Victoria Redclift, Associate Professor of Political Sociology in the Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU) at UCL— Written evidence (FAM0021)
Justice and Home Affairs Committee – Family Migration – Minimum Income Requirement (MIR)
Victoria Redclift, is an Associate Professor of Political Sociology in the Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU) at UCL, and an expert in the sociology of citizenship. She is the author of Statelessness and Citizenship: Camps and the Creation of ‘Political Space’ (Routledge, 2013), shortlisted for the BSA Phillip Abrams Prize for best first and sole authored book in Sociology. She is also the author of New Racial Landscapes: Contemporary Britain and the Neoliberal Conjuncture (Routledge, 2014) and her work has been published in journals such as Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Global Networks among others. Victoria has received funding from the ESRC, the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, and NIHR. The data used in this submission was funded by the ESRC [ES/N000986/1] [ES/N000986/2] and the Leverhulme Trust [PLP-2014-221]. In total, 75 interviews with 120 British Bangladeshis were conducted between 2015 and 2017. The research sites were Luton in Bedfordshire, Tower Hamlets in London, and Aston/Smethwick in Birmingham. Interviews took the form of semi-structured dyads with parents and children (n=90), narrative interviews with participants over 60 years of age (n=14), and semi-structured interviews with civil society members (n=16). Data on the MIR emerged in all three interview types. All names used here are pseudonyms.
Q.3 - Are there any unintended consequences for individuals and families?
Although existing scholarship has analysed the raced, classed (Sirriyeh 2015, Turner 2015) and gendered (Sumption and Vargas-Silva 2018) nature of the MIR, our own research is the first to examine how this requirement has been experienced in practice by the South Asian families it targets. Our research suggests a number of unintended consequences for individuals and families.
There was a common feeling among participants that the rules were more of an issue for women. This is unsurprising given the gendered nature of income inequality in the UK. In the case of one of our participants, Rina – a 24-year-old woman married to a Bangladeshi national – who was subject to the minimum income requirement, the gendered dimensions of these rules were apparent:
Rina: You have to show it for five years that you are still working, that you are still earning, but then not everyone is going to earn that much anyways if they are having children; it is difficult […] Especially for women, if you have children, you can't really work full time. Where are you going to leave the children?
Interviewer: How would that be different, do you think [for a man]?
Rina: Because I can go to work, at least full time, and the woman can look after the baby. So it will be easier.
The 2012 rules intersect with inequalities around reproductive labour and formal employment. Rina’s remark above that “not everyone is going to earn that much anyways”, echo others in our study, reflecting raced, classed, and gendered income inequalities in the UK, where Bangladeshi people experience disadvantages in the labour market (Salway, 2008; Khan, 2020) and are primarily in blue-collar employment (Stopforth et al., 2022), with women facing particular difficulties (Dale et al., 2002). As Shutes (2017: 248) has argued, the current income threshold has consequences for women’s capacities for “self-provisioning” as by limiting their rights to bring non-EEA spouses to the UK, it also restricts their potential to increase household income through dual-earning.
No direct questions were asked about the rules but they were raised as an issue by participants in 16 interviews (n=28), the vast majority of which were conducted in Birmingham (n=26). No references to the rules were made in the interviews conducted in Luton, and it was only raised in one interview in Tower Hamlets (n=2). This relates to the different demographics of each field site in socio-economic terms as well as the fact that there were more first-generation migrants in the Birmingham sample (n=14 as opposed to n=10 in Tower Hamlets and n=0 in Luton). We believe it reflects the uneven geographical impact of the MIR, which the APPG on Migration (2013) found disadvantaged sponsors outside of London.
For many participants, the difficulty of securing a job to meet the MIR, was thought to place significant strain on the family as a whole. Female participants drew our attention to how the MIR and extended probationary period combine to severely restrict family life, curtailing the possibilities for British South Asian women to engage in transnational marriage and have children.
All of our participants except one were British Citizens[1], the majority were born in the UK, and the 2012 family migration rules had significant repercussions for their experiences of citizenship. Some interviewees made explicit references to a sense that they were being racially targeted by the rules:
Serag: “It is a deterrent. They can’t very well state it as saying you can’t marry a girl from Bangladesh. Okay, they got the mechanism that help that you don’t.”
Serag, like many other participants, was acutely aware that the policy targeted British South Asians. Another participant, who was subject to the MIR, felt that the rules discriminated against her as a Bangladeshi woman. She described Bangladeshis having to provide “proof after proof” of their salary and, as a result, feeling as though she was perpetually treated as a foreigner, despite having arrived in the country at 9-months-old and possessing a British passport. The MIR was experienced by some of our participants as underscoring the lesser status of their citizenship. Indeed, many of our participants felt a strong sense of the precarity of their formal citizenship as Muslims of dual heritage, in the context of the British state’s growing powers around citizenship deprivation, and the policing of Muslim citizens across Europe. The experiences of racial discrimination around the MIR, then, were understood as an instance of a more systemic degradation of citizenship, which functioned at the intersection between anti-migrant and anti-Muslim discourses and policies.
Recommendation: Repeal the MIR.
It disproportionately impacts women, and people living/working outside London. Families are kept apart, and there are not enough safeguards for children. The policy targets British South Asians with very negative implications for feelings of belonging and associated integration.
September 2020
[1] One participant was on Indefinite Leave to Remain.