Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Hi Everyone,

I have been married to a UAE national female for almost six years. We have been informed her passport will be revoke:( within the coming months and she must take the nationality of her husband.

What is the process for applying residency/citizenship?

Many thanks.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Which passport do you hold? Ask you embassy?

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Have I missed something, I though this forum was British nationals:).

As for the embassy, they don’t dealt with visa or passports issues so you will be either refer to the UK Border Agency or VFS Global.

Has anybody going through the same process? If so I will appreciate your advice on the below questions..

Whilst in London can she apply for the spousal/residency visa?
We have lived in UK, for 2 months, though we travel back for 2-3 every summer…will this go against us?

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

You still haven't answered a previous question. Which passport do YOU hold? Are you a British National or a British Citizen, that is to say were you born in Britain and are entitled to a British passport or have you gained a British passport by becoming a British Citizen - these are two completely different things and will probably impact on the process your wife may have to go through to be able to obtain residency or even a visa.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Doesn't it depend on HER family?

A colleague of mine in Dubai is American and married to an Emirati lady. She has retained her status and her kids have been given Emirati status too, despite what is commonly thought to happen.

Her father is important and supports the marriage. And that is why she has retained her Emirati citizenship.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Am British citizen (born in Australia). The process seems to be lot smoother if I was in London and she was applying for spousal visa.

Lullabelle – glad to hear your colleague is not facing the same issues. Is he an Arab national with US citizenship?

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Rules have recently changed regards spousal visa. My understanding is that:

Your wife must apply for her spousal visa from outside UK (presumably in UAE) - she cannot do it from within UK. If she is in UK, she must travel to UAE to do this and then re-enter.
You must have a savings of £16,500 for at least 6 months before she moves to UK on her spousal visa.
You must have a job with guaranteed income of at least £18,500 in UK. Otherwise you must have additional savings of 4 x this income, or 4 x the shortfall of your income.

There is a thread on the moving back to the UK forum on this very subject.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

... oh yes, and regardless of the number of years you have been married, you must wait a 5 year probationary period in Uk before your wife can apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain.

Sounds like, if your wife's UAE passport is being revoked, you might be in trouble.

She can enter on a visitors visa, but this has it's own T&C which are ultimately quite restrictive.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Five years for indefinite leave to remain? That's become stricter. Used to be a year (although I know of a case where it was issued after 6 months) and you could apply for citizenship after three years residency.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

The UK's rules regarding spousal visas are nuts, and the immigration officers are clipboard wielding nazis, but luckily there is a way around them.

If you are British, then you are entitled to live in any EU country (other than UK) as long as you are 'exercising your EU treaty rights'. This basically means working, studying or just living at your own expense (not claiming benefits).

Furthermore, your wife and direct family, regardless of nationality, are entitled to be with you. The EU country you reside in MUST issue them with residency permits free of charge and may not discriminate against you or her - effectively they must be treated same as national citizens of that country.

Now it gets fun. After more than 6 months, you can come to the UK and bring your wife in, and they MUST treat you in the same way they would treat nationals of the EU country you are in too. This means that they must not only let your wife in (no possibility for them to refuse entry), they must also issue your wife residency if you decide to stay, and they must do so FOR FREE, with none of those financial rules others have mentioned.

The case law is here:

http://webdb.lse.ac.uk/gender/Casefi...d=118&pageno=7

I have clarified this myself with the EU's Signpost lawyers, the case law is sound as is the above interpretation of it. You can google 'Surinder Singh' for more detail.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

I believe this is called the Surinder Singh route, which I also believe may be closed off as soon as the UK govt can do it.

I'm not so sure that merely being resident in an EU country counts and that you must have some kind of employment.

Like a lot of areas in this issue it is slightly vague and also contains a certain element of heresay and not fact.

I would love to be able to spend 6 months with my non EEA wife in Portugal or Spain (cheap CoL) on an extended 6 month holiday, and then simply 'walk' into UK without the complicated rules which they have brought in this year for the spouses visa.

