I am a British national preparing to marry a Chinese girl. Perhaps my experiences so far will be useful to someone. Also any advice would be appreciated.
When my financee's student visa ran out in 2004, she applied for a HSMP work permit and made two unsucessful appeals. Her leave to stay eventually ran out in the middle of 2005. After that, she overstayed for 3 months and then applied for another student visa. This looks like a mistake now. She received a letter saying that her application was 'valid' but it required further consideration, in the meantime she could remain in the UK with the status she had when she sent in the application. Of course at that time she had no right to be in the UK but she couldn't leave because her passport was in the home office. She called to enquire about her application several times but she was always told that, 'it required further consideration.'
In July I proposed to her and we started to make plans to get married. It was clear that we could not marry in the UK because she did not have a visa for more than 6 months. We wrote a letter to ask for the visa applaction to be processed but nothing happened. With hindsight this was a bad idea because the application was bound to be refused and she would have been put under an adminstrative removal.
We decided to get married in China in Feb 2007. The documentation was reasonably easy to sort out. I got a Certificate of No Impediment and a Statutory Declaration of my personal details. Then I sent them for legalisation by the Foreign Office and the Chinese Embassy.
We spent an hour speaking to a solicitor (£185) about how to apply for a spouses visa so that my financee can come back to the UK. She told us to get together my bank statements, some photos, several letters and personal statements. Again, this is all fairly straight forward.
The next task was to get my financee's passport back so that we can fly to China. The solicitor told us that the passport would be returned if we withdrew the visa application. It has turned out to be more complicated than that so far. We sent a letter to Lunar House at the Home Office to withdraw the application. My financee received a letter saying that her documents had been passed to the Immigration Reporting Centre at Dallas Court in Manchester. She phoned them and was told that if she faxed the flight details to the Dallas Court office that her passport would be made available at the airport for her flight. This seemed simple enough but then she received a letter asking her to attend an appointment and the Reporting Centre. To me this sounded like she was in trouble but she phoned them and they seemed very friendly. She attended the appointment and had to go through airport style security at the front door and I wasn't allowed in at all. She had to leave her mobile and handbag in a locker at the reception desk. In the end, she wasn't interviewed at all and she came out again five minutes later. She was given all of the documents from her student visa application and a letter headed 'Notice of a person liable to removal' (IS151A) and two letters headed 'Immigration Act 1971 - Notification of temporary admission to a person who is liable to be detained' (IS96). It seems that she will be able to leave on the flight as planned but I think it would have been better to have started by making an AVRIM application. Anyway things seem to have worked out but I have got a few more grey hairs than I had a month ago!
Hopefully that will be useful to anyone in a similar stituation. If possible, I would like some advice on how to approach the application for the spouse's visa. Should we include the IS151A in the application?
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