the words after thereafter

a kind true life, prose, thinking piece i wrote about my situation regarding immigration. I'd like to get some feedback on it as writing though,

1.
I met my partner in March of 2010, in the café where I worked in Bristol. She came to the UK from Japan on a 2 two-year working holiday visa. It was windy outside; I think that inside the cafe we had the fireplace lit. I was 27 years old then; I worked in that café, I had a studio where I drew quiet watercolours while listening to books on tape, I started a lot of things without really finishing them. I read a lot of self-help books for a while; I made a lot of lists.

Kano worked in the café for while and made much better lattes than everyone else, then she left to become a full time baker. I would see her around on her bike sometimes, and we’d stop and say hello hello. She played saxophone with people and did it wonderfully. Some time went past in the way it does. We went to see TREE OF LIFE

And Somehow we got together in the summer of last year, we watched IKIRU, which is a film I sometimes claim is my favorite. We went to berlin at the end of October and saw the word Ohne in gallery, it meant ‘untitled’ but for a little while we thought it was a name. We were looking at photographs by Friederich seidenstucker, they were of Berlin zoo and then Berlin zoo all knocked down. We left and rode our bikes around the forest and mitte and got lost on very cold clear night. We also ate pomegranates, which were gigantic, and yoghurt which was frozen. We came back to Bristol and she moved to my house where I lived with two other nice people, and we listened to FATE IS ONLY ONCE and to LONDON IS THE PLACE FOR ME and the house was messy in a really nice way lots of the time, we ate toast and had pancakes in the morning and miso and spinach in the night.

I did start to think that soon it’ll be Christmas, and then January and then February - and they always feel so quick - and then it’ll be time for her to go back to Japan. And then it was Christmas, and then it was new years and then somewhere at the end of January we found out that Kano was pregnant. It was all very exciting, we made some appointments and filled in some forms and one day we the midwife amplified the baby’s heart beating. We talked about what we wanted to do, we said ‘lets get married’

2.
And then it was March and it was time for Kano to fly to Amsterdam and from there to Osaka. We got up at 4am to get to Bristol airport, Afterwards I went home and watched all of season 1 of homeland and slept for 2 whole days. For a few months I worked a lot, I watched mad men and read a book about babies called expecting. I watched ted talks in the bathroom and at the very last weekend possible the band I play in did some new recordings.

I flew to Hong Kong and on to Osaka may 8th and Kano and her mum picked me up. We went to Kyoto. We came back to Toyama and I met the two dogs. I looked around the neighborhood and the city and at mountains. We go to hospital here every other Monday and they show us the baby. I'm studying teaching English as a second language using an online course, its ok. I walk around the pear trees and try to learn Japanese as a second language.

Now.

I knew that the UK current coalition government had some idea about making it harder to bring a foreign spouse to England. I heard on the radio two people have a Today show polite back and forth about it one morning while I was opening at the cafe. I also knew I wanted to do that very thing, bring my foreign spouse back to Bristol once the child was born. Then, and less so but still somehow now, I thought ‘hey, I'm having a kid here, I'm going to be a father, they can just give me a break’ it seems like such a basic simple thing to want I couldn’t believe it could actually be an issue.

A basic simple thing to want

I want to have some kind of safe place to put the child in, and I know which place, it’s the place I live In and met Kano in and where I've been investing my time and energy. Its’ where all my friends live, all the people who I want to learn how to be a good parent from. It’s the house my family lived in, where the overgrown garden is takes up the whole world from the front window. I want to have a place where we measure this kid and make a line and write down the date �" when I read the new home office policy documents and the fullness of how we maybe do not qualify to even ask to come to the UK dawn on me, this was one of the tangible things I felt so sad about but, then a few days later I thought ‘well we just get a long stick and use that’ but that’s not the same.

New home office policy

The gist of this new policy, which taps the old policy on the shoulder and says ‘your time is over’ on July 9th this year, is this �" to sponsor a spouse from outside the EU you must have an annual income of around 18,000 pounds, with an additional 2000 for a each child.

