I feel like putting a different slant on the rhetoric that gets bandied about when it comes to immigrants. I am an immigrant to this country. I had been living in Britain for eight years when I first applied for indefinite leave to remain. That’s the permit that Nigel Farage has been saying he would scrap if he was to become prime minster. He sees it as some sneaky back door for all these immigrants who want to come in and put their feet up and be a drain on the welfare state. That seems to be the man’s only view of what it means to be an immigrant. And given how much he repeats it (as his selling point), he’s clearly confident that a lot of people agree with him.
Believe me, getting indefinite leave to remain status is not an easy process. I moved to Britain from Australia in 1992. As a Commonwealth citizen I was able to apply for a two-year working holiday visa. That meant I could work here but only in part-time jobs.
When I wanted to work on British magazines I was incredibly lucky that the two companies I joined in the 1990s were happy to sponsor me as a skilled worker, which gave me a finite amount of time to live here. I think it was three or four years. It also came with the stipulation that I would never qualify for unemployment benefits. If I lost my job, I lost my visa.
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When I married my husband, Ross, in 2000 I was eligible to apply for indefinite leave to remain. We’d already been living together for six years so I was very relaxed about it all. There was an absolute ton of paperwork to get together but I knew that once all that was done, it would be a few weeks and then, finally, I’d never have to worry about a looming visa deadline again.
It took the Home Office four weeks to come back to me and tell me my application had been rejected. I was informed of this in a short, cold letter stating that they were not satisfied our marriage was genuine. The last sentence of the letter told me I had four weeks to get my affairs in order and vacate the country for good.
With her husband Ross on their wedding day in 2000
I can’t really find the words to describe how stunned I felt, standing there in the kitchen of my flat. The flat my “fake” husband and I had bought and been living in for four years. I couldn’t understand how our marriage could have looked anything but real. It was real. Still is, thanks for asking. I could not get my head around the callousness of a short letter basically saying, “Off you f***.” I had spent weeks gathering all the information they wanted from me, including locating my original birth certificate and having it sent from Australia. They wanted reams of bank statements, letters addressed to both Ross and me, photographs and, of course, all the wedding documents and photos. I wonder how long it took someone to decide that it all added up to a sham.
There was no information forthcoming about how I might appeal this situation. No offers of phone numbers or mailing addresses that might lead me to a discussion about this with a human. The whole blunt tone was a fully intended stonewall. Just leave.
I’d built a life here. It was pretty easy to check that I was in gainful employment, dutifully paying my taxes and obeying the law. I’d have welcomed some kind of unannounced visit from an official if they wanted to check that Ross and I were indeed a genuine married couple.
I was the editor of New Woman magazine at the time so the next morning I took the letter to work and numbly showed it to my boss, Dawn. She put me in touch with a lawyer they used — usually to help Brits go and work for the Australian arm of the company, ironically.
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The lawyer was incredible, calm and pragmatic but at the same time in agreement that this was a situation worth panicking about. This turn of events had also put me in the position of overstaying my skilled worker visa so now I was breaking the law. I was officially an illegal immigrant.
My only option was apparently to gather every single possible piece of crap I could that proved Ross and I were a legitimate couple and present myself to an immigration office in person.
It was turning into a real-life version of that old film Green Card but I didn’t need to fake any of our relationship: I had holiday photos, joint bills, cards from friends congratulating us on our wedding, emails inviting the two of us to parties, phone bills that showed the times I’d called his parents. Anything. Everything.
I had a huge handbag bursting with manila folders as I made my way to the immigration reporting centre in Croydon, south London. It would be a day of queuing for hours and hours and waiting for my turn to be seen and make my appeal in person. My lawyer drafted me a letter explaining how aware and anxious I was about being illegal because the denial of indefinite leave to remain had come through after my other visa had expired.
I arrived at the centre at 5.30am to find that there were already about 300 people queuing outside the closed building. It would be hours before the office would open. We were all standing outside in a car park with metal barriers in place for us to snake around in a line. My lawyer had advised me to take food, water, a book and be prepared to be standing there for hours. She was right. This was the year 2000. No smartphones to bury our heads in. I don’t remember what book I took and I was too stressed to concentrate on reading it anyway.
Elvin in 2016: “I’d argue that my hard work has paid off for more than just me”
DAVID M. BENETT/GETTY IMAGES FOR AUDI
A younger woman standing next to me said she was desperate for the loo and asked if I’d mind her spot in the queue. Of course, I said. She returned two hours later with food and a Topshop bag and just smiled at me as she took her place in the queue behind me. I’ve never forgotten the brass neck of that. I think most of us standing there, staring into space, would have preferred to go shopping while some other mug held our place. I remember wishing that an immigration official had witnessed my exasperation at such appalling queue etiquette — surely all the proof needed that I was a fully assimilated Brit.
I made it inside the building at 11.30am, when I had to take a number and wait another hour to be called to a desk. I handed everything to a bored, harried immigration officer. He flicked through it impatiently, gave me another ticket and told me to come back in about two hours. I have never been so thrilled to be released to a shopping centre. I ate, I sat, I shopped a bit, but most importantly I peed, while a faceless bureaucrat in a dingy office decided my future.
It was finally time to go back for the verdict. I had thought there’d be some sort of lengthy discussion with an immigration officer, a ton of questions for me, that maybe they’d be trying to catch me out if they really did think I was lying. But no, I was called to a desk and told they’d reviewed my documents and were now satisfied. The man smiled as he put that beautiful sticker in my passport: indefinite leave to remain. I fought back tears as I thanked him and got the hell out of there. I was definitely grateful, relieved and ecstatic. But then when I got the lawyer’s bill for about £2,000 I was furious — what an expensive frig about when my application was always legitimate.
Nigel Farage has been talking about indefinite leave to remain residents recently as if they’re all scammers, simply setting up shop here and leeching from the economy. “A huge burden on the state,” he says. If I’d have heard him talking like this back when I was one, I’d have been devastated. To brand hundreds of thousands of people as nothing but grifters who just want to park our butts and start claiming the dole is disgusting.
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Since I moved to Britain in 1992 I have worked my arse off. And forgive my immodesty for a second, but I’d argue that my hard work has paid off for more than just me. At the time of applying for indefinite leave to remain I’d already launched Sugar magazine, which became a market leader. In short I think I’ve more than held my own as a contributor to the workforce, to the country.
And I feel confident to say that most immigrants who are here with indefinite leave to remain are just like me: human beings who simply want to work, contribute to the country and live a nice life with their loved ones. People put down roots, they meet their partners, they have children. The idea that Farage wants everyone to have that status reviewed every five years is an insulting threat. It’s dehumanising. He’d have us all queueing down at that immigration centre every five years, wondering if some official in a bad mood might just turf us out on a whim. Would you give your skills and tax money to a country that actively wanted to make you feel permanently insecure?
It is not easy to just walk into this country — that’s the first thing to remember. And it’s a lengthy, tedious, time-sucking, expensive thing to then apply for citizenship. I’m not complaining about that; I’m happy to have jumped through all the hoops to have earned that right. But don’t let anyone have you believing it’s an easy road.
As the famous line from Hamilton goes: “Immigrants — we get the job done.” Immigrants are far more of a boost than a drain for economies. I’m going to start being a lot more vocal about the fact that I am one because we need to challenge the dominant, poisonous rhetoric around the subject.
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