#humanrights

Love, Bureaucracy, and the Borders of Europe

How a perfectly legal couple spends years fighting a system that claims to protect the family

I have always loved Europe.
I still do.

The peace, the democracy, the rule of law — these are extraordinary privileges, and I’m grateful every day to live in a part of the world that, compared to most of the planet, is safe, stable and humane.

But loving a thing does not mean lying about it.
And the deeper my own journey into the European immigration system has taken me, the more convinced I have become that something fundamental is broken — not just in Germany, not just in Britain, but across almost the entire continent.

This is not an anti-German story.
It is a story about what it feels like to do everything legally, responsibly, respectfully — and still find yourself treated as if love were a loophole, marriage an inconvenience, and foreign spouses a threat to be contained.

It is a story that could happen in almost any European capital.

It just happened to us in Berlin.

How Love Became a Test of Endurance

A few years ago, I fell in love with a remarkable man in Indonesia.
Our relationship grew quickly and deeply, and we knew we wanted to build a life together in Europe rather than in Indonesia. We planned to marry anyway, so we assumed — naively, as it turns out — that marriage and legitimacy would make the process of living together straightforward.

We were wrong.
Painfully, spectacularly wrong.

Wedding Bells, Bureaucratic Walls

Because our marriage would not be legally valid in Indonesia, we had to marry in Europe.
What we imagined would be a simple civil ceremony became a six-month odyssey through paperwork, translations, apostilles, appointments, contradictory guidance, and requirements that bordered on the absurd.

Still — we got married.
We thought the hardest part was behind us.

But marriage, we learned, is not a ticket to a shared life.
It is merely the beginning of a long, labyrinthine process designed, it seems, to test whether your relationship can outlast bureaucracy.

The Rule No One Tells You: “Apply in Jakarta, or Don’t Come at All”

Once married, we were informed of something almost nobody tells you in advance:

If you marry an Indonesian and want to live together in Europe, your Indonesian spouse must apply for a family-reunification visa from Jakarta — and only from Jakarta.

Not from Berlin.
Not from any European consulate closer to their home island.
Not from Europe on a tourist visa (which would be logical, humane, and in line with every legal principle about protecting marriage).

Jakarta.
Or nothing.

The waiting list?
One year.
We have the screenshot.

And that’s just the waiting list for you to submit your application — not the processing time afterwards.

Imagine telling any married couple in Europe:

“Congratulations on your marriage.
You will now be forcibly separated for at least 12 months.”

That is the system.
That is the norm.

One Document Wrong? Start All Over Again.

When our turn finally came, the embassy did not approve one of the documents uploaded during the online process. They asked us to delete it — and, indeed, there is a little trash-can icon on the website.

Except the icon doesn’t work.
It never has.

After weeks of emails, calls, and technical back-and-forth, the embassy’s final advice was:

“Delete your entire application and start again.”

Which, in plain language, means:

“Restart the one-year waiting list.”

It is breathtaking to realise that the legal rights of marriage can be instantly overruled by a broken trash-can icon.

Geography as a Financial Weapon

If you are Indonesian and live on Sumatra, you must pay to fly twice to Jakarta — once for biometrics, and once to collect the visa. These costs are enormous relative to Indonesian salaries.

For many families, this is simply impossible.

This is what “legal migration” looks like in practice.

The 90/180 Trap: A Long-Distance Marriage by Law

Some couples try an alternative: the Schengen visitor visa.
But that route comes with its own cruelty:

Your spouse can visit for 90 days maximum
but must then leave for another 90 days minimum

Meaning:

You may live together for three months, then be forcibly separated for six.
Three on, six off. Three on, six off. Indefinitely.

Assuming, of course, you can afford the flights between Jakarta and Europe.
Most cannot.

The Berlin Immigration Office: A Fortress Without Doors

If the embassy maze is surreal, the immigration office in Berlin is its European twin.

You cannot phone them.
You cannot email them.
You cannot speak to a human being unless you already have an appointment — and you cannot get an appointment without submitting a webform that may sit unanswered for two months.

If you attempt to enter the building to ask for help, security guards turn you away.
“No appointment, no entry.”

It is Kafka with fluorescent lighting.

