Defend Truth

Opinionista

Love in the time of visa applications

mm

Antoinette thinks of the world and the people who live in it as a bear with a sore paw. She has a stick covered in thorns and shes poking the bear. When shes not doing that, shes watching cricket and longing for the days of the boring, boring Arsenal.

Not falling in love with a foreigner is probably some of the best relationship advice you’ll ever get. But, as with all things when it comes to matters of the heart, advice goes in one ear and out the other. With long-distance love comes visa applications, and recent changes to South African immigration laws have changed things quite a bit. Here’s a first-hand experience of the process.

The best relationship advice you’ll ever hear is that you should never fall in love with a foreigner, unless you have a lot of patience for red tape and bureaucracy. But who ever cared for following advice when it came to matters of the heart?

Cross-continental relationships take some serious effort. A person only has so much tolerance for confined spaces in an aircraft with screaming children who create supersonic noise levels that can penetrate even a dose of prescription sleeping pills. The inventive sleeping positions one comes up with might one day be beneficial for a career in contortion, but when you don’t plan on running away to the circus any time soon, the skill serves little purpose.

After a few years, couples tend to decide to settle somewhere. This decision arrives based on various factors, but no matter where you go, the issue of a visas is likely to come up at some point.

The easy option is to get married. From a visa perspective, it changes things, and makes everything easier. The adrenaline junkies, however, opt to go the “unmarried partner” visa route. As the most-often abused visa category in almost any country, it’s also the category that requires the most meticulous preparation.

The thing with the South African visa application process is that information really is not forthcoming. During the process, forums become your best friend, and late-night panic attacks over horror stories of rejected applications become part of your daily routine.

Prior to the recent law change, which now requires applications to be made in the foreigner’s country, applicants could submit in South Africa after entering the country on a tourist visa. Some applicants who went that route have been waiting for anything from a few months to a few years. Many have had to resubmit everything because, oops, forms got lost.

Conflicting information between forums, immigration agencies and even official wording from Home Affairs and the Immigration Act mean that, aside from the most basic info, the gathering of supporting documents can be incredibly stressful.

You can use an immigration lawyer or agency for the service, but they often charge anything from R8,000 to R15,000. These fees are exploitative because many of the documents needed are not the ones agencies will have access to.

The thing is, it can be done on your own. In essence, a visa application is a legal case. My legalese is very much limited to watching Boston Legal and frequently repeating “If I put it to you” in a mock Afrikaans accent on top of my own, real Afrikaans accent. But what I do know is that there is an immigration law that needs to be applied and the applicant needs to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he or she is legitimate.

Armed with this knowledge, I recently set off on an information foraging expedition that resulted in turning an over two-year relationship into a mini textbook.

There were many moments involving pulling out excess hair and breathing heavily. It all culminated in an Amazing Race-like dash around Trafalgar Square on a rainy London day in order to submit the application.

The Embassy doesn’t actually do the applications, mind you: the Consulate does that. The sign at the Embassy says they’re left past the Tesco and by left, they mean right. Once this particular obstacle is cleared, the staff inside are surprisingly useful and friendly. There are even windows in the building, nothing like the Home Affairs nightmares many have experienced in recent years. Be sure to listen carefully for your number, though, because there is no PA announcement system and, if you miss it, you miss out.

The lady who eventually got lumped with the stack of documents that was presented to her looked both bemused and impressed at the lengths we’d gone to putting together all our evidence.

For those looking to apply in the “life-partner” category, the official forms needed are fairly straight-forward. The application is not actually called a life-partner or unmarried partner visa in South Africa; it falls under the “relative’s visa” category. You also have to be together for at least two years, and you need proof of this. First, the basics. An application form (which can be usually be downloaded from the embassy you are applying from), a medical report, a radiology report (these are both forms from DHA and need to be used and stamped by a GP and a radiology department), a police clearance report (for every country the applicant has lived in for 12 months or more since they were 18) and a couple of affidavits (obtained from DHA, but confusing since there are many different versions), and it all needs to be stamped by a commissioner of oaths.

Then it comes to the evidence. For the life partner category, cohabitation as well as shared financial responsibility is key. This can be proven in a number of ways, ranging from joint leases to joint bank accounts and joint bills, as well as transfers between the two parties all help. It all needs to show that you “have a relationship akin to marriage” for at least two years.

You might or might not need a notarial agreement, which will cost you anywhere from R700 to R2,000 for a signature, depending on where you go. The actual immigration law states that it’s either the notarial agreement or the affidavits, but there have been cases where applicants were declined on the basis of not including a notarial agreement. Neither the Embassy in London nor VFS (the new guardian of visa applications in South Africa) regularly asks for this document.

Flight tickets proving visits, holidays together, in some cases photos, gift receipts, emails, Skype records and anything else that proves you are a real couple, not just two people living together, all help.

As life becomes more globalised, visas are more and more likely to crop up in an “ordinary” person’s life. The difficulty of obtaining these visas range from impossible to challenging to nothing to stress about despite all the doom and gloom. Most of it can be done on your own, with a little bit (or a lot) of persistence. That there are companies who are exploiting the desperate and the panicked is perhaps the saddest part of the whole process. DM

Gallery

Please peer review 3 community comments before your comment can be posted

Become a Maverick Insider

This could have been a paywall

On another site this would have been a paywall. Maverick Insider keeps our content free for all.

Become an Insider

Every seed of hope will one day sprout.

South African citizens throughout the country are standing up for our human rights. Stay informed, connected and inspired by our weekly FREE Maverick Citizen newsletter.