Dundee centre. It's basically a fancy shed: the entire thing is basically one open room on several levels with office dividers put up. It's freezing cold outside. We, like many other applicants, have our toddler with us of necessity. But "no babies allowed" inside.
This is justified because, as stated, the whole place is just a shed - there's no walls between the testing & waiting areas, and they don't want child-noise to distract the test-takers. So anyone with a small child has to wait with them outside. IN SCOTLAND. IN WINTER.
If an adult showed up alone with a baby? They would've been turned away. Parents who came in pairs had to take turns with their kid outside, where there was no shelter and no place to sit. In 4C weather, I saw a frozen woman cradling a baby in arms as she paced in the wind.
My husband and I were "lucky" - we'd driven there, so we had the car to sit in. My husband went first while I waited in the car with our son. Fifteen minutes passed. My husband came back, visibly shaking. He hadn't been allowed to even sit the test. Why?
Because on the dropdown form he'd filled out online, he'd accidentally clicked that he was bringing a different type of valid ID to the one he'd actually brought. So even though he had valid ID on him, even though it was the matter of a single mis-checked box, they refused him.
Next, it was my turn. Now, at that time, my passport was still in my maiden name, because I'd got it just in advance of our wedding to go on our overseas honeymoon. This had posed no issue when getting my visa to the UK, or in opening a bank account there in my married name.
As I'd done in every other instance, I'd brought my original marriage certificate with me, because all my utilities, bank statements etc referred to me by my married name. Again: this documentation had been sufficient to get me INTO THE ACTUAL COUNTRY and to work and bank there.
But to sit the fucking citizenship test in a shed in Dundee? Oh, no. For that, I was told, only BRITISH marriage certificates could be accepted. Never mind that I was from a Commonwealth country: I was likewise deemed to have insufficient ID and turned away.
I asked if I could speak to a supervisor; no, there wasn't anyone higher around than the woman I was dealing with. Could I call the relevant office for help? No; it was Saturday, nobody would answer. The office was closed. So we had to turn around and drive right back home.
On the basis of this, we decided we didn't want to stay in the UK anymore, but we still needed to renew our expiring visas. Which, as they were ancestry visas, meant:
a) paying around £2000 for the three of us; and
b) sending in huge quantities of original ID documents.
a) paying around £2000 for the three of us; and
b) sending in huge quantities of original ID documents.
These documents included: all our passports, original marriage certificate, all our original birth certificates, my MOTHER'S original birth certificate, my GRANDFATHER'S original long-form birth certificate, bank & utility statements, original work contracts - EVERYTHING.
By the time we came to send this all off in late November 2015, my husband had a job offer back in Australia, so we planned to leave the UK in April - we only need the visas extended for the next five months. So we send our stuff off, and we wait.
And wait.
And wait.
And wait.
And wait.
We can see from our bank statements that the UK visa authority has taken the £2000-odd pounds processing fee from us, but we're into 2016 and haven't heard anything - until, in late January, we get a letter telling us that our application and all our documents have been lost.
Specifically: having received our application at their first processing centre, the visa authority took our money, made NO OTHER RECORD OF OUR APPLICATION, and then send our docs on to their other centre, via the REGULAR-ASS UNPROTECTED MAIL SERVICE, whose post depot flooded.
Ours was not the only application thus affected. In fact, we were later told by the Australian consulate, fuckups of this nature are *common* to the UK visa authority, who are apparently known for being careless with documents, slow, & generally incompetent by other governments.
So: we need new passports in order to leave the country. But to get new passports, we need new supporting documentation. And all those documents WERE ALSO LOST. And me? My passport is my only photo ID. So we had to get my mother IN AUSTRALIA to get a new birth cert for me.
We then had to organise, and pay out of pocket for, a two-day trip to London (where the consulate is) FROM ABERDEEN, to get new passports in an expedited, not-reliant-on-the-Royal-Mail fashion. Which, again, cost us about £2000 out of pocket. It KILLED our savings.
In the end, the UK visa authority refunded us for the application they couldn't process, and returned our "lost" documents (which evidently weren't destroyed by water after all) to us. But by then, it was late in 2016, almost a full year after we'd applied, and we were in Aus.
We never recovered or were compensated for the additional £2000 we lost having to sort things out, and because of THEIR ERROR, the UK visa authority now flags all our passports whenever we enter the UK, because for some reason, they need a re-explanation of what happened.
The entire 5 years we lived in the UK - as well-off, white, English-speaking, Commonwealth citizens - the UK visa authority was a hostile, incomprehensible, unpleasant, stressful entity to deal with. That's it's baseline mode: it is profoundly more vile to anyone less privileged.
It's a cold, hard fact that dealing with the UK visa authority trashed both my husband's and my mental health and left us in a financial hole which, without the support of solvent, caring family members, we would never have climbed out of. Years later, we're only just recovering.
How an entity so comprehensively dedicated to intransigence and bureaucratic pettifogging can possibly hope to deal with the hugely expanded workload necessitated by a hard #Brexit is beyond me. They simply won't cope, and any UK citizens wanting visas should beware.
In all respects, the UK visa authority almost perfectly fits the description that Douglas Adams famously gave to his Vogons: "Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous" - the "almost" is because these days, yeah: they actually ARE evil, too.
In conclusion: the marriage of xenophobia and bureaucratic incompetence is one of the ugliest in the modern world, and that's saying something. The UK isn't alone in perpetuating this particular evil, so let it be a lesson to everyone on a similar path to FIX THAT SHIT NOW.
FIN
FIN
