{"id":384,"date":"2004-09-24T21:01:39","date_gmt":"2004-09-24T21:01:39","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-06-01T22:14:43","modified_gmt":"2020-06-01T21:14:43","slug":"24092004","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/2004\/09\/24092004\/","title":{"rendered":"Loopholes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The BBC is usually reasonably accurate when it comes to reporting on immigration issues in the UK. Their current piece on &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/uk_news\/3679482.stm\">Beating the sham wedding cheats<\/a>&#8221; however starts with a significant inaccuracy:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/2004\/09\/fungi.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-12\" title=\"Click for larger view.\" src=\"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/2004\/09\/fungi-small.jpg\" alt=\"Fungi growing in the woods.\"><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The number of bogus weddings has increased dramatically in recent years according to Home Office records.<\/p>\n<p>The scam exploits a legal loophole meaning that foreigners can stay in the UK if they marry an EU citizen working in the country.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>My understanding of a legal loophole is that the effect of the law concerned is unintentional. The <a title=\"Short EU document describing freedom of movement\" href=\"http:\/\/europa.eu.int\/comm\/justice_home\/fsj\/citizenship\/movement\/fsj_citizenship_movement_en.htm\">freedom<\/a> to bring your spouse into the EU country where you work is a fundamental one agreed at the EU level, not something accidentally granted through legislative incompetence.<\/p>\n<p>Sham marriages are a problem whether the participant is a UK national or from another EU country. Restricting the ability of EU nationals to bring their families into the country would hurt a significant number of people, and make little dent in the problem.<\/p>\n<p>I wonder whether the BBC piece is even original work, rather than being taken off a wire, as almost identical wording can be found in the <a title=\"Guardian article on sham marriages\" href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/uk_news\/story\/0,,1310407,00.html\">corresponding<\/a> Guardian article.<\/p>\n<p>Photo: Fungi growing in Mount Pleasant Park, Nova Scotia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The BBC is usually reasonably accurate when it comes to reporting on immigration issues in the UK. Their current piece on &#8220;Beating the sham wedding cheats&#8221; however starts with a significant inaccuracy: The number of bogus weddings has increased dramatically in recent years according to Home Office records. The scam exploits a legal loophole meaning [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":789,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions\/789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}