marriage visitor visa

[robinlovesfatman]

Know its not really Aibu but posting here for traffic. Friend in bit of a pickle and wants to marry guy from overseas. She's British. He is not.

Would they be able to marry with this visa? Once they are married can he apply for different visa to live here? Surely it can't be so simple.

StHildas, is it now straightforward then to convert (say) a student visa to a spouse visa after getting married? We were strongly advised not to do that (we had to leave the UK and go back to DH's home country for a few weeks' holiday, apply for the fiance visa at the British consulate there, and then once it was granted return to our home in the UK and get married), mind this was like nearly 15 years ago.

robin, she needs to talk to someone who deals with immigration cases - they do have helpline numbers you can call. We didn't use an immigration lawyer as the process was fairly straightforward but you do just need to do everything they ask, if you do it all according to their best practice guidelines it's not that difficult.

Sorry to be clear she needs to talk to someone in the home office.

We got DH in through the work permit route as well (non EU immigrant). I wouldn't have been able to sponsor him via the marriage route as I only work p/t and my savings aren't anywhere near £65k. It meant he did all the visa stuff through his work and we didn't have to prove anything about our relationship etc, and his visa renewals and ILR went through without any problems.

He did the LITUK test last year and got British citizenship after paying another £1k.

Newbrummie check section 7.2 in the pdf in www.gov.uk/join-family-in-uk/eligibility

It explains how savings are considered for eligibility.

As she is 14 I just got her a british passport and strolled straight in but honestly, there were a few sleepless nights

What does being 14 have to do with getting a british passport? It is an honest question.

stop don't worry, am not anti immigration. Mum is an immigrant but back then Britain was keen for peeps to settle here

OP, the best advice you can give your friend is to tell her to pony up for some proper legal advice. She needs a decent, reputable solicitor. Unfortunately there are a lot of absolute sharks doing immigration law, I know because I practiced it myself until recently and spent a lot of time trying to undo their mistakes. I was not always able to do so, though. It's absolutely crucial to get it right first time. Bad advice at the start can and does fuck people's cases up entirely.

This is really not the sort of thing to be crowdsourcing to Mumsnet, as nolim says. Some of the posts here are at least partially accurate, although some are a bit confused (for example, you don't have to earn 18.6k OR have 65k in the bank, there can be a combination of the two Some are inaccurate and little mistakes matter, for example it's 18.6k, not 18.5k or 18k, and a miss is as good as a mile with the income requirements. But you've not given enough information in your OP for anyone to be able to properly advise even if they had the necessary expertise. If your friend was coming to see me, I'd need much more information off her than that.

Two points I would particularly emphasise:

• The system has changed hugely in the past few years, particularly after July 2012, so don't assume your friend's experience will be the same as someone who did it before then. It won't be. It will likely be harder. Immigration law changes constantly.

• Don't ring the Home Office. They're not legally trained and shouldn't be providing immigration advice anyway. Most likely you'll end up spending half a day trying to get through, before speaking to a temp who had about ten minutes training before being unleashed on the general public. Newbrummie's experience is exactly why you need to take what they say with as much salt as you can get hold of. This is not necessarily a criticism of the HO phone people. They're not given enough training to do their own jobs properly, let alone act as unpaid legal advisors over the phone.

Best of luck to your friend and her partner.

Marriage visitor visa is for getting married in the UK. you can't change status once here so he would have to leave and apply for a spouse visa. It is a long and very expensive process and refusal rates are sky high.

Just RTFT and I just wanted to second everything Chicken said. A lot of PPs anecdotes aren't going to help your friend as the rules changed drastically in 2012 just as DH was putting his spouse visa application together

OP, is your friend currently living and working in the UK? Or elsewhere in the EU? If so, different rules (much less strict actually) might apply.

You need to look on the government website for the most up to date info as it changes constantly. As per march the rules the latest I read up on (6 months ago) were You need to be earning about £18,500 for at least 6 months or have £65,000 in the bank if you plan on bringing a non EU spouse to the UK to live.

And - important to note, it has to be the British citizen earning the 18,000 and you HAVE to prove you have a job in the UK to back this up. They will not take evidence of a possible job

The other option to consider if a UK visa is not forthcoming, is the non EU partner to go live in the EU and gain EU residency there, and then you can settle in the UK under the freedom of movement agreement.

Granted, this can take a while, but can be quicker than waiting for the UK immigration wheels to turn. However, I suspect that this route is probably going to be under scrutiny (if not already)

Agree with PPs re getting legal advice. I am Australian, DH English and though I still would have qualified under the new rules, I'm thankful we did it in 2010, as it was only a 2 year wait for ILR. I think the new rules are unnecessarily draconian, and some of the stories I've read of families being ripped apart are heartbreaking.

On a different point, don't take anything you hear over the phone from "officials" as accurate... I still remember the fun getting DTDs' passports (I had to explain that even though DH was born abroad, it was while his dad was on active service in RAF and thus he was classed as British from Birth....grr...)