When Your Appointment Arrives… It’s Too Late

In our case, by the time Berlin offered my husband an appointment, his visitor visa had expired.
They could not — or would not — offer an earlier date.

He was legally in the country.
He had proof of marriage.
He had every document required.

But the system, moving at its own glacial pace, simply shrugged.

The Catch-22: Work to Stay, But You Can’t Work Until You Stay

Here is the cruelest irony:

To obtain residency, the European spouse must prove sufficient income to support both partners.

But the foreign spouse cannot work unless they already have residency.

So if the European partner earns too little, the spouse receives only a six-month Fiktionsbescheinigung — a kind of temporary suspension of deportation, halfway between permission and limbo.

With that document:

You cannot work
You cannot earn
You cannot contribute
Therefore you cannot raise household income
Therefore you do not qualify for residency

This is not immigration policy.
It is a bureaucratic cul-de-sac.

And Then You Realise: If It’s This Hard for Us… What About Them?

We are educated, organised, legally married, European-based, English-speaking, German-speaking, online-competent, and persistent.

And still we nearly drowned in the system.

What must this system feel like for asylum seekers?
For people fleeing war or persecution?
For couples separated across borders with children in tow?
For those without money, stability, documents, or perfect German?

Oh yes, and in case you’re wondering, I did contemplate moving back to the UK and applied for residency for my English-speaking husband there. Our application was declined.

The system does not merely fail people.
It dehumanises them.

A Quiet Exception: The Spain Nobody Talks About

There is one place in Europe where the logic is different: Spain.

Spain has a little-known rule — almost never advertised — called arraigo social.

If you remain in Spain for two years, stay out of trouble, and integrate into community life, you can obtain legal residency.

No endless separation.
No forced poverty.
No trapdoors disguised as requirements.
No broken webforms or locked doors.

If you are married and have property there, the chances are even better.

Whatever critics say, this is a system that treats people — even undocumented ones — as human beings capable of building a life.

It is the closest thing Europe has to a humane immigration philosophy.

What This Story Is Really About

This is not a rant.
Nor is it an attack on Germany, which continues to offer extraordinary opportunities to millions of people, myself included.

It is a plea.
A testimony.
A reminder that behind every “case number” is a love story, a family, a life.

Europe prides itself on protecting marriage – see ECHR, Article 8 §§1–2.
Courts across the continent insist that “bureaucratic inefficiency is not a legitimate reason to separate spouses.”

But in practice?
The systems built to uphold those principles routinely violate them.

If Europe wants to protect its values — its humanism, its dignity, its rule of law — the immigration system is where it must begin.

Not with walls.
Not with suspicion.
But with the simple recognition that married couples should not have to fight this hard to live under the same roof.

“Bureaucracy is the death of all human action.” — Max Weber

Spain takes more refugees than Britain. So why isn’t Madrid screaming about it?

There is a strange and revealing truth at the heart of Europe’s migration politics, and it is this:

Spain receives more irregular boat arrivals than the United Kingdom — yet it treats migrants with more dignity, less hysteria, and far greater political maturity.

In 2024, Spain registered around 61,000 irregular sea arrivals.
The UK recorded roughly 37,000.

And yet, if you walked into a British newsroom or scrolled through British political Twitter, you would think that civilisation was on the brink of collapse.

Why is that?

Why does a country with fewer arrivals behave as though it’s under siege, while a Mediterranean frontline state quietly manages the reality without setting its national hair on fire?

The answer tells us something uncomfortable — not about migration, but about the moral core of modern British politics.

Spain: A Social Democracy That Still Remembers Its Soul

Spain has no illusions about its geographic position. If you sit at the hinge between Africa and Europe, people will come. Some are fleeing violence. Some are escaping poverty. Some are simply seeking a future.

Spain’s response is almost boring in its sanity:

Rescues at sea are organised, not weaponised.
Asylum processes function without turning every application into a national morality play.
NGOs and municipalities handle frontline integration without being smeared as traitors or “pull factors”.
And critically, Spain offers a legal pathway — arraigo social — that allows migrants to be regularised after two years, recognising the simple fact that if people are already living in your society, the most rational thing you can do is integrate them.

