Asian Angle | For Chinese immigrants to the UK, Brexit is a faint beacon of hope
The twin barrels of departmental incompetence and a bias towards Europe by the British immigration authorities leave Chinese disadvantaged. Brexit could sort at least one of those problems out
In February, officials from Chinese government ministries complained about the review system Britain is proposing for foreign investment. “Just when China is relaxing restrictions on foreign investment, the UK is putting up barriers,” grumbled one director general. These complaints were unjustified. Chinese ministries complaining about Britain’s alleged hostility to China picked on the wrong thing. They should have been complaining about immigration.
Britain, however, is worse. I have a report on my desk as I write from February 2017 by the Parliamentary Ombudsman. It upholds a complaint I made about Britain’s Immigration Department (called UKVI), and its treatment of my wife. The report criticises UKVI for telling her to leave the UK on October 16, 2015. Not only was this date three months before her visa expired, it was two weeks before the date of the letter, and therefore impossible. UKVI did not apologise until six months after their initial error, having already forced my wife to leave Britain for several months, separating her from our children and me. My case is just one of hundreds of Chinese applications that UKVI mishandles each month.
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The Home Office has in the past suggested there are vast numbers of successful Chinese immigrants, referring to figures from the Office of National Statistics. But those “immigrants” were nearly all on student visas, and students are now required to leave the UK on completion of their courses. Real immigration from China is negligible. There are more immigrants from small European countries such as Portugal and Hungary.
