Proving It to a Stranger

Nearly every country lets a citizen bring a spouse to live with them. The moment it does, it has created an obligation to decide which marriages are real, and that is a far stranger administrative task than it first appears.

A government cannot observe affection. It can observe documents, answers and money, and every system in use is some combination of those three.

The United States chose documents and answers, with a clock. The Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendments of 1986 established that where a marriage is less than two years old when residence is granted, the status is conditional for two years. Before it expires the couple petitions jointly to have the conditions removed, supplying the accumulated evidence of a shared life: joint accounts, a lease or mortgage in both names, tax filings, insurance, photographs, correspondence. If the marriage has ended in the meantime, the immigrant spouse can still apply alone under a waiver, which requires showing that the marriage was entered in good faith. Note the standard carefully: the test is intent at the beginning, not duration. A marriage that failed honestly still qualifies.

Where an officer doubts the relationship, there is a second interview at which the spouses are separated and asked the same detailed questions about their household, and their answers compared. Which side of the bed, what the other had for breakfast, where the bins are kept, who was at the wedding. Discrepancies are treated as evidence of fraud.

Britain took the third route and tests money.

Since 2012 a sponsor has had to demonstrate a minimum income to bring a spouse. The threshold was eighteen thousand six hundred pounds, rose to twenty-nine thousand in April 2024, and was slated to rise again to thirty-eight thousand seven hundred before the increase was paused and referred to the Migration Advisory Committee, which recommended against it. Savings can substitute for income, at a level most households do not have. Nobody asks for photographs, because the test is not about the relationship at all. It is about who will bear the cost if the household needs support.

Now the criticism, which applies to both systems and is not a complaint about officials.

An evidence-based test can only see evidence that a relationship happens to generate, and genuine relationships generate wildly different amounts of it. A couple who keep separate finances, as plenty of people sensibly do, produce fewer joint documents. A couple separated for months by work produce fewer photographs together. A couple from a tradition in which the marriage is arranged between families and the household is multigenerational produce a different pattern entirely from the one an officer's checklist was built around. Meanwhile anybody committing deliberate fraud knows exactly which documents to accumulate and can rehearse the separated interview for a week.

So the test is systematically hardest on unusual real marriages and easiest on prepared false ones, which is the precise opposite of what it is for.

The income threshold escapes that trap by refusing to ask the question, and buys a different problem. It makes the right to live with your spouse a function of your salary, which means it falls hardest on the young, on part-time workers, on carers, on anyone living outside the expensive cities where the wages are, and on people whose partner earns well abroad but whose own earnings are what counts.

There is no clean version of this. A state that recognises marriage for immigration purposes must draw a line, and every available line is drawn through something other than love, because love is the one thing in the file that cannot be evidenced. That is worth knowing when you read about a couple failing one of these tests, and worth remembering as the limit of what any such test can establish.