Kept apart: Routine family separation in the UK family immigration system as times of crises

Abstract

The UK’s family immigration regime involves the routine separation of partners from their families. Most obviously, it keeps apart those who are unable to meet the income and other requirements for family (re)unification, and those refused visas. But separation for at least several months, and sometimes much longer, is the norm even for those whose applications are eventually successful. This article draws on creative, co-produced accounts of immigration-related separation to reveal multi-faceted temporalities of crisis in the ‘experiential migrantisation’ of British citizens seeking to reunite bi-national families in the UK. The bureaucratic temporalities of immigration control impede aspirations for life-course progression and shared futures, while increasing the tempo of working and caring lives. In exploring the accounts of British citizens kept apart from partners by the immigration regime through a temporal lens, we chart this experiential migrantisation through the varied and intersecting temporalities of bureaucracy and immigration control, and of biography and (transnational) family life. These can become intertwined with and compound other temporalities of crisis at different levels, from the global Covid-19 pandemic and other international geo-political events, to the more intimate and familial, leading to ‘times of crises’. Such crises are, moreover, often expressed through temporal tropes of key dates missed—birthdays, anniversaries, holidays—and phases of family life postponed.