UK Border, Stansted airport. Image: Flickr/ Andre
Immigration has been a hot topic of late, featuring in election campaigning and ranking third (after the NHS and the UK economy) in a list of the most important election issues according to a BBC poll. It is a problem that we always think of immigration in a one-sided way. The ‘us’ is an uncomplicated homogenous ‘British’ population. And the ‘them’ is the immigrants and potential immigrants that are coming to ‘steal our benefits’ / ‘use our NHS’ / ‘take our jobs’ / ‘contribute diversity and multiculturalism’ (delete as appropriate). On the other hand, we could think about emigrants. And ex-pats (since, white people aren’t ‘immigrants’ no matter where they go). Or transnational families, or mixed citizen-immigrant families – the latter is what I focus on here.
For example, maybe you’ve heard that Britain is the biggest exporter of people in the EU. Or that Britain isn’t even in the top ten of destination countries for Romanian migrants. You’re possibly also aware that the cost of immigrants to the NHS is vastly lower than the costs UK citizens levy on European national healthcare systems (who are the ‘health tourists’ now?). And I’m interested in pursuing this question of benefits. I believe that restricting access to benefits for migrants will have a detrimental effect on people in the UK. My position is based on an existing effort to prevent immigrants from accessing benefits and the enormous amount of harm that has done to immigrants and citizens alike. I’m talking about the spousal visa minimum income requirement.