At the same time the home office and home secretary Theresa May are clarifying for the courts what it is that they should think when they think about article 8 of the humans rights act. That’s the right that says, “ Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence”. The discussion about the government dictating this rights mean to judges seems to me to have been about criminals. These criminals are being allowed to stay here with their families and cats even though they did crimes, because of human rights. I don’t know what to think about that, it seems to me you would have to prove to the court that this family life existed and I guess you would have served the criminal sentence. Perhaps its more complicated than that, but talking about criminals whilst changing the laws for everyone feels disingenuous. It seems the right of appeal for immigration cases could be withdrawn completely in 2014.

The rhetoric of the home office on this issue is often about public funds. Anyone bringing someone here shouldn’t rely on public funds and the person coming here shouldn’t need them either. I don’t think a foreign spouse would be able to qualify for access to public funds currently, I suppose they could once they become a citizen. At the moment that takes 2 years but that goes up to 5 under these changes.

The United Kingdom

The reason I want to raise my child in the UK has nothing to do with public funds. If we could have a work visa for Kano by waving the right to access them I would want us to do it. In Bristol I feel confident that we could make ends meet as a sustainable family unit. Nothing in what I've read address’s children much, apart from to say you need an extra two thousand per one, so its’ lucky were not having twins. A child born in our circumstance footnote 1 is a British citizen. It seems unfair footnote 2  and immoral that the child should be excluded from any benefits it would be entitled to if Kano was British, or if I was a single father in the UK. I don’t know what those benefits are, but they are not the reason I want to be in the UK.

The imaginary economics of our living in the UK

If I was to return to my old job, I could work full time at minimum wage, which would be about 11.600 pounds. If Kano could work part time at her old place of work she could earn about 6000 pounds a year (that’s at about 12 hours a week, because they’d pay her more because she is more skilled). So If I also do some additional design or art work over a year, that could be an extra 4000 Footnote 3 per year So that’s an income of around 19 and half thousand between the two of us. Which now I write it down seems not great, but carrying on. If our family income was 1600 a month, with bills and rent taking a little over half of that, and food and others the rest, we’d be not saving anything, but it seems possible. It also feels possible there to do things to improve our situation.

One huge problem I have with the application for spouse visas is that there seems to be no way of including the potential earnings of the spouse, unless they are already legally working in the UK when the application is made. So its’ entirely based on my inadequate income. I think at the least there should be a way of showing them the whole picture.

3.
I first read about the proposed changes in bit more detail one morning in guardian article titled 'Stark choice under new immigration rules: exile or family breakup. I felt sick. I wrote to two PMs and scrolled around some websites trying to see what to do. I don’t know much about how it all played out from there in the British press and parliament. On a strange whim I looked for the reporting on the story in the daily mail, not to read the article but to make myself angry reading the comments, when I looked at that part of the bottom half of the internet though, it was mostly people saying that this would have really messed them up if it had happened when they were younger. I found a facebook Footnote 4 page about it and I ‘liked’ that. I wrote to lots of lawyers and didn’t hear back. The letters I wrote were likely frantic and sprawling and without proper questions or bullet points. I got an email back from Chris Bryant of labour saying that labour kind of opposed it and had different principles, but might support the government with some of these things like stopping sham marriages. I'm all for stopping sham marriages. I got an email back from my MP saying he could write to the home office on my behalf but that it likely wouldn’t do anything. Via some online comments I read that the liberal democrats didn’t say anything when this was debated in parliament, I'm sure I can find out more about that at some point if I want. I wrote to Theresa May and her secretary and have heard back anything; I don’t what they would say.

How does something like this work? Which parts of it are law, which parts are policy? What are those things exactly? I remember Theresa May on Andrew Marr’s show saying what they wanted was for parliament to agree all together on this article 8 business, so what was that, an act of parliament?

Most of the people who lives are going to be affected by this wont know about it until its too late. They’ll meet someone somewhere and fall in love and they’ll be having their first child and right when they don’t need this kind of obstacle they’ll find the rules aren’t what you thought they were they are this now.

4. 
The policy document itself is a nightmare to read, for someone like me at least. It seems to start with a list of changes to all the paragraphs you haven’t read yet. It says things like ‘After the definition of ‘civil partner’ insert “‘conviction’ means conviction for a criminal offence in the UK or any other country.’ And

In the definition 
of ‘intention 
to live permanently with the other’ add after that phrase
and intend to live 
together permanently
and delete the words after 
thereafter”. 

