The new family migration rules enacted by the Coalition government have become infamous for curtailing the right of British passport holders (let’s treat this designation for what it is: one based on holding a piece of paper) to bring their non-EU spouse – and, potentially, children – with them, unless they earn more than a minimum income threshold of £18,600 (or more, if children are involved). These rules recently came under the guillotine of a High Court judgment, which has found that the income threshold is set too high to not be considered an arbitrary encroachment on the right to family life. As a consequence, the judgment has demanded of the government to bring the threshold down to a more reasonable level (as well as to amend a number of other aspects, such as to review the refusal to consider third-party financial support, and retouch the amount of savings required to make up for any shortfall in income). What the judgment has not done, however, is to challenge the very existence of an income threshold.
All the judgement says is that, at its current level, the threshold is disproportionate. While I agree that it is, the setting of any price on enjoying life together with one’s spouse surely creates an arbitrary limitation that is unacceptable in and of itself, regardless of where the bar is set. Specifically, it conditions whether someone (he or she) has a right to marry who they want (and the means test often affects more harshly the she’s than the he’s), regardless of their income, and of the papers they, and their spouse, possess. This sacrifice sounds even more unnecessary and cruel given that a spouse visa is always issued under the condition of the recipient not having any recourse to public funds. At least it does not serve the purpose that it has been sold to the public with, namely to ensure that the spouses avoid being a drain on public finances. The question, in other words, is this: how can one be a drain on public finances, if they are not entitled to do so in the first place?
In a previous piece I have argued that, from the Coalition’s point of view, perhaps it matters little whether these measures serve any practical purpose, as long as they enable a public performance of profanation (of one’s right to family life), in order to simultaneously establish the ‘sanctity’ of borders as an acceptable reason that trumps rights, just like that to a family life, that we presently regard as absolutes beyond the possibility of government intervention.
There is, however, another dimension through which it is possible to look at the new family migration rules; and this is through the prism of the public mythology that features, at its heart, the ‘taxpayer’. The taxpayer, by definition, is someone that earns enough to pay income taxes. It is also the public face of that other propagandistic vignette that features prominently in the Conservative imagery of society: the ‘hardworking’ person. Now, of course, not all citizens are taxpayers, as there are some who do not earn enough (while usually working just as hard), others who cannot work, and in either case may or may not be reliant on the social security system – which is no fat cow, let’s be honest – to meet their needs. It follows, therefore, that the choice of the taxpayer (aka the ‘hard-at-work’ Tory target voter) as the centre of governmental attention is a subtle way to pull the rug from under the feet of those that cannot pay income tax, and who may or may not on the receiving end of the system financed by the formers’ taxes. And yet, these are citizens nonetheless. There is, in other words, a shift in the notion of citizenship that appears to be working towards a two-tier system. Some, those who can pay tax, run the game and should expect value for money – in much the same way as shareholders would in a corporation – whereas others, who can’t, must accept the leftover crumbs of citizenship.
In fact, immigration policy has long been an incubator for the introduction of differences based on census, differentiating migrants based on whether they are ‘good’ (hence can contribute to the UK economy by earning and paying tax or creating jobs) or ‘bad’ (‘health tourism’ being the latest addition to an expanding definition, which includes for instance the ‘lack of skills’ or the earning of a ‘low wage’). A very iconic (or shameless, depending on how one looks at it) project outlining this trend is, for example, the current pilot scheme for a ‘Great Club’ that provides a ‘premium’ fast-track visa service for business executives. The differentiation based on financial worth is so glaring here that the scheme even borrows terminology more frequently found to describe premium membership schemes in airlines. In this sense, one could say that the new family migration rules show an unsettling trend to assign rights of citizenship based on a censitary basis (democratic rights dependent upon wealth), and are merely an extension of a discourse that has been bred and cultivated openly in policies directed at migrants. The curtailment of the right to a family life for holders of a British passport grows out of the fence where migrant ’others’ are placed, and that fence is one of variable extension – as the family migration rules show – where one can quite arbitrarily be included as a result of this or that policy change.
Against this trend, a renewed focus on the inherent dignity and value of personhood (regardless of census or nationality) must provide a counterpoint to the tendency towards further fragmentation of the camp of those affected by discriminatory government policies. We must do away with the experimental fence (and the experiment) altogether, rather than argue for it to be pushed back a bit. The tendency towards censitary differentiation is therefore left unscathed by the argument that it is ‘other’ migrants who should really be the target audience of de-humanisation and public display of suffering. What needs to be addressed instead is the very focus of public policy and discourse around the ‘taxpayer’, as the representation of someone that is a net contributor, and therefore valuable, to ‘society’. This, if unchallenged, is a slippery slope, which leads to a discrimination of people based on whether what they do translates into a monetary value. What the new family migration rules are already showing is that this approach affects in a disproportionate manner women, young people (especially students, artists and freelancers) and non-Londoners. It is therefore crucial to reframe the general discourse that seems to have gone mainstream about the ‘financialisation’ of human dignity, and resist the temptation to demarcate further in-groups and out-groups based on where the stick should be set from atop. What is needed much more urgently, instead, is a debate on whether this censitary differentiation of human beings is something that we should even be willing to accept in the first place.