Viva la Visa

Today I got a biometric residence permit, signifying that I achieved Indefinite Leave to Remain, also known as a settlement visa.

It took five years and maybe $7,000 and countless hours of searching for, assembling, numbering, and packaging documents about David's and my finances, living arrangments, marriage, employment, etc. A year from now, I am eligible to apply for citizenship. But in the meantime, I have a right to stay here without a time limit. It is good to be on firmer ground. Thanks to Theresa May's hostile environment, the UK is not welcoming foreigners. The application process for each of my three visas (limited leave to enter, limited leave to remain, indefinite leave to remain) made it clear the Home Office would like to find any reason at all to kick me out--any T not crossed or I not dotted.

I should be over the moon celebrating this achievement. However. There's this thing called Brexit that gives me pause. It looks like Boris Johnson is driving a Mini Cooper over a cliff in slow motion. Brexit is a mountain of hubris about British sovereignty and British pluck when it is really British chauvinism and British folly. At the root of it is the gazillionaires--always the gazillionaires--not wanting the EU to spoil their tax-free, sock it away in the British Virgin Islands approach to life. The EU isn't perfect but it leads the world in addressing abuse of human and environmental rights and it is slowly addressing the shell game used to hide trillions in global wealth. Not something that goes down well with the media barons running British newspapers.

And on this island, the creation of a north-south border when the UK leaves the EU (while Ireland remains an EU country) could mean a return to the Troubles. The paramilitaries are still armed and putting up a border gives them so much more to fight for--the nationalists wanting to attack the border, the unionists to defend it. I lived here in the 70s during the Troubles and I really don't want to revisit that time in history.

So, I guess I'm trying to say I feel relieved to live here without a time limit. But I'd feel better if I didn't feel the country's economic, political, and military future weren't in play.  

Sept. 27