Somehow I think this route might be too good to be true.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

You are correct, the previous rules were a lot simpler. The new rules are not. If I/we had gone back this June we would have been given automatic ILR based on our 10 year marriage, and could have claimed citizenship fairly quickly.

We wouldnt have had (m)any financial requirements either.

Not now. Lots of people in similar situations who are not happy.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Firstly, you don't have to be working, but you have to be 'exercising your EU treaty rights'. This means living in another EU country legally and 'permanently'. So if you're retired and live in Portugal, for example, that is fine, or if you are studying - but you have to do so at your own expense. It has been established that 6 months is enough to qualify as 'permanent'.

As for the UK being able to stop this, that will be difficult, because freedom of movement is enshrined in the EU treaty, and this interpretation is clearly established by the EU. The UK government cannot simply pass a new law, or change immigration rules to work around that. And even if your partner is a convicted criminal or has immigration issues in the past, this bypasses that. It puts you exactly on the same basis as a non-UK EU national bringing in family.

It isn't hearsay either - these are established legal precedents.

Check out the EU's signpost service yourself:

http://ec.europa.eu/citizensrights/f...d/index_en.htm

It may sound too good to be true, but it is true. Feel free to contact them through that site with your specific circumstances - it's free, and they really do respond to you within a week with detailed answers, unlike the lazy t**ts who work for the UK government's departments where you might be lucky to get a 'sorry, cannot help you' within 10 days. And you will see from that site dozens of cases where nation states have applied rules contrary to EU treaty requirements, and their lawyers step in to sort things out and ensure EU laws are applied.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Will her passport being revoked make her stateless? If so, things are likely to get quite serious - how would she have ILR if she doesn't have a passport? You should probably contact an immigration lawyer PDQ.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

I have taken your advice and written to them asking for advice on the Surinder Singh route.

There is a whole thread on this issue on the MBTTUK forum:

http://britishexpats.com/forum/showthread.php?t=761780

This also addresses questions about the Surinder Singh route (which is where I got my info from regards the uncertainty of whether you have to be working or not). It's a long thread so put the kettle on before you sit down to read it. :thumbsup:

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

As far as am aware you don’t need a passport to get the spousal visa.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Thanks guys I wasn’t aware of this.
Victor the kettle is on..time for light reading.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

But in general you need to apply for the spousal visa from outside the UK - and if the process takes longer than the UAE let her keep her passport, how's she going to travel?

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Here is the crazy part..she can stay here without passport .
As for the travelling, she can travel with the visa alone.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

I'd like to see the receiving country let her in without a passport.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Indeed.

When someone becomes "stateless" a whole lot of things suddenly change, wrt immigration.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Interesting, I will take a look - any pointers as to how far in the discussion on Surinder Singh is?

My wife is from Brazil, we're actually planning on moving to Portugal next year anyway. My business is largely conducted via the internet, so I can kind of locate myself anywhere and have no intention of ever living in the UK again and will be working in Portugal (probably declared as self-employed initially though plan to set up ltd company). The UKBA won't even allow my wife into the UK to visit, the rules they enforce are published on their site, but they still just completely ignore them and slap on bans they know have no justification just to force you to appeal (which we're currently doing). Once we are living in portugal and my wife has residency there, my understanding is there is nothing the UK can do about us coming in. I will have fun testing it.

My UK company had an employee from Sri Lanka who we employed as he could stay and work for couple of years after completing a degree. Eventually the various visas he was able to work on were closed down, so he ended up applying for 'Skilled Migrant' status. He wasn't a particular great programmer, didn't earn enough to qualify, but put forward rental income in Sri Lanka on properties he claimed to own there to bulk up his earnings. Unbelievably, he got the skilled migrant status. He seemed very confident he would, despite the rules implying he didn't qualify - he had friends stacking shelves at Tesco who'd done the same. He said it's all about 'who you know' and not what you know.