Maybe I can make twenty two thousand pounds a year laying government policy statements out like f*****g poems. This talk of what to change in upcoming paragraphs goes on for about 20 pages. There’s some chatter about paragraph 276 footnote 5 which I am now afraid of. Page 23 starts with a few things that I don’t mind, the partners must be over 18, they must have met, they must intend to live together, fine. Then it lugs the financial requirements out of its bag and dumps them all over the page, (a) a specified gross annual income of at least-
(i) £18,600; (ii) an additional £3,800 for the first child; and 
(iii) an additional £2,400 for each additional child; 
alone or in combination with 
(b) specified savings of- 
(i) £16,000; and 
(ii) additional savings of an amount equivalent to 2.5 times the amount which is the difference between the gross annual income from the sources listed in paragraph E-ECP.3.2.(a)-(d) and the total amount required under paragraph E-ECP.3.1.(a);

Nuts, so the amount that’s relevant to us is, I think £ 21,900. We’d have to somehow show them that money as income or have some significant savings and match the rest with our income.

The next 25 pages kind of repeat themselves over but you have an idea that they are probably subtly changing, it’s a bit like Philip Glass.

5.
There’s another document titled ‘statement of intent: family immigration’ - its a lot more understandable, but it’s the same. Often while reading it the criminality or conviction or threat to the public comes up, when a moment ago we were talking about spouses. Its hard not to think there’s a deliberate attempt to conflate these issues and muddy the conversation, I don’t want to think like this. 
Further on, the document talks about the best interests of the child, and about appeals with regards to article 8. It says you also have to meet the immigration criteria to use that, which is essentially the financial barrier, which means that right is for people who can afford it.
There are some other criteria that I'm less concerned with because they don’t seem such a hurdle to us; I suppose that’s how a wealthy person feels about the financial part. Those criteria the language test, which is possibly getting slightly harder and at some point that citizenship test.

They mention a new threshold for proving a genuine relationship but I think that’s published somewhere else. At the bottom of page 7 were told about the withdrawing of the right to appeal visiting family members, this is likely to be in 2014 but is already withdrawn for extended family members. They can apply, be refused for any arbitrary reason and then they can do nothing but apply again.

Page 9 is about article 8 in more depth, it tells us that the courts have been deciding public policy and that its time for parliament to have its say. That parliament is going to have, and I think now has had, a little debate about all this so no one can say that its not very very democracy. Page 11 begins ‘This does not mean that the Secretary of State and Parliament have the only say on what is proportionate. The Courts have a very clear role in determining the proportionality of the requirements in the Immigration Rules. It is for the State to demonstrate that measures that interfere with private and family life are proportionate. But a system of rules setting out what is or is not proportionate, outside of exceptional circumstances, is compatible with individual rights, as has been accepted by the Courts in other spheres, e.g. housing law. Where the rules have explicitly taken into account proportionality, the role of the Courts should shift from reviewing the proportionality of individual administrative decisions to reviewing the proportionality of the rules.

Its hard not hear the first sentence as someone talking to a child, I don’t know that I understand what this means - shift from reviewing the proportionality of individual administrative decisions to reviewing the proportionality of the rules.
Does that mean, shift from assessing what the facts are in a case and thinking about that and the laws and society and making a judgment TO thinking about the rules themselves?

Shortly after that, point 44 seems to say that if you can’t meet the income requirements or something else, you can try a ten-year route to settlement, only where it would breach article 8 to make you leave, Paying all relevant fees and using the correct forms, of course. Is that good? It doesn’t sound good.

6.
Hoi. Enough of all these documents; what are our options? What’s most important, what’s probably possible, what’s likely impossible.

We could just forget the UK all together and live in Japan.
This is possible it seems, as a foreign spouse here I could work; I am trying to get a qualification to teach English, And I do like it here, its very green and beautiful and people drive safely and one night we were driven out to a river bank where we watched thousands of firefly’s moving about and it was amazing. This child that’s coming is half Japanese, and I certainly want it to come here and see these things. 
So why not just shrug off grumpy England and do our best here?
Well, It would be much harder for me to work if I even can at all, harder to provide a space for the child and Kano and comprehend what’s going on most of the time. If It was just Kano and myself, I’d be all for just seeing what we could do here, but with the child on the way I just want to wake up in house that I understand, where there are people I can talk to and question and apples I can afford. I worry that if we are stuck here I will become a burden on Kano at the worst possible time. 
There are some other things about Japan that give me pause, but it could be that I don’t understand enough about it. 
I guess this is the thing we’ll end up doing most likely, which means a world of problems and I fear an untenable situation.

we could do something that means we meet the financial requirements somehow perhaps, were certainly going to be needing some more money, as a family, so its not the worst thing in the world to think about this. Glancing over that second document though, it seems theres many facets to showing any kind of income, I'll look at that more soon. but also, what am I even talking about, how are we making all this money in the future?

