I divorced my visa sponsor, but I will never be at peace with my immigration experience
I have a lot to say about getting divorced. I’m starting with how the UK immigration system made my first relationship and breakup much more painful than they should have ever been.
Welcome to the divorce series
I ended my marriage three years ago today (yes, on April Fool’s Day). My divorce was finalized 16 months after that.
Now that some time has passed, there is a lot I want to say about the different aspects of my divorce. I’ve written a series of posts about my experiences and will be publishing them over the next few months. Spoiler alert: the experiences were awful.
I’m kicking things off with the topic I feel is most important to share: how the UK immigration system led to me getting married at the age of 22 and the subsequent damage caused by that.
I’ve been speaking out about the UK immigration system since 2020 when I got indefinite leave to remain. I wrote a very long post about how the UK immigration system hurts people.
In that thread, I spoke about some of my own experiences with the system, but for the most part, I focused on its policies more generally.
Now that I’m divorced, I feel I’m in a place where I can share more of my personal experiences of the system.
To be honest, though, I’m still not comfortable sharing most of it, so consider this post the watered-down, condensed version of my experience.
I didn’t get married on my own terms and have suffered the consequences for it
My grievances with the UK immigration system started the moment I realized my uni boyfriend and I had to get married to stay together.
Prior to that, I didn’t think much of my immigration experience during my first 4 years in the UK as a student. I applied for a student visa and showed up for a couple of attendance checks each academic year. Being a US citizen shielded me from discriminatory visa decision-making and requirements imposed on other nationalities.
When I applied to the University of Edinburgh, I remember reading a page on their website that advertised a 2-year post-study work visa. I thought it was good there was an option to stay in the UK after graduation if that ended up being what I wanted to do.
Not long after arriving in the UK, then Home Secretary Theresa May closed this visa route. Even though I was frustrated about that at the time, I had hopes that something would work out. I’d be able to get a work visa, right? They let me come here to study, surely they wouldn’t make it that difficult to stay?
Those were the thoughts of a privileged white American who never experienced much friction when crossing borders. I didn’t know at the time this system was deliberately designed to keep people out.
By my second year, it seemed likely I would want to stay in the UK. I got my first ever boyfriend who I was completely inseparable from. As someone who always felt like the odd one out growing up, I thought I met the one person on planet Earth I was compatible with.
When I was nearing the end of my degree, I started looking into work visas, but it seemed like a lost cause. I was a linguistics student, not exactly a hot commodity in the graduate job market.
It felt very unlikely I would meet the salary threshold needed for a work visa; plus, only certain companies sponsor international workers.
Nevertheless, I started the job hunt in my final year holding out hope. As a humanities student, finding a job was stressful enough. Beyond anything else, my biggest concern was to find something that I actually wanted to do and someone would hire me to do it.
I considered both jobs that would sponsor me and those that wouldn’t. I did this because there was an alternative to a work visa: a spousal one.
A spousal visa is not what I wanted to do, but it seemed more realistic than a work visa. My then-boyfriend and I met the requirements. At the end of the day, we wanted to be together, so we would do what we needed to do.
At the start of my second semester in my final year, I ended up getting offered a job with a University of Edinburgh department I had worked with the summer before. I really wanted to work with them. I felt so lucky to get a job I actually wanted.
It wasn’t a job that would sponsor a visa, though.
That led to a conversation with my boyfriend where I basically said, “we’d have to get married if I take this,” and he said okay.
That was it. There was no big to-do about it. It was a practical decision to make to stay together.
While I wanted to be with my boyfriend, I felt incredibly embarrassed at having to get married at 22. The only people who I knew who married that young were 2 generations older than me or super religious.
At the time, I thought we’d likely be together forever (I met the one person I was compatible with, remember?), but that didn’t mean I wanted to formalize our relationship this way just as I was graduating.
But at the end of the day, this immigration system wasn’t giving me another feasible option.
This system took an important life choice away from me. I wasn’t able to decide to marry someone because that’s what my partner and I decided to do after years of being together.
It was something we had to do because the only other alternative was to live on different continents.
This is wrong. No couple should ever be forced into an important decision like this because governments restrict people’s abilities to cross imaginary lines.
What makes me most resentful of not getting married on my own terms is the consequences that have come from getting married and subsequently divorced.
Marriage placed this extra weight of permanency and seriousness on a relationship that was too young and immature for it. I was too young and immature for it.
We unknowingly accelerated life decisions, like buying a house together, because, hey, why wouldn’t we. We were married, so together forever, right?
I got married the day I graduated uni. I never got to experience being a working adult while not married (or about to be married).
There was so much personal growth ahead of me, but marriage and this immigration system were these legal entrapments messing with that growth.
So when it got to the point where I knew I needed to end the relationship, my first break-up experience was so much more traumatic and intense than it needed to be.
My first break-up was a divorce where the Scottish government told me I had to be legally tied to my ex for a year before I could formally end the relationship.
My first break-up involved months of financial negotiations where my ex, who always earned more money than me but didn’t save money, got to take some of my savings because being married meant half my money was his.
I feel so sorry for 22-year-old me. I was forced to make life choices no one, especially no one that young, should have to make. And now I have literally paid the price for that choice, all because this country’s sadistic immigration system put me in that position.
But that’s jumping ahead. Back to the being married part.
A spousal visa created a power imbalance in my relationship
While the spousal visa route was the most feasible option to stay together, what I didn’t realize until years later, was that it creates a power imbalance in a relationship.
