We’re not cash machines, stop penalising migrants

We’re not cash machines, stop penalising migrants

New increases to visa fees are guaranteed to push more people into poverty, especially as the UK already had among the highest visa fees in the world.

There is growing economic instability in the world, everyone is feeling the crunch as prices go up and bills become more unaffordable. For migrants, increases to visa fees feel like a penalty on us for living and working in the UK. We already pay taxes, and most of us do not have access to any public funds to act as a safety net should we need it.

The increases to visa costs have become almost a regular occurrence as different governments attempt to boost the economy at the expense of migrants’ lives. This is an unsustainable exploitation of those of us who live and work in this country. We are not a cash machine for a government to continually tap to raise further funds.

Imagine you were told that in order to work and pay taxes you had to give the government tens of thousands of pounds. That is the reality migrants face every day in the UK. We are charged extortionate amounts of money, far beyond the actual processing costs of visas, in order to be allowed to pay taxes. We can’t even rely upon much of the infrastructure which much of those taxes go towards funding. We have to pay thousands of pounds throughout our time on visa routes for what is known as the “immigration health surcharge” to access medical treatment. We are blocked from receiving state support through what is known as “no recourse to public funds”. We are seen as a disposable resource, in no small part because many of us are not allowed to vote, so governments do not see us as necessary to think of.

As one of our members said: “I feel like we're treated as cash cows and political football. No one cries out if the NHs surcharge increase to over £1000 per year or if applications randomly increase without any explanation. Most people are not even aware how we are being treated, and yet we are to blame for the dire state Britain is in, not the policies of decades by both main political parties. It makes me feel like I can't trust anyone to represent us but ourselves”

No-one is complaining about paying the cost of the processing of visas. We are talking about paying ten times those costs though, on top of paying everything else which everyone else does. This has a dire effect on our mental and physical health.

“I was very depressed and suicidal and anxious and insomniac. I couldn’t live my life. I had no support because no one understood what I was going through or cared to learn…I came close to killing myself because all I ever experienced was being othered and not being able to access friends and family.”

The world is an uncertain place at the moment, more so than usual. With a potential global economic collapse on the horizon, it is essential that we are not left to take the brunt of the impact. We cannot continue to pay vastly overinflated costs, and be left with nothing to support ourselves and our families.

We need a system which is rooted in fairness, which doesn’t treat human beings as a means to make a profit, a system which caps fees at the same level they cost to process.