A report published on 22 January by Action for Southern Africa and Women of Zimbabwe revealed that thousands of single mothers, from Zimbabwe and elsewhere, settled into their jobs only to then be denied visas for their children, who were waiting back home to join them.
Our postman of 20 years is Chinese; our local station is opened and closed at ungodly hours by a Nigerian woman; our supermarket tills are almost exclusively staffed by south Asians; our cat is regularly jabbed by people from Spain, Poland and India; and the drivers on our local bus route have recently included people from Ghana, Nepal, Somalia and Albania.
These mothers – looking after our loved ones every day – have been separated from their children for years now, making multiple costly visa applications (some exploited by unscrupulous legal advisers in the process), because of Home Office refusals based on their concept of “sole responsibility”.
John Harris’s article mentions the March 2024 rules banning new migrant care workers from bringing dependants (In an NHS ward I saw how Britain relies on immigrants.
Less well known is that thousands of health and care workers who arrived before this date have also been prevented from bringing their children – most of them single mothers.