For the 5 years I was on the visa, my ability to live in the UK was tied to my husband. I could live here as long as the relationship persisted.
My job, my house, my life in the UK all rested on the stability of this relationship. If I lost the relationship, I lost it all.
My husband wouldn’t lose it all if the relationship ended. Only immigrant me would.
I didn’t actually recognize this imbalanced feeling until my relationship’s glossy façade started to fade.
For many years I was infatuated with my husband. It wasn’t like he was perfect all those years, but I never ultimately cared about something he said or did that was questionable. I loved him and that was all that mattered.
But then one day my husband did this incredibly stupid thing that was the first time I seriously questioned, am I okay with who my husband is as a person? Is this someone who I want to show up in the world with?
It sent me into my first ever experience of depression. I felt this cloud of sadness and anxiety hanging over me, and I didn’t know if it would ever go away.
It was at this point I realized the reality I was living in. This relationship controlled my ability to live the life I was building in the UK.
This first experience of instability in a relationship that previously felt stable was terrifying. There was suddenly this immense, intensive pressure on my relationship, and it felt like it was constantly weighing me down.
I was only worthy of living here as someone’s wife
To relieve the pressure off my relationship, I did at one point look into switching to a work visa.
I spoke to an international staff adviser at my work where I learned that was not going to happen.
For my age at the time, my job met the salary requirement for a work visa, but it didn’t matter. My type of job wasn’t something my employer would sponsor.
And even if they did, I’d have to quit my job, leave the UK, and apply for it again.
There was no route to stay in my job, or even in the UK, to be able to switch visas.
My only worth to the UK, according to the immigration system, was as a British citizen’s wife over the 5 years until I got indefinite leave to remain.
The system further confirmed the power imbalance: I lived here at my husband’s disposal.
It was either be in the relationship or lose the entirety of my life in the UK.
It didn’t matter that I had lived the entirety of my adult years in the UK. Building my life here meant nothing as an individual, only when tied to someone else.
I convinced myself at the time that getting the clarity it was either be married or leave was actually a positive thing. It made me think, I guess this relationship isn’t that bad in the grand scheme of things, right?
I’m so disgusted with how this immigration system warped my mind into devaluing myself so much.
If you’re thinking, “well surely you could have just found another job that would sponsor a visa”, get this rubbish thought out of your mind.
For one, I didn’t want to leave my job. I liked my job. I shouldn’t have to change jobs when I had stable employment I could support myself off of.
Two, I was a linguistics grad still early in my career. Finding a job that would sponsor me, and that I wanted to do, would have been as challenging as it was when looking in my final year of uni.
Three, the needing to leave the country thing. I was just meant to quit my job, leave the country with no job, and cross my fingers I’d find something new that was eligible and wait weeks or months for my visa to get approved? No, thanks.
The whole point was to try and relieve pressure off the relationship. Switching visas would have meant separating us. That’s not what I wanted. It would have only made things messier and more complicated.
I wanted the freedom to navigate the difficulties of my relationship without a power imbalance getting in the way of that. This immigration system never gave me that freedom.
I don’t want to say anymore
I know I’ve been building up this narrative in this post from why I had to get on a spousal visa to the pressure it added to my relationship, but I need to stop this narrative there.
I don’t want to tell you all the things that followed and led up to me ending my marriage. Like I said at the start of this post, this is the watered-down version of my story. I’m saving the full details for my memoir.
All you need to know is the UK immigration system contributed so much harm to me, my ex, and our relationship.
Why I will never be at peace with my immigration experience
Even though I am now legally out of my marriage, I will never forgive the people who created this immigration system for what it put me through.
The way I see it, I experienced a very normal thing in life: first love, growing up, growing apart, first breakup.
But being an immigrant in the UK meant I couldn’t experience these normal life occurrences in a healthy way.
It forced me into legalizing my relationship when I was way too young.
It made me feel unsafe to have difficult conversations with my husband because so much rested on that relationship.
It made my first breakup a drawn-out, financially costly, legal nightmare.
I said previously how Theresa May took away my option to stay in the UK 2 years after graduating. What she also did at the same time was make the spousal visa a 5-year route instead of a 2-year route.
Having gone through what I did, I don’t think there should be any time tied to a spousal visa. However, I can say my experience would definitely not have been as horrific as it was if there was a power imbalance for 2 years compared with half a decade.
It angers me that 12 years after Theresa May introduced the hostile environment and made extensive, horrific changes to the immigration system, they still exist, and her successors only resort to injecting more harshness into the system.
It’s more than just spousal visas. The very nature of a visa means there is a power imbalance. Someone is gatekeeping someone else’s right to exist in the place they’ve chosen to call home.
So this is why I will never be at peace. Because what happened to me, and what has happened to others, will never be right, and the UK Government has no interest in creating a more humane immigration system.
They intentionally want to uphold and expand a discriminatory system that keeps people they don’t like out.
I don’t know how many times I have to state this: moving across borders should not be a big deal. If it’s okay to cross county lines, it should be okay to cross country lines.
We should all be fighting for a world where everyone can live as freely as they can.
What’s next
As I said at the beginning, this is the start of a series of posts on my divorce.
This will be my only immigration-related post. My next ones will be about different aspects of the separation and divorce process.
It’s not just the immigration system making people miserable. In next month’s post, I’m critiquing the Scottish legal system.
