When the Home Office wanted to deport me

I keep hearing that it's easy to just stroll into Britain. My experience was a little different.

At an Ashish press day in 2016. I bought this top.

I feel like putting a different slant on the usual rhetoric that gets bandied around about immigrants.

I want to tell you my story of being 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 wants on about it as a selling point, he’s clearly confident that a lot of people agree with him.

Believe me, getting that Indefinite Leave to Remain status was not an easy process. I moved to Britain from Australia in 1992. As a Commonwealth citizen, I was entitled to 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 worked for in the 90s 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.

When I married Ross in 2000, I was eligible to apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain. We’d already been living together for six years, and 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 I’d finally never to have to worry about a looming visa deadline again.

It took the Home Office four weeks to come back to me and tell my application had been rejected.

I was informed of this in a short, cold letter stating that they were not satisfied that 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.

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 by this point. 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 fuck’. 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.

My god, 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 and so the next morning I took the letter in 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 Aussie arm of the company, ironically.

I can’t remember the name of the lawyer, but she was incredible. Calm and pragmatic, but at the same time she did agree 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 now 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, Greencard, but I didn’t need to fake any of our relationship: 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 processing centre in Croydon, South London. It would be a day of queuing for hours and hours and just 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 ILR had come through after my other visa had expired.

I arrived at the immigration centre in Croydon 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 smart phones to bury our heads in. I don’t remember what book I took and I was too stressed to concentrate on reading it anyway.

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 if she went to find out. 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 back 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 piss about 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 11.30, 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 number and told me to come back in about two hours. I have never been so thrilled to be released to Croydon’s Whitgift shopping centre. I ate, I sat, I shopped a bit but most importantly I peed. Even so, it wouldn’t have been my first choice for a place to sit and wait while a faceless bureaucrat in a dingy office decided everything about my future.

It was finally time to go back for the verdict. I had thought that there’d be some sort of lengthy discussion with an immigration officer, a ton of questions for me, maybe 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 now were 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 bill for around £2000 I was furious - what an expensive frig about when my application was always legitimate.

Nigel Farage has been talking about ILR 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 about ILR residents 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.

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 ILR, I’d already launched Sugar magazine which became a market leader and so significantly increased job opportunities across the teen mag sector. When Glamour magazine launched in 2001, it was proven to have grown the magazine sector as a whole by 12%. There are many esteemed media figures I could name who got their first job from me. In short, I think I’ve more than held my own as a contributor to the workforce, to the country.

And I feel confident that I can say that most immigrants who are here with ILR 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 their children. The idea that Farage wants everyone to have that status reviewed every five years is an insulting threat. Dehumanising. He’d have all us 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?

I asked Chat GPT how workable Reform’s idea of scrapping ILR really is. The short answer: not very.

A few top lines include: ‘Reduced attractiveness of UK for talent, as workers would not like the instability of having to reapply for residency every five years; Migrants in essential sectors like the NHS and hospitality would also be turned off by the instability; If you’re feeling your stay is likely to be temporary, you’re less likely to buy a home or start a business; Forcing hundreds of thousands to reapply for a visa every five years would overburden an already overwhelmed Home Office, leading to huge backlogs.’

There’s loads more, take a look. In fact, as much as I hate to admit it, I find our AI companion quite useful in cutting through the bias of political parties or news outlets. It’s disturbing but true that it’s your best best for objectivity.

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. If you’re an immigrant too, talk to me in the comments! I’d love to compare experiences.

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