I know it’s dangerous to think of real life as being like the movies, but I’m rewatching Dirty Pretty Things for the first time since it came out four or five years ago, and one peculiarity of the English immigration system serves as the backdrop for an important early plot point: Under a Turkish immigrant’s particular type of visa, she cannot legally work or accept rent.
It’s clear in the movie that she depends on her job and her rent income to survive, so it’s not like she had some special rich-people visa or something. If someone isn’t allowed to have any income at all, how are they supposed to survive in a new country? That doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would such a visa exist? Wouldn’t it exponentially increase illegal labor by definition?
I don’t have all that much info for you - I just came in to point out that this is no peculiarity of the English immigration system. This is a restriction imposed on many people’s visas. I think the general idea is that especially in western nations it’s damn hard to get a work visa, so people come in on non work visas, and then try to find a job. check out [Wiki - american visas] to see this. Generally, you’ll need to be well educated, etc, to get a visa that allows you to work.
Why didn’t you ask about Scotland and Wales as well? Anyway, immigration and border controls are governed entirely by the UK government, this hasn’t changed in centuries.
I think the issue mentioned in the OP comes up when someone is seeking asylum in Britain - until they get a decision from the Home Office, which may take many months, they are not allowed to work. I’m not sure why someone from Turkey would be seeking asylum though, unless she was Kurdish.
You can either legally immigrate, in which case of course you can work; or you visit as a tourist, in which case you are expected to bring sufficient funds to support yourself, and leave when your visa expires; or you might visit on business, in which case you need a work permit which enables you to work but again you are expected to leave when your visa expires. There are probably other options I’ve overlooked, but only the first of these options can be considered “immigration”. So the scenario in the OP cannot occur (not counting illegal immigration, but the OP doesn’t appear to be talking about that).
Refugee claimants in Canada aren’t allowed to work until their claim is finished being processed, which can take years. I can see the point behind this, so that people can’t just come and make a false refugee claim and get a work permit, and work until the claim is rejected and they get deported. But of course, even perfectly legitimate claimants (i.e. the ones whose claims are ultimately accepted) aren’t allowed to work legally while they spend years here waiting. And refugee claimants are quite unlikely to be independently wealthy, or to have local family members who can take care of them.
I cannot imagine how this could be enforced without violating the Geneva Convention, so it seems that Citizenship and Immigration Canada must just look the other way.
I’m quite aware of that, but I didn’t know exactly which government took care of what. I just knew the story was set in London. (In the present day, which would have been around 2003.)
“Immigration” is my word, not the movie’s. There’s no exposition scene where the terms of her visa are laid out in a list; you just see the British equivalent of INS barging into the character’s apartment with a tip that she’d been renting out her couch and possibly working, and saying something to the effect of, “You know you can’t accept rent and/or a job on your visa. Have you been working and/or accepting rent?” (It was quite a bit more cinematic than that, of course.) I assumed they weren’t just making shit up, as the movie was actually made by Londoners.
Yes, of course, but I was asking how a government could expect people to survive legally on such a visa. It makes more sense if it was a tourist visa. Although I can’t say I understand why it would be such a bad thing to let a tourist work. What do people on working vacations do? I’ve heard of American students working during their vacations in Europe. Is there some special visa for that, or is it all hush-hush?
“Although I can’t say I understand why it would be such a bad thing to let a tourist work.”
It’s quite easy in general to get a tourist visa, and governments want to make sure people leave at the end of their vacations. It’s not unheard of for people to go to another country on a tourist visa with the intention to stay, and the last thing any government wants is more illegal immigrants. This is especially true of countries who have national health care and other social programs that people can take advantage of once they are in the country.
I believe there are special student work visas, but I have no direct knowledge of those.
There are working holiday visas in many countries, including the UK and Australia, though not in the US. Their existence is not a secret, but there are limitations, including age (generally you can only get a WHV up to the age of 30 or thereabouts).
Some countries also have working holiday visas. I held one a few years ago that limited me to a maximum of six months’ work in a 12 month stay and no single job for more than three months.
Please note that US has a lot of long-term stay visas with no permission for work. H-4 comes to mind, which would allow stays for up to six years (with a single renewal) but would not give you permission to work. It is a dependent Visa, so it’s slightly different, but still.
To simplify, there’s only one Government, which does the majority of lawmaking for whole of the UK, and it is located in London; there are then regional assemblies in three of the four nations, which have varying powers. The country in its entirety is the UK; the internal borders are totally open - think of them like state borders in the US.
Anyway, I’ve nothing more to contribute to this thread than nitpicking, so I’ll don my tissue-paper “ignorance fighting” hat and bugger off now.
Never done this, or even read the relevant sections of my many Lets Go guidebooks (haven’t been that bored lately), but I’m pretty sure they get a different visa than the standard tourist visa.
Another restriction of Working Holiday Visas is that you often cannot work in your primary capacity - so a trained chemist cannot work as a chemist, but can pick fruit or keep bar.
I haven’t seen the film, but it sounds like it doesn’t actually quite correspond to any actual scenario which could occur. If somebody has applied for asylum, they are provided with accomodation (normally the worst social housing which nobody else would accept) and with a small amount of money to live on (less than the smallest unemployment benefits). Note that there isn’t a visa for any of this, it’s not possible to legally enter the country with the specific intention of claiming asylum. Hence the situation where people enter on other visas if they can, and the big market for people-smugglers.
Working holiday visas are specifically for Commonwealth citizens. So unless the people you heard about had, for example, Canadian citizenship, they were probably just working illegally and being paid cash-in-hand. (If you mean they were in Britain already, on a student visa, then they’re allowed to work during holidays.)