In my previous post about leaving Ohio for Scotland, I mentioned I had a UK passport and was a British National. So we knew I could head over to Scotland. My wife and two daughters are American, though.
To immigrate, I needed to apply for a Spousal Visa.
That turned into a two year ordeal that almost broke me. The plan had been to move shortly after the inauguration, maybe that summer, so that our daughters would have two years of high school, a gap year, then university.
First of all, during the Tory rule and fears about immigrants breaking out, the government changed immigrating on a Spousal Visa to include the estimated price of the NHS to be pre-paid for all family members, and raised the fees tremendously. So the application costs thousands of pounds, and then you have to prepay even more thousands of pounds for the NHS fee. You will then have the NHS taxes also deducted, so immigrants to the UK pay double. Bringing a family is about 14,000 pounds. Oh, the application fee is non-refundable (6,000 pounds total), the NHS charge is refundable.
We initially applied, but then the law changed, and the center we showed up to do biometrics for had shut that day in Columbus (and by then also had an armed US Border Patrol or immigration [forget which] person watching Fox on TV and laughing about people being rounded up, honest, not even making that up). We were able to cancel and get a refund, but then had to start over again.
At this point I tried to engage the services of a lawyer to help us fill it all out and apply. That lawyer said yes, we had a Zoom meeting, and then they just… ghosted us. I put the application together on my own.
Our first official application went out, and we paid an extra thousand pounds each for a quick decision.
It came back that summer. Denied.
Why?
Well, there were 4 different mistakes I found on the denial.
1) It didn’t consider my work from home income, which I documented and proved. 2) it didn’t consider all our savings, just some. 3) it misclassified the application from a spousal visa to a humanitarian refugee application, and 4) something else I can’t remember and don’t want to look up because the whole thing gives me PTSD. Oh, it also claimed we’d applied in 1979, on my wife’s birthday.
We consulted with a lawyer that had been recommended to us, and they said that due to all the clear mistakes, we could try to take it to a judge to get a second look, but it would be expensive, more than just re-applying, and take longer than just re-applying. We took the 9,000 pound hit and started over again. I was so sick about the loss of money I was actually sick to my stomach for days.
Our second application went in over the winter, after reading as much as I could and looking over successful applications, and spending weeks on it checking it over many times because I’m ADHD, we sent it in. Our biometrics were done in February of 2026.
And we waited.
And we waited.
Summer came around. We waited.
May, I started calling. Where was the status? In process. Just wait.
Every week in June. In process.
In July. In process.
By now two summers had gone by, and estimates on what we could get for selling our home had lowered.
My stress levels, after two years of this, were so extreme I could barely sleep. ICE raids were growing, more violence was on the news. I wanted to know for sure what we were doing.
I finally, in desperation, reached out to a member of parliament. Because this whole time we’d been paying for renting a flat, a requisite part of the application. More money we could ill afford. The MP, at the end of July, after I filled out some paperwork, was able to tell us in just a week that there was indeed, actually a decision made.
What was that decision?
I had to fill out more paperwork.
A week later, the Home Office sent us a copy of the PDF approval.
Guess what? They mistyped our email address in, and because it was fat-fingered, we never got the approval.
Sent on May 12th.
Only an email. No text, no letter, either of which would have changed our summer for the better.
So in early August, we told our jobs we were leaving for the UK, and set out to sell our house in 6 weeks.
Why the rush? Well, according to the paperwork, the visa has to be used by a certain date. When I called I was told it was 90 days from May 12th, when accepted, which meant we needed to get my family to the UK in a few weeks. Another call said it needed to be done by Sept 20th. Another call said I could bring them in whenever.
I tried to call our lawyer, and found that they had shut down and disappeared. Which, after having ghosted us, made sense.
I found the most expensive, known immigration firm in London and paid for an hour of consultation, and found out that the date was basically September 20th. So we sold, donated, or threw away everything we owned to pack everything down into:
- 8 50lb checked suitcases
- 2 carry ons
- 2 pet carriers
- and 4 backpacks
I won’t talk about how challenging it was for my family to do that, but they rallied, and none of us will ever talk about the utter insanity that was six weeks of selling the house and doing all that ever again, because the headline is: we survived it. And none of us killed each other.
With our original moving budget from two years ago destroyed by two sets of application fees, and 18 months of renting a flat unseen, we thought we’d done the impossible. Sold our home, gotten permission to move, pared our lives down into suitcases, and purchased tickets.
On the last Sunday of the week we were in the US, we threw a going away party. People from three different states came over, and I said good bye to dozens and dozens of beautiful, amazing people that made our community.
Our friends drove us to the airport in Detroit, where I thought the last challenge waited: the logistics of getting all the luggage and two cats to an apartment in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, would be hurdled, and then we could rest for the first time in 6 weeks.
Little did I know, I was only halfway through our ordeal.
In part three, I’ll talk about the flat from hell…
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