you learn the hard way: ignorance is expensive – and ignorance is not bliss at all.’
Diana isn’t alone. She and Kelly, another person I speak to, live in different cities and have had completely different lives, but their experiences of the immigration regime are remarkably similar. Calling the UK home since she was nine years old, Kelly came here after her dad brought the whole family – Kelly, her sister and her mother – from West Africa on a diplomatic visa. Ten years later, when Kelly was in the middle of her first year of university, he abruptly left the country and she was told she didn’t have the right to stay in the UK. With her mum and sister, Kelly applied for a family visa, but when that was rejected, she decided to apply for the right to stay in the country alone.
‘I went through three lawyers,’ she says. The first one didn’t understand her case and after he submitted her application, the Home Office said there was no cogent argument in the papers, so they had nothing to consider. That cost her over £1,000. ‘At the time I didn’t understand the case, so I was dependent on him to explain,’ Kelly remembers, shaking her head. ‘There was no communication … so … I was chasing him every second and then when the Home Office refused it there was not much done.’
Kelly waited three years for her appeals to be processed. With no right to work and unable to access state support, she had to resort to living between friends’ houses and she nearly became homeless. ‘It’s ridiculous to be honest because you’re not allowed to work, so where do you expect me to get the money from?’ she asks. ‘I think the cost is just to frustrate people to just give up and go back.’ She asked multiple agencies for financial support and legal help. She was a ‘novice’ and had no idea ‘what was going on’. It’s not chance that makes Kelly’s and Diana’s experiences so similar. As well as exorbitant fees for visas and applications, support for immigration and asylum cases is almost non-existent unless you happen to have the money to pay for it, and when you’re not allowed to work, for many people, funding legal representation is an impossible task. Even for those lucky enough to be able to afford it, there’s no guarantee that the advice you get is going to be reliable.
‘In the late 90s when New Labour came in, it was a sort of a golden age for legal aid … because there were a lot of asylum claims at that time the government was really throwing money at solicitors’ firms to get them to open immigration departments … to get solicitors trained up in immigration law so they could take on all these asylum claims,’ former immigration barrister Frances Webber remembers. The legal aid she talks about is money the state gives to people who need it to pay for advice or representation. It was available for people regardless of where they were born, so it could be used for people trying to regularise their status or claim British citizenship. But within about three years, New Labour started cutting back. ‘It was like this great tidal wave of money was then retreating, retreating, retreating,’ Webber says.
In 2007, the government introduced a flat fee for legal aid asylum cases, which meant lawyers were paid a fixed amount regardless of how many hours they worked on a case. ‘If you did go over a certain number and if you could justify that … then you would get paid by the hour,’ Webber explains, but getting to that stage was very complicated and difficult. These changes incentivised a factory-style process: encouraging ‘rubbish firms who do no work or do very little work’ and penalising those who took ‘great care’. Firms were expected to subsidise work on asylum cases with money they received from more straightforward legal aid cases. Then the Coalition government cut legal aid in 2013, including the money available for most immigration and asylum cases.2 ‘When we talk about legal aid cuts and we talk about other aspects of austerity,’ journalist Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi says, ‘we don’t also talk about immigration.’
New Labour had cracked down on fraudulent lawyers but, as costs spiralled and legal aid was hacked away, the chaos left people once again exposed to predatory lawyers. What has essentially been solidified is a two-tier justice system.
Reliable help is now extremely hard to come by. Two of the biggest not-for-profit immigration and asylum centres, Refugee and Migrant Justice (RMJ, formerly the Refugee Legal Centre) and the Immigration Advisory Service, closed in 2010 and 2011 respectively. Between them, they represented around 20,000 clients and employed hundreds of staff. The reason for their failure was massive cash issues; RMJ said this was brought on by changes to legal aid, which meant bills wouldn’t be paid until a case was finished. When they went under, they were owed £2 million by the Legal Services Commission, which ran the legal aid scheme in England and Wales from 2000 until 2013.3 ‘You just don’t have the bodies helping people, so you are going to see more rejections,’ explains Alison Moore, director of Refugee Women Connect, an asylum organisation in Liverpool, which caters specifically for women. ‘It’s not an area where you shouldn’t have a legal representative with you.’
But the issue is also the cost. ‘Initially they were very modest,’ Webber says of immigration fees. They were increased by a small amount when the Home Office claimed they weren’t covering administrative costs. But then they skyrocketed to the levels they are now, and they’re still soaring. In 2016–17, fees for settlement, residence and nationality increased by 25 per cent. They’re constantly changing, but at the time of writing, if you want to become a permanent resident of the UK, it will cost you £2,389.4 That’s on top of £50 for a ‘Life in the UK’ test, which you have to take when you apply to become a British citizen or for permanent residency and, if you’re required to take one, £150 for an English exam.
Playwright Inua Ellams had discretionary leave to remain and so had to refresh his status every three years, costing £900 each time.5 Being able to stay in this country, he tells me, is ‘expensive – it’s thousands upon thousands upon thousands of pounds’. It’s even gotten to the stage where the Home Office is charging £5.48 every time you require a response by email.6 This inevitably impacts poorer migrants disproportionately, people who might not be able to pay to get the reply they need, which risks subsequently preventing them from successfully resolving their claim.
Having cash is not an automatic guarantor to frictionless movement, but money lubricates the whole system. As of 2010, if you have £2 million or more to invest in the British economy, you can apply for an ‘investor’ visa – and if successful, come to the country for three years and four months and bring immediate family members. The right to settle after two years has a £10 million price tag, and £5 million buys the same entitlement after three years.7 For everyone else, the cost of it all can shape their whole lives.
While successive governments have extolled the virtues of family life, immigration controls have kept people apart. Since July 2010, migrants from outside the European Economic Area and their spouses in the UK have been separated by borders and the associated price tags. Under Theresa May’s plans to ‘get numbers down’, a UK citizen or settled resident (someone who has the right to stay in the UK with no time restrictions) had to earn £18,600 per year before tax if they wanted their non-EU partner to join them. The cost rose by £3,800 if that included bringing a child, and an extra £2,400 for every additional child.8
For decades, non-EU spouses and family members have been treated with suspicion when all they wanted was to join their loved ones: couples are quizzed over the most intimate details of their relationship and asked questions often based on racist stereotypes; children’s teeth and wrists are X-rayed to try to ascertain their age; and older relatives have been left continents apart from their closest family simply because they have a relative in the country they’re in – even if that person isn’t available, able or willing to look after them. It’s virtually impossible for elderly non-Europeans, whether grandparents, aunts and uncles or siblings, to come to live in the UK.9 And it’s not always easy to visit either.
It’s these strict, costly rules that left five-year-old Andrea Gada’s family desperate. Walking home from school with her father and brother on a winter’s day in Eastbourne, Andrea was
