[LINK] "The non-EU workers who’ll be deported for earning less than £35,000"

[rfmcdonald]

The Guardian's Donna Ferguson notes how many long-time residents of the United Kingdom, most notably here Americans and Australians, will be driven out of the country by new income requirements.

Alyson Frazier, a 25-year-old classical musician from Washington DC, is trying to describe how it feels when people ask her whether she wants to stay in Britain. “It’s like asking a fish: ‘How’s the water?’. London is my home. This is where I have built my adult life since the age of 19.”

Unfortunately Frazier – who has a first class MA from the Royal Academy of Music and is the co-founder of Play for Progress, a therapeutic music programme for refugee children – only earns £17,000 a year.

That’s less than half the salary she, her fellow-Americans and other non-EU migrants will soon need to stay in the country permanently, thanks to rules being introduced next month.

From 6 April all skilled workers from outside the EU who have been living here for less than 10 years will need to earn at least £35,000 a year to settle permanently in the UK. Some jobs, such as nurses, are exempt (see How the rules are changing, right) but Frazier’s is not. Unless she gets a higher-paid job, she will be deported in September.

“I’ve chosen to take a lower salary because I’m trying to improve the lives of unaccompanied child refugees and do good in the world through music and education,” she says. “How do you put that on paper in a visa application? How do you show the value of trying to make a child’s life better?”