Chinese National moving to the UK

My wife is a Chinese national, after marrying, our plans were always to return to the UK and to start our married lives together in my home country. This was, as it turns out, easier said than done. This is not exactly simple, but to be honest, it’s also not exactly hard.

There is a lot of strange gibberish on the UK.gov web page, you’ll find reference to documents in one place that are either missing somewhere else, or use different (usually older) names for the same document which can make it a little difficult to cross-check your understanding. Furthermore, the Internet is full of web pages offering advice, as indeed I intend to here, some of that advice will be out-dated by the time you read it, yet it will still come out towards the top of an Internet search.

The fact is that the process is actually not that complicated, there are some strict rules, if you follow them, then you’ll probably be just fine. Of course there are always gray areas, things that are not as easy as a yes/no and in those cases, each of those gray areas will have to be tackled on a case-by-case basis.

CAN I HELP YOU?

Short answer; Probably not! I’m not a lawyer, I’m not an immigration expert, neither is my wife. We can only share our experiences, especially the mistakes we made and we hope that you don’t make the same mistakes.

Please, feel free to ask questions, I’d love to help you, but this is not my day job, I wouldn’t want you basing your application on my advice. I hope to have a check-list at the end to help you get things ticked off.

SHOULD YOU PAY FOR AN ‘AGENT’?

Let’s go with the short answer first; No!

The longer answer would be as a result of your circumstances. If you have the money to burn, you don’t have the time to do this yourself and you find a good agent, then go for it.

If you really want to go this route, ask them to detail what they’ll provide for the fee and what you need to provide, in order for them to proceed. As with all things, you will find the services and the value for money differ greatly.

If they will ‘check your documents’; great, basically you’re paying them so you can do all the work, produce the documents and collect the evidence and then they’ll check it for you, that sounds like an amazing way to waste cash, if you are really that keen to throw money away, let me send you my PayPal email address…

Of course, there are grey areas; if you have children, if you have a low income but a healthy savings account or if you have some peculiar employment situation, these areas require a more thorough understanding of the visa application process, in this case I would suggest you approach a company with experience of both the visa process and the legalities surrounding the British Immigration Requirements, this is where your agents will earn their money.

BASIC RULES…

At least one of you already needs to have the right to live in the UK already, which may come from either:

• Being a British citizen
• Having settled in the UK (they have ‘indefinite leave to remain’ or proof of permanent residence)
• Having refugee status or humanitarian protection in the UK
• You and your partner must intend to live together permanently in the UK after you apply

You need to provide proof of your relationship, so a translated Marriage Certificate will help you here, if you married in China.

In some of the larger cities like Nanjing, Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, etc you may actually receive a translated certificate as part of the service, for the smaller Tier 2 or Tier 3 cities, you will probably receive a Chinese language Marriage Certificate and have to arrange your own translation. This needs to be stamped by the translator, but this is where your Chinese partner can help. Use something like Tmall to find a translation service, you’ll probably find a perfectly acceptable service that can be both quick and cheap, I’m talking £10-£25 here, this is typically much cheaper than a similar service in the UK.

Of course, if you married in the UK or in an English speaking country, then your original Marriage Certificate will work just fine.

Basic rule; everything you submit needs to be in English or have a certified translated copy that is in English.

Again, there are grey areas, if you’ve both lived together in China for the last 2 years and can prove that with a number of bills, residence permits etc, but you are not married, then you can still apply and will probably be successful, and once again, grey areas are where agents can earn their money but helping you through this minefield.

The Chinese Partner needs ‘Good Knowledge of English‘, okay, this is not a difficult test, you can help your partner prepare for this and I will provide a follow-up post on this later, but essentially, if you and your Chinese partner mainly communicate in English then they will ace this test, it is really very basic.

Financial Requirements; this is the area that most people tend to get wrong. You need to prove that the Chinese national will not be a burden to the UK Welfare system. So you either need savings or you (the UK national) need to earn at least £18,000/pa, be able to prove that and you need to have been employed by that employer for at least 6 months. If you have changed jobs in the last 6 months then it’s not impossible, but you are moving back into that grey area…

WHAT WENT WRONG?

We actually made a number of minor mistakes. At the time we were too excited and maybe a little too rushed to fully realise how many minor mistake we made during our first application.

The following documents were rejected:

• A printed version of my online bank statement for 6 months = No
• Printed copies of Electronic Pay Slips = No

We forgot to include the following documents:

• A letter from my employer confirming my employment, duration thereof and salary
• A Mortgage Statement, Rent Agreement or other form of proof to support that we had somewhere to live in the UK

When we received the notification of decision and we found out it had been rejected, my heart sank and I felt sick to my stomach. It was an awful day that threw me off my kilter for a few days, I was very angry with the UK Immigration department, I was also confused and upset, I took it that the UK Immigration department didn’t want my wife & I to live as man and wife. We were still in the early days of the chaos caused by Brexit and I was viewing the UK as some negative, racist country that no longer wanted foreigners.

I had a lot of questions; should I appeal, should I just apply again, should I try and make a life in China or should we both make a fresh start and head somewhere else in Europe (ironically, it is easier for an English person to take their non-EU spouse to another EU country than it is for the UK National to bring their spouse to the UK)?

TO APPEAL OR NOT TO APPEAL, NOW THERE’S A QUESTION..

If you fall into the grey areas, Appealing might be an option. However, expect this to take a very long time. I am aware of one case that took 2.5 years to go through the appeals process and ultimately whilst the outlook was successful, they had to provide the documents they’d missed in the first place as part of the appeal. In that case (similar to mine) they had made an assumption that by providing 6 months of pay slips from a single employer showed that they were clearly employed by that employer for 6 months and earning a salary which over the course of 12 months would have met the £18k per annum requirement.

Essentially they asked the decision maker to use that information, perhaps apply some common sense, and guess the rest of the story. Guessing is not in their job description!

Legally, there is no requirement for the appeals court to accept additional evidence, if you simply didn’t include something, then come on man, that’s your fault, you can’t blame the decision maker, they aren’t supposed to guess what you meant, they base their decision on facts that they can easily identify. If it isn’t easy to identify your living status or employment status they shouldn’t just guess that you must be employed or have a house.

When we received a negative decision, we were upset and angry. We immediately went down the appeals route, but those time lines are unforgiving and once we understood what we’d missed, it was clear the problem lay with us.

TIMESCALES

How long does it take?

A successful application will take between 7-60 days to be approved. There are stats that can help you understand the timescales, at the time of writing, only 2% of decisions are approved in the first 7 days, around 85% or so are approved within 30 days, so that’s where most of us will sit and the remainder are approved over the next 30 days.

An appeal could take 6 months, or maybe 2.5 years.

If you receive a negative decision on your first attempt, you could consider an appeal or you could read that Notification of Decision letter to help you understand what they didn’t like, beef up that area and apply again. You need to ask yourself, do you want to potentially live apart for the next 6 months or possibly more than 2 years, just seeing each other for holidays or do you want to bite the bullet, pay and apply again providing the missing information?

One of my guiding principles is “The only thing we don’t have enough of in this life, is time“.

I don’t want to spend more money, I definitely don’t want to give any more of it to the UK government, we’re taxed enough as it is, but do I really want to spend the next few months relying on WeChat and FaceTime in order to see my wife?

When you finally get the positive answer, the one you and your partner are waiting for, go ahead, book that plane ticket and prepare to start your next chapter in the UK together, there are a lot of new things for your partner to get used to, lots of things they’re going to miss and lots of things they’re going to love about life in the UK.