Basically, if you've had UKBA dealings or dealt with the home office in Croydon or the tribunals in Leics, you'll notice that there are a large number of people from immigrant communities working there, from countries which have a culture of corruption. Sri Lankans simply need to find the right bent Sri Lankan guy to take a bribe, and their application succeeds.

If they want to crack down on abuse, they should start with investigating every highly-skilled migrant visa issued in the last 5 years, and not start bashing honest British people who just want to bring their families in to the UK with them. The reason they won't is that the UKBA big wigs are not going to be the ones to tell them how utterly corrupt and incompetent a service they've been running all these years.

At some point in the future, this will be one of those 'Jimmy Savile' type scandals that hits the headlines, and then everyone asks why this was going on for so long with nobody doing anything about it, and there will be public enquiries and so on to find out why what was an open secret to so many was never public knowledge and why newspapers and media never bothered to investigate.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

So, on the one hand they say that Emirati women married to foreigners will lose their UAE passport.

On the other hand, they announce that Emirati women married to foreigners are now eligible for state housing. Is it just me who finds that a little bizarre...

http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-n...-state-housing

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

only fair given they won't be allowed out of the country :rofl:

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

So, with the increasing barriers, what happens when a Brit marries a non-EU woman abroad, spends 5 years with her out there and then tries to move back to the UK if the situation in the originally employed country becomes too dangerous to work in? If there is no confirmed job to come back to, and savings are lost getting out of the country, are the wives shown the door? I'm struggling to understand how the UK government is supporting the sanctity of marriage.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Yes, the wives are shown the door.

Our relationship is quite obviously genuine - we're similar age and have been together for nearly a decade, and now have a kid with another on the way. My wife has a good job in Dubai, legal residency, we have a decent apartment and car and a good standard of living. She's been to Europe several times with me, including Portugal (same language as Brazil) and she's not done a bunk to join the underground economy. Yet they seem utterly convinced that as soon as she enters the UK on a visit, she'll disappear, leaving me and her kids behind, take a room in some rickety house full of illegal immigrants and do low paid restaurant and cleaning work, knowing that she cannot visit her home country again (and return) and could face deportation at any time.

The UKBA are quite evidently completely bonkers. There really is no reasoning with these people.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

According to our great embassy:eek: here, she can enter the UK with the spousal visa only.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

I'd also check with the airline to see if they will carry her.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Funny rules mate. This is her home country so they can’t deport her to another country. Also she can still work for her firm, however she won’t be eligible for bonus/profit share.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

All the best with your expected new arrival, we are expecting our second as well.

In our case she completed her further studies in London, so she didn’t faced any issues with visit visa.

It seems to me we are getting punished for our honesty. I still can’t get my head around the whole thing. How do you explain this to your parents…sorry dad/mum it looks like we won’t be coming back anytime soon.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

And in the same vein, how do you explain to your kids from a previous marriage that you won't be coming back soon? Another worry over this situation.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Indeed, we were completely honest with all questions from UKBA but like that Ian Foot bloke on Come Fly with Me, they'll disbelieve anything you say even if it is true and you have no reason to lie anyway. I was told in 2006 to my face by UKBA officer that I was a liar because I claimed to own a company in Dubai 50/50 with my brother (which was true), but the officer claimed this was not possible, and I must have a local partner because 'she knew a bit about Dubai'.

So I can speak with first hand knowledge when I say UKBA employs borderline retards who are rude, lacking in any social skills and who'd be out on the street with a boot up their backside if they were at any private company.

As for my parents, they already know that my kids will grow up Brazilian. Britain has done squat for me except try to make my life miserable, that's why I've spent as much of my life as possible outside the place. As Brazilians, they have so much more opportunities in life, and have a fair chance of watching their national football team actually win a WC or three in their lifetime.

Re: Married for 5+ years outside UK
 

Having a foreign spouse is now an incredibly complicated business for those of us who are subjects of Her Britannic Majesty.