The Family Migration Visa in the History of Marriage Restrictions: Postcolonial Relations and the UK Border

Abstract

This article: • Provides a necessary critical reflection on the changes to the UK family migration visa 2012; • Responds to the recent call made by Nick Vaughan-Williams and Victoria M. Basham in BJPIR for Critical Border Studies to better appreciate the interlocking elements of race, gender, class in border practices. It does this by also paying attention to sex; • Challenges the presentism in the recent literature on border practices/immigration by situating the family migration visa in a broader history; • Makes a strong contribution to the cross-over debates which are taking place in International Relations and governmentality literature regarding the postcolonial. It offers a Foucauldian analysis of government which takes colonial and postcolonial relations seriously. This article explores the changes to the family migration visa (2012) through a history of postcolonial government. It explores how the visa shares a familiar function to previous forms of rule which targeted the household and family as a site of regulation. Under Empire, 'marriage restrictions' were used to manage the 'intimate' connections between coloniser and colonised. Over the course of the 20th century UK border regimes also targeted the intimate and the familial to regulate racial proximity. In tracing this history, I argue that the family migration visa works as a similar technique. The visa manages the intimate space of the couple, family and household through an ideal domesticity; in line with certain raced, gendered and class norms. It highlights how government techniques make claims over whom can live with, raise a family with, be intimate with whom in Britain.This article examines the implementation of changes to the UK family migration visa (or the 'family of a settled person' visa) which occurred in 2012. This is the visa which gives non-EU spouses/partners, children and dependents of British citizens/ 'settled persons' limited right to reside in the UK. The changes to the visa mean that a family (including a non-EU citizen) must fulfil both a financial and language requirement to be granted the right to live together. The Home Office justifies these bs_bs_banner

‘Wandering and settled tribes’: biopolitics, citizenship, and the racialized migrant

“…In other words, they are strong candidates for contributing to the biopolitical optimization of life. This discourse thus replicates colonial anxieties about race and reproduction that generated attempts to manage marriage between white British subjects and colonial natives (Stoler 2002, Turner 2014. Living in the shadows does not threaten the purity of the state, but it does disrupt racialized governance as it seeks to distribute peoples across circulatory channels by relying on a logic of racial differentiation.…”

Introduction: Engaging Geopolitics through the Lens of the Intimate

“…As states amplify regulation of intimate relations (Boehm 2012;Turner 2014), families and migrants affected by these practices are compelled to problematically reproduce the gendered, patriarchal and heterosexual norms of state-sanctioned marriage. This plays into a long history of circulating and expanding centralised state control regarding practices and claims to property, citizenship, and group identity.…”

Where can I get free? Everyday bordering, everyday incarceration

“…In spite of attempts to contain them by partners, families and communities, the women had all left their homes and, as one participant put it, “thrown themselves on the mercy of the British state” to protect and support them. This pathway is necessitated by the UK's immigration legislation, which is embedded in postcolonial governance (Turner, ; Wemyss et al., ). While a thorough review of immigration legislation and family migration is beyond the scope of this paper, it is necessary to note a few key points to frame the ensuing discussion.…”