We could live in Japan and the UK, or in the UK and a different country. Wait could we, no idiot you can’t even afford to live in England.
Is it possible for us to live in the UK for the period of time Kano is allowed, I think its like 6 months, and then go somewhere else for a bit and then come back. Its probably not, I'm sure the passport people would put a stop to it. Both practically and financially I don’t even know what I'm talking about. Its something I think about this when I'm at a loss but it’s not a plan. I love Berlin, and when I was there I saw some very polite children all cycling along with helmets, but we can’t live in Berlin any more than we can live in Bristol. If I was from a different EU country that did allow anyone to have a foreign spouse I could move to England with a big family no problems. I've no problem with that, its one of the reasons I want to be in Europe, but it can make you a little crazy

Will the next step be for this rule to apply to all EU nationals as well? I think that is far from the governments power at the moment, but I'm sure its what some people want

We could apply and see what happened. 
This is what I want to do, I need to find someone to talk to about it properly, and ask a lot of questions about how to make the best case possible. At the same time, when I read those documents, the idea of applying seems ridiculous �" like if I went around applying for pilots jobs �" ‘how many flight hours logged?’ ‘Oh, none, I cannot fly planes’ ‘…’.

What would doing this be like? We’d fill in some forms and pay some fees then they’d say no. I think, we could appeal, but I don’t know what that means.

These policies will become facts on July 9th - will someone challenge it in the courts? Which courts? And who? I imagine it will take a long time. I worry that there’s a way these laws keep you more out the longer you’re kept out.

A.

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I couldn't work out footnotes in HTML yet

1. A Foreign national parent and a parent who is British by descent, meaning my parents were also (both?) British. I've spent about 50 hours on the internet making sure that is true, reading the same sentence over and over until I cant remember if the child was born before 1983 or not �" it isn’t, its not even born now. Sometimes it says a legitimate child is entitled to, and then you try an find exactly what they mean by that, and you can’t and you slam the laptop shut and then try again. I actually spoke to someone about it yesterday though, and it is true, our child is British as far as Her majesty’s government is concerned �" which I thought was a strange way of putting it until I remembered that in fact, as far as the emperor of japans government is concerned the child is Japanese, and although it can have 2 passports at first, Japan doesn’t really allow dual citizenship, so at 22 it’ll have to chose a team. That’s not until 2034 though so I wont get worked up about that today. Britain, bless it, does allow dual citizenship.
2. Something else unfair, but now irrelevant �"If it was 2005 it seems that a Japanese female couldn’t pass on nationality to her child, so in our situation the child could only be British. I only read that in one place, and I may have misunderstood it.
3. That estimate feels low and high at the same time, I've never really made art or design work my job, and now is likely a really stupid time to think I could start, but that figure is based on experience somewhat. Its awfully emasculating this affair, I think I should realize and accept that I need to improve my financial situation now I'm going to be a father, but I think I should be beating myself up about it rather than being exiled from my job, home and everything. Obviously not everything, I'm with Kano and the not yet baby, but being here at the moment is difficult in itself. Some days I think about this stuff and say ‘I better change my flight, get back to a country I can work in and work all the hours’ and I could do that, but I want to be where they are, and I also feel like I should be. I have a kind of awful optimism some days, I think, heck I can earn loads of money if I write children’s books or start a magazine about Tolstoy or open a crèche. Those are all real ideas I thought about for at least a few hours, what I should I suppose is retrain as something with better prospects, like a repo man.
4. Brits Against Family Exile, people have written a little about their situations and how they are feeling and I really started to get wound up and angry. I'm lucky, in that I have the mobility to go where Kano is, some people are much more trapped where they are for reason they did not choose, and this will truly severe them from the people they love.
5. For a moment I thought that was the number of the room in the middle of the shining, but that’s 237 �" the distance from the earth to the moon is 237 thousand miles, hmm