'Yvonne is one of many propping up the NHS - yet we refuse to let kids join her'
Over the weekend I learned about the story of Yvonne, whose situation mirrors that of many within the NHS.
A nurse from Zimbabwe, she has to FaceTime her daughters back home to see them, with the calls very often ending in tears. Why? Because Yvonne is among the many immigrants propping up our health service yet denied the humanity of their children being allowed to join them.
It is yet another of the scandals in plain sight under our current administration.
It was in March 2023 that she left her girls and headed to London. Two months later, she applied to the Home Office for the children’s visas. The application was denied with the Home Office contending that the girls could live with other relatives, and that Yvonne hadn’t provided “compelling reasons” for them to join her.
Bureaucracy trumps humanity yet again.
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Many critics’ first response will be to attack those affected rather than the decades-old rule that a child can only receive a visa if both parents are living in the UK, unless the parent living here has sole responsibility.
Even though the rules allow healthcare workers to bring family members, there are still single mothers – many tempted over to work in the NHS and care sector – having their applications denied.
As has been pointed out in this column before, despite all the scaremongering, the statistics show most of the people arriving in the UK work, pay their taxes and contribute to the economy. Check the figures.
They work on the transport system and in the NHS – just as they did in the 1960s,
’70s and ’80s.
And it is important to reintroduce that truism to the conversation because No 10 would have you believe – to use language from the late Margaret Thatcher – that we are being “swamped”. We aren’t.
Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick, Rishi Sunak, unflushables like Nigel Farage, and even the Labour front bench have burned the phrase ‘stop the boats’ so deeply into
the media discourse that presenters inadvertently help the haters by using it routinely.
In addition, those whose lives are too busy to read the details end up conflating those in the boats with those propping up our health service who have actually made applications.
Yvonne’s youngest is four by the way. We forget that at the centre of these stories are real people. Human beings.
Like so many, she came here in search of a better life for her family. She’d been assured by her employer that it wouldn’t be a problem for her daughters to follow her over. It was. And has been ever since.
Often we hope against hope that this is not what this country has become. Sadly, it is.
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