Yes exactly. I was spring cleaning the flat this weekend and came across the old rejection slip from the Home Office for a gf trying to move to the UK years ago. I'd forgotten how monstrous the process was.
She had everything in place: A job with a high enough salary. Language requirements. Enough money in the bank. We'd spent months working on it. Hired a lawyer we couldn't afford to make sure application was perfect.
It was rejected on the basis that the bank statement did not have a proper stamp from the bank at the top. The stamp was right there, at the top of the page. Anyone could see it.
But that's what it said. Completely bizarre Kafkaesque experience. So we had to appeal - more money, more time apart, further chance for the employer to say - 'this is too much hassle' & she'd lose job.
And if you lose the appeal it's a black mark against your name and you can't come to the UK on any visa for a good long time. Basically, it'd have meant I'd have had to leave the country.
We won appeal, it all worked out. But I never forgot what it was like to have this seemingly insane govt department have so much control over your life, making baffling decisions, while you haemorrhage hard-earned cash.
That's what it's like without free movement. That's the reality of what people face when the state gets to fuck with you however it likes on the basis that you want to take a job somewhere else.
Anyone who has gone through it, even tangentially, doesn't forget the total lack of control you have over your life, of your finances, of the viability of your personal relationships, of your emotional wellbeing.
It's an absolute bollocking shitchasm from morning to midnight is what it is. Free movement carves out a space in which we can at least protect some people, a continent's worth, from having to experience it, & work out from there. A great liberal project for the next century.
That's worth fighting for and worth defending. Many on right and left claim to support that goal, and tio support immigrants, but now that the fight for the single market is on they hide away and make their bullshit excuses.
Rant over.
