Quick overview and background on the Malta case:
It will vary from country to country, but many places don’t necessarily grant you residency by virtue of marriage to a citizen.
And I’d guess that ours isn’t the only jurisdiction alert to the possibility of fake marriages - and actually checking that an applicant couple are living and socialising together over some set time period.
Yeah. I was not advocating a sham marriage for immigration purposes. I was advocating that while visiting e.g. Portugal regularly, look seriously at finding a local you can really like and love. Then do the traditional thing.
Note: Australia has a lifetime limit of one for the number of people you may import by marriage.
You can bring one in, but if they die, or it doesn’t work out, you have no further chances. If you do it as a friend, or for consideration, same thing: better avoid falling in love with any other foreigner.
“Honey, I love you, but I’m not sure I want to spend my spousal visa allowance on you.”
Wow. I knew Australia’s animal import rules are strict, but isn’t this taking it too far?
You could look at Jersey. The rules are pretty strict and getting a job there is unlikely.
Interesting. One of the folks at my former condo had a NYC-born & raised son who married an Aussie and they settled in some small town in the outback where she and her family were from. I never learned how they met.
Anyhow, fast forward a few years and he is being driven up the wall by life in Nowheresville*. Based on the trajectory when last I checked in with his parents maybe 5 years ago, it sure sounded like by now that poor lady will have burned her lifetime allowance on a now-missing man.
Which, ref @Schnitte makes me wonder how much her not losing that played into whether & how long he hung around. IOW “We’re staying together for the sake of her allowance.”
*In US English common jokey names for generic rural small towns are Podunk, Bumfuck, and Nowheresville. There are surely more, but those are IMO the big three.
I have to imagine Oz-flavored English has some jokey names for the same idea. But they’re probably much more Oz-appropriate. Care to share?
The lifetime limit appears to be two people, not one. Here’s the regulations if you’re curious; the relevant sentences are:
the Minister must not approve the sponsorship of the applicant unless … not more than 1 other person has been granted a relevant permission as the spouse, de facto partner or prospective spouse of the sponsor.
IOW, this rule only kicks in if you’ve already sponsored “more than one other person”, i.e., you’ve already sponsored two and you try to sponsor a third. (Several Australian law firm websites say the same thing but in plainer language.)
It sounds to me like in this case the “allowance” was already “spent” when the visa was granted, and it wouldn’t affect anything legally if he stuck around or not after that point. That said, a couple might fall into the sunk cost fallacy when thinking about this sort of thing, which might influence them to stay together when they wouldn’t otherwise do so.
Yeah. Sunk cost thinking is what I meant. Kinda like this:
She: If you leave me I’m stuck here by myself. I’ll never lure another Aussie out here, so I’d have to go get another clueless foreigner to replace you. But you’re my one and only immigrant allowance. That’s not fair.
He: OK, you’ve guilted me into staying another 6 months. Sigh.
Lather rinse repeat. And yes, I’m largely joking here, but couple dynamics often include people wildly mis-valuing certain aspects of their lives. I sure have.
Oonawoopwoop. Sometimes just Woop Woop.
Oz names have a wide heritage. The above joke name is probably influenced by Oodnadatta (population 102), and a host of country towns with double banger names, such as Woy Woy (population 11,000) and Wagga Wagga (pop 57,000).
Oodnadatta is probably the archetype isolated hell hole. It is a ridiculous distance from anything resembling civilisation, the weather is appalling in summer, and it basically never rains. There is hundreds of miles of exactly nothing in every direction. But a nothing that will kill you swiftly if you don’t respect it.
Moving from New York City to small-town Australia is a huge difference that obviously didn’t work for him but is something he should have thought long and hard about before doing so. But some people are so in love that they think they can overcome anything.
[wrong forum - memo to self “facetiousness elsewhere”
Brings to mind the Monty Python *Australian Table Wines" skit.
“Chateau Louis St Wagga Wagga… this is a wine with a messge, and the message is ‘Beware!’. This one really opens up the sluices at both ends…”
Podunk might be Dubbo (‘there is no night life in Dubbo’). Those are both real places, like Timbuktu
Woop-Woop surely doesn’t have any night life, but who would know? Nobody lives up past Woop-Woop.
I remember looking at a map of Victoria, and thinking that the map makers had cheaped out by not showing the roads north of the state border. When I got there, I realized that it wasn’t cheap mapmaking: there are no roads north of the border.
We of the Never-Never by Jeannie Gunn | Project Gutenberg
I’ve never read a discussion of Australian grammers, but presumably, double terms are plurals/intensivisors like Yarra-Yarra = “Many Waters”
Mostly. Indigenous Australian languages are extremely diverse, but reduplication as an intensifier is a feature of quite a few, particularly along the eastern seaboard. And I think most of the reduplicated placenames are found in NSW or Victoria.
Not all of the reduplicated names represent intensification, though. Jim Jim Falls in the NT is named from a corruption of the name in the local indigenous language for pandanus. Gingin in WA is named from the Noongar word for a footprint. The Bungle Bungle mountain range, also in WA, is name for bundle bundle grass, which in turn is named from the English word “bundle”; it’s not an indigenous-derived name at all. (The indigenous name for the mountain range is Purnululu.)