The UK operates one of the most restrictive systems worldwide for admitting foreign spouses and partners, requiring couples to satisfy a wide range of criteria over a prolonged period. Data from the Brexit Couples Project shows that young, highly mobile couples often struggle to meet these requirements when applying for a partner visa. Drawing on a set of qualitative interviews, this paper explores how such couples encounter and make sense of the immigration regime, and how these encounters shape their legal consciousness as they navigate the demands imposed on their lives.

Two key criteria dominate couples’ accounts of the partner visa process: the minimum income requirement (MIR) and the evidentiary burden of proving the authenticity of their relationship.

The MIR, as previous scholarship has highlighted, is rigid and exclusionary, offering couples little flexibility and excluding many who fall short of the financial threshold. The proof of relationship, by contrast, is more ambiguous, leaving room for couples to curate and perform their relationship through the legal evidence they submit. This paper argues that examining how couples negotiate the evidentiary demands of the proof of relationship sheds light on the ways in which legality is interpreted, enacted, and embodied in the context of intimate lives. Young couples, often unmarried and accustomed to highly mobile lifestyles, find themselves in a particularly precarious position, revealing the broader implications of immigration control for intimacy, mobility, and belonging.

Speakers

Katharine Charsley is Professor of Migration Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on gender, family, and migration, with a particular interest in cross-border marriages and the UK’s family immigration regime. She currently leads the project UK-EU Couples after Brexit, building on previous work on family separation in immigration processes. Her publications include Marriage Migration and Integration (2020) and Transnational Pakistani Connections, and she has co-developed influential models of integration for research and policy.

Jasmin El Shewy is a legal geographer whose research explores how law and space are shaped through migration. She works on spousal migration in the UK and colonial legacies in the Middle East. Jasmin is Postdoctoral Research Associate on the UK-EU Couples after Brexit project, examining the impact of immigration rules on couples’ everyday lives.