What David Cameron doesn't want you to know about Britain's immigration system

The room is quiet, dark and still. A woman sits bathed in the glow of yellow light, her eyes downcast as she reads from the single sheet of paper she holds in her hands.

“For the moment, we exist in the interstice between the words of our vows and the deeds of them. For now, I’ll wrap myself in our love. I’ll be grateful, knowing I am lucky to have it, while looking forward to after – an after where we use our love, brick by brick, to build our lives together.”

These are the words of a woman known simply as Lucy; a woman who has been denied the right to live with her husband, Neil, a British citizen, because of recent changes to UK immigration law that effectively undermine the basic human rights to love and family.

Lucy’s story is just one among the estimated 50,000 families affected by the changes made by the Conservative-led government on 9 July 2012, the last day of active parliament. Under the new law, British citizens married to citizens of non-EEA member states (including the US and Canada) are no longer permitted to bring their partners and families over to live with them if their income is under £18,600 a year. This figure has to come entirely from the British citizen, as any income earned by the non-EEA partner or their family is not counted. Neither are the possibility of extended family members supporting the couple or any other extenuating circumstances taken into consideration, for example, the fact that one partner is in higher education.

In other words, the changes brought in by the current government effectively deny 47 per cent of the adult UK population – and 29 per cent of Londoners – (the proportion of the population who earn less that the required £18.6K) the right to fall in love with, marry or have children with anyone who comes from a country outside the EEA.

The net result of these policies has been to rip apart the fabric of thousands of British families, and create artificially low immigration figures in the run up to the 2015 election.

But the people of Britain are pushing back.

Love Letters to the Home Office is a grassroots initiative headed by artist and director Katharine Rose Williams Radojičić, a British citizen whose own Montenegro-born husband was initially denied a spouse visa following the changes as a result of her variable freelance income – a decision that took more than 18 months of heartbreak, anguish and financial strain to overturn. In a recent article in the Guardian, Katherine writes that: “I am one of the lucky cases… We have our visa now, but there are so many others who do not. So we’ll be standing alongside them until human rights are the same for everybody in the UK, regardless of income or who they marry.”

A mixture of artistic project and political activism, Love Letters to the Home Office is in the process of collecting and compiling the stories of the hardworking British citizens and their families who have been affected by the recent changes, culminating in a book publication and, premiering last night at the Battersea Arts Centre, a theatrical rendition of the stories written and directed by Katharine herself and cobbled together in only three days of rehearsals in time for next week’s election.

“We decided it was really important to get the message out before the elections,” says Katherine at the show’s opening night, “we want people to be aware of the law and to know what they are voting for.”

The show itself was un-polished and somewhat haphazard, but no less emotive or powerful for that. What it lacked in theatrical pomp and circumstance it more than compensated for with the strength of its message and the heart-rending passion of the actors and director alike as they wove through details of personal stories with facts about the law itself.

“We don’t know when we’ll see Daddy again. Mummy needs to get a job so Daddy can come and live with us.”

So says one little boy whose parents have been artificially separated as a result of the law. Another letter details how a 15-month-old little boy living in California refuses to be separated from his mother’s tablet computer, calling it “Da-da” because it is only through the computer’s Skype app that he is able to see his father. The little boy is a UK citizen, as are his older sister and his father, but his mother is an American who travelled back to the States to visit her dying father with her two children in early 2012. While she was away, the law was quietly changed so that when she applied to go back home to re-join her husband in Scotland later that year, she and her children were denied entry because her husband’s income as a full time student fell below the required £18.6K threshold – this despite the fact that when living in Scotland she was working in a full time job earning considerably more than that. The family don’t know when they will see each other again.

“This policy is hardest on the children. How does one explain that Daddy and Mummy love you, but the government says you can’t see them?”

More worrying than the law itself, is the arbitrary manner in which it is applied. The decision whether or not to grant a spouse or family visa is often left to low-ranking Assistant Entry Clearance Officers (ECOs), a job for which you only need 2 GCSEs and whose salary is, ironically, under £18,600 per annum. These ECOs often make basic errors in processing the forms and documentation of applicants, thus requiring desperate families and spouses to resubmit their entire application – often to considerable personal and financial cost.

One man, Oualid, describes the pain and uncertainty of this process: “My income is over £19,000. I have applied twice, yet still I wait. I have spent over £2,000 just on application costs and over £10,000 on travelling to meet my wife every few months. All while paying my taxes, my rent, all my travel expenses… I just don’t know. I wonder if they have families. Do they not have wives that miss them? Do they not want to be parents? Even if they don’t, I do and my name is human.”

Another woman articulates the frustration and impotency of being a fully fledged UK citizen and yet being denied basic human rights by the same government you pay tax to: “It is heartbreaking to realise that as a tax paying, honest, law-abiding citizen, I have fallen victim to my own country’s ill-conceived laws. My tax is going toward the same civil department that is keeping my family apart.”

The reality of the situation is that current policy is both unlawful, and a fundamental violation of basic human rights as enshrined in the Geneva Convention and the EU constitution. The law has been arbitrarily changed at the detriment of ordinary British citizens and to provide an artificial gloss on immigration figures that can then be used as part of an anti-immigration election campaign. This is not only immoral, it is unsustainable. This is a racist (non-EEA countries predominately have high proportions of non-white citizens), inflammatory policy that “simply does not work”.

In the words of Trevor A Toussaint, one of the actors participating in Love Letters to the Home Office: “The UK Home Office website used to state that the family unit was at the heart of all British policy on immigration. It doesn’t say that anymore.”

This is what David Cameron and the rest of the coalition government don’t want the British public to know about immigration: that our country’s laws and policies are not only hurting the most vulnerable British citizens, they are tearing apart the very fabric of British society.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.