It’s been 170 days since I applied for Indefinite Leave to Remain, that’s close to 6 months. What has followed my application has been a long process of bureaucratic nightmares, incompetent contractors and a level of indignity I can’t remember ever feeling in my 36 years alive. Come with me as I take you on a journey through what is like to be a foreign national trying to switch from Leave to Remain to Indefinite Leave to Remain.
It started off simple, create an online account and download an app to scan your passport. I was pleasantly surprised at how simple that was, I should have known that was just impossible. Fast forward 3 months. My application was dismissed. Why? Because apparently, I was supposed to do it in paper and not online. PAPER, in 2025? Yes, because once you do one application in paper you have to do all subsequent ones in paper. So, there I was for the second time in 5 years filling out a 60-page paper form and sending the Home Office, with a lot of the same information they had asked me 5 years ago.
My partner and I sat on our living room floor and made a selection of pictures from the last few years, images with hand written captions “ Us and the views from Shibuya” , “Paul and I at Anfield” , all sorts of precious private moments we would much rather share with friends and family other than with a hostile government office that has nothing but deep unjustified distrust towards me.
Fast forward another 2 months and I get an email telling me I need to go to a private contractor to give them my Biometrics, the same ones from 5 years ago. I call them and I tell them that my fingerprints look the same, I’ve not sanded them. They tell me that it doesn’t matter and I have to do it again.
And here is where it gets super fun. The Home Office gave the contract to a private company and the private company is meant to contact me to give me an appointment. I have one month to do the whole thing, almost 2 weeks go by and they’ve still not contacted me so I call the Home Office. I call them 3 times. The first time I’m given the wrong advice, the second time the call drops and the third time -after being on the phone for over one hour- they finally tell me I need to contact the private company myself, but they don’t have a phone number, only an online form. I ask them since the Home Office is the client of this company if they can contact them for me, they say no. I ask them if the contractor doesn’t get back to me or takes longer that the time frame advised if I can get an extension or if my application will be dismissed. They tell me it depends on who gets my case. Lovely. Just lovely.
So I go and email the private company and get an automatic reply saying it can take up to 10 working days to get a reply, that would put me over my 1 month deadline. I guess there’s nothing I can do other than wait and try not to have a panic attack.
They finally contact me, and I manage to get an appointment within the required time frame. And now we wait … again.
I am a person; I deserve to be treated with dignity. Everyone does. Please don’t be fooled by the rhetoric that if you come here “the right way” foreigners are welcomed. It’s simply not true. Every step of the way you are reminded you are not wanted here. There’s institutionalised xenophobia, the so called “hostile environment”. It’s in the media, it’s in the way the Home Office operates and it’s in Labour announcing policies such as today’s, saying they will publish a ranking of the most incarcerated nationalities. As if that’s helpful somehow? As if we don’t get enough abuse as it is? As if victims of human trafficking don’t end up imprisoned in this country?
I’m sitting here and while I write this I think if the Home Office will Google my name and if this article will somehow be a problem for me and my application. But I have done nothing wrong, and they can try to take my dignity away, but I can’t allow them to take my voice too, at this point it’s all I’ve got left.
By Malena Roche
