The Papers Chase
Well there you have it.
Without paying really close attention three years have been lived. Though as you know living takes work. It is a skeleton and you put meat or if you are a vegan, plant based material on its bones. And one likes to think there is an end game to all this. No, not the existential one. The spiritual enlightenment or divination of purpose. I speak of the ordinary, get to the end of the day every day game. Or fractionally higher, the getting to stay in this country a little while longer game. The fact that the prize is to lengthen your stay in a country which raises its pitchfork and shouts “Immigrant!” as if you are the last carrier of the bubonic plague or that makes the phrase “Winter is coming” not just a too oft repeated line in George Martin’s Game of Thrones opus but a real harbinger of doom in the real world is not the point.
That being said I was on the hunt last week, because my visa expires on October 24, 2011 or I should say expired. Since I outfoxed them and renewed it early. Take that Theresa May! See how I made that sound simple. Watch and learn.
Though ostensibly a paper exercise. You score points for establishing certain salary thresholds (a bonus if you earned that salary in the UK, tax revenue baby), educational qualifications, proof of an ability to maintain yourself with a minimum amount of funds in the bank and if you have the dewy fertility of youth on your side ( for we know it is more young to service that future pension deficit that they are really after) then you will hit the motherlode. Three years ago I could fool them, today I am a part of their pension problem. Oh well, youth is its own burden.
So pretty much all you need are bank statements and payslips, easy right? Wrong. Because you can’t just walk into your bank and say “Hey Mr Bank Manager can I have a letter that says I am your customer and I have money in the bank?” Nope not that personal. “Ok can I get some bank statements?” Well you will have to tell that lady who will write it meticulously on the pad on her clipboard and tell you it will take seven days to be mailed to your address. You will wait at your address and eight days later all but random months in your request will arrive, meticulous note taking on clipboard guarantees nothing. You may end up speaking to someone on their telephone banking system about an unrelated matter and when she foolishly asks what else can I do for you today, you may hold forth on that now related matter. She will then tell you, oh you can get this back in three days just pick it up in the branch. You may wince but you won’t get weary.
You will save your weariness for the teethpulling pleasure of trying to get stamped and signed payslips out of the death grip of your employer. Ahh nothing like the joys of outsourcing because even though your payslip tells you Payroll is but a Tube stop away, you are given to understand that STAMPING will take two weeks because the STAMP is in Budapest. And so off to Budapest our payslips go, happily making their contribution to the planet’s carbon load. Only for them to return, stamped with an ordinary rubber stamp, nothing very Hungarian looking about it but signed on some pages and not on others. When you engage with the signer on why this will not be acceptable to Ms. May and the Home Office she suggests you discuss it with them. Perfect point for you to draw yourself up to your full lawyerly height and give her a proper lecture on why a signature is needed and why this is non-negotiable. So this now means the payslips take another ride to Budapest, I really must check that city out seems it’s all happening there. Weeks pass and you too pass from rage into quiet acceptance, perhaps broken on the wheel of impersonal process but there is more.
The pitchforked mobs anti-immigrant cries are just a way of pretending that the immigration business isn’t one of the biggest money spinners in these British isles. It has spawned a cottage industry of secondary markets for the immigration lawyer and the representative or as we call them in Jamaica the tout and Lunar House is the soulless commercial heart of voluntary trafficking. And I do not know if I have yet seen a greater leveller than a visa office. For the lucky the tou representative fast tracks you through the system. But from the well heeled couple in Ferragamo to the Bangladeshi student in her Hello Kitty sweatshirt and ill fitting cardigan all contend for a place at Her Majesty’s grace. And we do this in a room 100 feet long and 20 feet wide with row after row of metallic red chairs. Not cheery in the least. The seats rapidly fill up with couples, singles, families, every nationality. Babies shriek and are quickly hushed by embarassed mothers. Only the representatives are comfortable here, they exchange knowing smiles and stories with each other, the staff knows them by name and they make jokes together, they ignore the “No Mobile Phone” signs, arranging the next client as one set leaves. As the morning turns into afternoon and the biometric machine delays everything they seem more relaxed as we become more agitated. It is funny how these offices are depressingly similar regardless of location, notes are pressed on the wall with arrows pointing this way or that and through the plate glass you can see which chair belongs to an officer because the back of it has a paper notice taped to it and declaring exactly that.
But I trade my cold hard sterling (debit or credit card only) in this temple and get the right to stay here and watch for two more years. After year five the end game may be trading away my inheritance for a mess of pottage. We shall see.
Dispatches From An Island Girl 