A guest blog from IASH Public Engagement Fellow Dr Vanessa Montesi:
If you fall in love with a British person and decide to join them in the UK, the road is paved with obstacles. When I met a man at a multilingual choir in Newcastle and started dating him while on a research visit, I would not have envisioned moving to the same city some years later. Even less expected was the encounter with an openly hostile, incredibly expensive and torturous spouse visa immigration system – the second most restrictive in the world (MIPEX, 2025).
First, your partner needs to prove that they earn more than £29,000 a year, showing payslips for the last 6 months – 1 year if self-employed. Not many are able to do so: 50% of the UK population does not meet the minimum income requirement, with only 36% of women and 12% of under-25s meeting the requirement (Jorgensen, 2024). At no point is the partner’s income or predicted income considered, which means that carers, families with additional support needs and part-time workers face even more difficulties sponsoring their partners. The visa itself, for those lucky enough to qualify, can cost up to £13,500 during the 5 or 10-year probation period before the spouse can apply for indefinite leave to remain, with hidden costs related to lawyers, travel to attend biometric appointments, and potential temporary accommodation for the spouse applying from outside the country. An application can take 6 months to be processed. Spouse visa holders, just like work visa and student visa holders, have no recourse to public funds, and must pay an NHS surcharge of £1,035 a year until granted settlement (2024). Throughout, you are treated as guilty until proven otherwise. Illustrative of this was a letter that arrived at my house on the day of my wedding warning me that marriage to a British citizen does not necessarily mean I would be given a UK visa.
Apart from the slow violence (Wheeler, 2024) unnecessarily inflicted on families and UK citizens, what do these political decisions tell us about the way we conceptualize personhood? How are neoliberal logics of profits and margins mobilised to strip people of basic human rights, and justify the conflation of human value with productivity? How do these policies and rhetoric directly and indirectly affect other racialized groups? Whose families are considered valid and grievable, and how do the heteronormative policies shaping spouse visa forms affect the way we do family? What is the role of art in portraying, challenging, complicating narratives of family migration? These are the questions that animate my public engagement project at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Coming from a PhD in comparative studies with a focus on translation and dance studies, I spent the past two years familiarizing myself with a new literature that would allow me to start posing and answering these questions from a range of different angles: journalism, academia, frontline work, and the arts.
On 25 March 2026, I will bring together several experts on this subject for a roundtable discussion at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, followed by a zine workshop on 26 March. Prof. Khaterine Charsley from the University of Bristol will share findings from her latest project, Brexit Couples, and how they relate to previous findings on the impacts of family migration on non-European couples and families; Reunite Families UK’s CEO Caroline Coombs and policy expert Matteo Besana will talk about the repercussions felt by the community of cross-border families they support and advocate for; journalist Anna Lekas Miller will broaden our gaze to include similar changes in the US and the dehumanization of refugees, while choreographer Sharon Watson, maker of the award-winning choreography Windrush: Movement of the People (2018) will reflect on how the current anti-migrant rhetoric is embedded in a history of racism and devaluation of non-white family lives, and if and how artforms can allow us to see and perceive these realities in human terms. Meanwhile, a photographic exhibition of family portraits originally commissioned by RFUK will be held between 13-26 March at the Storytelling Centre (43-45 High Street, Edinburgh) to remind everyone of the human cost of policies driven by a neoliberal logic blind to everything but numbers.
What do I hope to do with all this?
The material and knowledge created through the roundtable discussion and zine workshops will be included in a final report on the project sent to all newly elected MSPs in June 2026. The exhibition itself will include a wooden postbox and an invitation to write messages of support to family life in exchange for a poem to all visitors, with the hope that MSPs recognize that the larger electorate has a stake in the issue. The project’s main aims are to influence political decision making, create lines of connection and solidarity among migrants, and platform the too-often silenced voices of people with lived experience of a system that punishes them and everyone around them for falling in love with a person of their choice.
In study after study, family migrants repeat their surprise and their sense of loneliness as they go through a grinding process most people are unaware of. Few people are ready to believe, for example, that a child might be separated from a parent for years, or that a retired person not meeting the £88,000 savings threshold should have to exile themselves for ever. As part of my public engagement fellowship, I also run an international online book club with spouse migrants and their partners. Each month, we meet to discuss an artwork that speaks about or to our experiences and craft creative responses to it. Some of my participants have been made homeless by these rules before they could reunite with their partners; others talked about feeling grief, and of seeing the repercussions of the separation in their children's mental health (48% of families separated by the rules noticed a deterioration in their children’s mental health, Koumis and Coombs, 2025). All of us were unaware of these rules and faced disbelief when telling others about them.
And yet, while keeping away from the public imagination, family migration – which historically accounts for less than 10% of overall migration to the UK (Jorgensen and Walsh, 2025)– is not ignored by politicians and in the last two years several major reforms have been proposed, and at times, enacted. The £29,000 threshold is a 56% increase from the previous £18,600 brought in by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government in 2023. Initially aiming to raise the threshold to £38,700, after a 100K petition signature and a legal challenge from the charity Reunite Families UK (RFKU), the incoming Labour government decided to maintain the £29,000 and commission a Migration Advisory Committee report on the impact of spouse visa measures. The report was published in the summer of 2025, and yet an answer from the government is still to come. This has not prevented the new Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood from including family migration among the routes that will see further cuts and settlement delays if her ironically titled “A Fairer Path to Settlement” (November 2025) comes into effect. Here, despite being granted only 7 lines in a 60-page document, family migration comes under renewed attack and in ways that are bound to create more division and two-tier systems between spouses with a British citizen and those with a settled partner. Indeed, the settlement route for partners of UK residents without British citizenship is increased to 10 years, with all the extra costs of visa renewals and biometric appointments to be repeated every 2.5 years. Family reunion for refugees, until now exempt from the minimum income requirement, will be brought in line with the rest, effectively forcing people fleeing persecution to choose between their own safety and their families, while also increasing their settlement time (the time after which one can be granted citizenship, now also 5 years) to up to 20 years (Home Office, 2025). Debt, deportability and deferral are actively mobilized to engineer a governance of uncertainty (Bhiel, 2015) which denies coavelness and restricts agency – as Bourdieu reminds us, waiting “is one of the ways of experiencing the effects of power. Making people wait delays without destroying” (2000, 228).
This is why I’m hoping to engage as broad a range of people as possible before more hostile decisions are taken. Everyone is invited to participate in any of the events. When the government attacks our private life, we won’t keep our dissensus private.
References
Bhiel, Kristen Sarah. 2015. Governing through uncertainty. Experiences of Being a Refugee in Turkey as a Country for Temporary Asylum. Social Analysis, 59(1): 57-75.
Bourdieau, Pierre. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Jorgensen, Nuni. 2024. Family Fortunes: The UK’s New Requirements for Partner Visa. Migration Observatory.
Jorgensen, Nuni and Walsh, Peter William. 2025. Family Migration to the UK. Migration Observatory.
Koumis, Tamsin and Coombs, Caroline. 2025. Families Belong Together. Reunite Families UK.
Home Office, 2025. A Fairer Pathway to Settlement.
Wheeler, William. 2024. A Slow Violence. Boaz Trust.
Image by kind permission of Hamit Gış from the Humanity Cartoons contest and exhibition. All rights reserved.