Give advice, go to jail
« previous post | next post »
Here's what I think you should do regarding your desire to immigrate to Scotland so you can study linguistics and English language at the University of Edinbu… oops. I nearly put a foot wrong there. According to a brochure I just received from my daytime employer:
Staff should not give immigration advice to students. To do so represents a high risk and is a criminal offence.
A criminal offence? A conversation in which I supply you with some advice about UK immigration matters could end up with me facing criminal charges? Even for me, well versed in the many ways the UK government is permitted to restrict freedom of speech (look for the phrase "who cannot be named for legal reasons" in UK newspapers, for another example), it is hard to get fully attuned to the necessity to button one's lip. Sorry. No advice from me.
Come to think of it, I did give Barbara occasional advice while she studied for her Life in the UK Test recently. Probably that was legal: not a case of university staff advising a university student.
The Life in the UK Test is required because the UK government now doesn't allow people to apply for either citizenship or permanent residency until they have passed a sort of civics and language test. The test is of course heavy on pointless statistics and acronyms you have to memorize, because that is what is easy to test. (30% of my fellow Britons have tried illegal drugs, I learn, and 50% of young people. And quangos are now called NDPBs. Don't ask.) Lots of acronyms and abbreviations, and pointless numbers to learn. At one point Barbara read out to me a paragraph from the official book covering the syllabus for the test, which said this:
The European Union (EU), originally called the European Economic Community (EEC), was set up by six Western European countries who signed the Treaty of Rome on 25 March 1957. […irrelevant sentence about purpose omitted here…] Originally the UK decided not to join this group and only became part of the European Union in 1973. In 2004 ten new member countries joined the EU, with a further two in 2006 making a total of 27 member countries.
Let's just do the math to make this easier to memorize, shall we? Six original signatories in 1957, so that's 6. The the UK added in 1973, so now we have 7. Ten new members in 2004, and then there were 17. Two more in 2006, that makes 19. So the total is… 27?
I'm sure there is some solution — another 8 countries that somehow crept in between 1957 or 1973, or between 1973 and 2004, and they happen not to have been mentioned in the book. But the point is not whether there are really 27 members or whether the authors of this book can count, but about whether the authors can write. What an appallingly stupid and confusing paragraph. What a useless load of numerical trivia to expect every immigrant to learn from such an ill-written and confusing paragraph. What a huge burden of privatized busywork, just to satisfy the public that Things Are Being Done About Immigration by farming out a testing procedure to an industry of private test designers and testing centers. And it that will never ever go away, because the hosts of testing centers and test question authors will constitute a lobby for keeping it.
I'm sure you'll be glad to hear that Barbara (a native speaker of English with several degrees and three years of residence within the UK) did indeed pass. It would have been a rather extreme case of the test being made to look ridiculous if she had not passed. We're not having a big champagne celebration over it. Just another working day, wrestling with the bureaucracy so that Barbara can stay in Edinburgh with me rather than be stopped in midway through a philosophy lecture and deported to Ohio.