Minimum Income Required: U.K. migration rules put a price on family unification

terminal5insider

LONDON—Mustafa has not seen his father for three years, a painful absence that often comes to his mind during the daily school run. “Where is my father?” he asks his mother, Muhado, at the gates of his elementary school in north London. “Why is he not taking me to school like the other children?” It’s not an easy question for her to answer. Explaining to a child that the government doesn’t think you earn enough for the family to be together can’t be pleasant. Muhado says she has run out of responses to her son’s question and no longer replies when he asks.

For the 26-year-old naturalized British citizen, who requested that her children’s and husband’s real names not be used to protect their privacy, the morning trip to school is one more reminder of the difficulties she faces a decade after fleeing civil war in her native Somalia and arriving in the U.K. as a teenage refugee. “Life is very hard for me,” she said. “The father of my children is not here and they do not understand.”

While she struggles to raise Mustafa and his younger brother, Abdi, in a housing project in a high-poverty neighborhood of London, her husband, Ahmed, ekes out a living in Dubai. Also Somali-born, he takes odd jobs and occasionally works as a taxi driver. The pair, who were introduced by family and married on a visit to Ethiopia in 2012, have spent most of their marriage apart. They were last together three years ago, when Muhado took the children to Dubai. But she has been unable to afford another set of plane tickets, so Skype and WhatsApp have to fill the void.

Marriages like Muhado and Ahmed’s are increasingly common. Thousands of families are being kept apart as a result of migration rules introduced by the U.K. government five years ago.

In 2012, the ruling Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government passed the so-called “minimum income requirement” (MIR) as part of a broader crackdown on immigration. The change means that British citizens and U.K. residents must prove they earn a minimum annual salary of £18,600 ($24,000) before they can apply to bring in a spouse from countries outside the European Economic Area. This figure increases by £3,800 ($4,900) to sponsor a first child, and £2,400 ($3,100) for each additional offspring.

The MIR was the brainchild of now-Prime Minister Theresa May when she served as home secretary, the cabinet position responsible for border enforcement. The rationale for the rule, as stated by May’s Conservative Party, was to reduce net migration to the United Kingdom below 100,000 and keep out people who might become dependent on government services. And while the MIR has provoked intense criticism from human rights activists, opposition leaders, and families, the Conservatives have doubled down on it, proposing earlier this year in their party manifesto to further raise the threshold.

UNFRIENDLY TO FAMILIES

The consequences of the MIR for families have been far-reaching. The Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England, an internal government watchdog agency, says that as many as 15,000 British children are growing up in so-called “Skype families,” where one parent is unable to live in the United Kingdom. The income threshold has separated children from parents, husbands from wives, and grandparents from their grandchildren.

For people like Muhado, reaching the £18,600 salary is difficult. She works in a beauty shop three days a week, but her child-care challenges make it virtually impossible to take on more hours. “I can’t work two jobs, I have kids, it’s not easy for me to earn that much,” she said. “I am stuck.”

According to figures from the U.K. tax office, roughly 37 percent of earners have an annual salary below the MIR benchmark. A 2015 report commissioned by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner said that...