This is not naïveté.
It is pragmatic humanism.

A country that is actually under pressure has learned that panic makes everything worse — and that moral clarity and administrative realism are, in the long run, the only sustainable approach.

Britain: A Superpower of Performative Fear

Then there is Britain — a country with fewer boat arrivals, fewer border pressures, and incomparably more political theatre.

The new Labour government, elected on a promise of competence, has appointed a Home Secretary — an Oxford-educated politician who should know better — who has plunged headlong into the same punitive reflex that defined her predecessors:

Proposing visa bans on entire nationalities.
Reducing asylum processing time limits to the point of absurdity.
Recycling the rhetoric of American culture wars and Trumpian nationalism.
Treating refugees as a statistical nuisance to be minimised rather than as human beings with stories, trauma, and dignity.

This is not the behaviour of a confident nation.

It is the behaviour of a country addicted to manufactured panic, because panic is the last remaining tool in its political toolkit.

Britain no longer has a coherent economic model.
It no longer has a unified social vision.
And its political class no longer has a narrative of who the country is, or what it stands for.

So it turns to the only story it has left: fear of the outsider.

The Moral Collapse of British Labour

The tragedy here is not simply that Labour has adopted conservative immigration framing.

The tragedy is that Labour has forgotten its own genealogy.

Social democracy — the European kind, the post-war kind, the moral kind — was built on a simple conviction:

The health of a society is measured by how it treats the stranger.

This was not an abstract ideal.
It was a lesson drawn from genocide, fascism, war, and displacement — a recognition that if Europe was to rebuild itself, it needed a political ethic grounded in solidarity, not exclusion.

Spain, with all its imperfections, still remembers this.

Britain does not.

The Labour Party of today triangulates itself into oblivion, chasing right-wing voters who will never love it, and sacrificing the values that once made it a moral force in world politics.

A Labour Party that governs by fear is not Labour.
It is simply a softer mask on the same punitive instincts that have now defined British immigration policy for twenty years.

Migration as a Mirror

Migration does not destabilise nations.
It exposes them.

Spain’s handling of higher arrival numbers reveals a society that, despite its flaws, still has a functioning moral compass and a political class capable of distinguishing reality from theatre.

Britain’s handling of fewer arrivals reveals something far more troubling:

A nation with no confidence in itself, no stable identity, and no political imagination.
A country performing toughness because it no longer knows how to perform leadership.
A Labour Party performing cruelty because it has forgotten how to perform justice.

A Simple Truth Worth Saying Out Loud

A country does not drown because desperate people cross its waters.
It drowns when it forgets who it is.

Spain, for all its pressures, has not forgotten.
Britain, tragically, has.

And until the Labour Party recovers its moral centre — the centre that once made Britain a pioneer of compassion, dignity, and internationalism — its immigration policy will remain nothing more than an anxious shadow of its own lost ideals.

“The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the twilight of life, and the shadows of life.”
— Hubert Humphrey

Why Populists Thrive in a Connected World

Why Has Globalisation Increased Division Instead of Unity?

Globalisation should have been our great humanising force. For the first time in history, large numbers of people can travel freely, study abroad, work internationally, and encounter cultures that would once have remained distant and unknown. We have access to films, music, literature, foods, and languages from every continent. On paper, this should have produced an age of empathy. A century in which the old barriers of race, nationality, and religion dissolved into shared humanity.

Yet the opposite has happened. As the world has opened up, political identity has hardened. Populist nationalism has surged: Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and similar strongman figures elsewhere. Racism, religious extremism, conspiracy thinking, and tribal rhetoric are resurgent. The more connected the world becomes, the more threatened people seem to feel.

This contradiction is not new. It is the old story of the Tower of Babel. Human beings build upward toward unity, creativity, and common purpose—yet something in us fractures, resists, and disperses. Even if we don’t read that story religiously, it is psychologically precise. The closer we come to real integration, the more fear arises: fear of loss of identity, loss of control, loss of status.

Globalisation has consistently been experienced not as shared enrichment but as competition. The immigrant is framed not as a neighbour, but as a rival. Cultural diversity is discussed not as dialogue, but as dilution. Political rhetoric encourages the idea that “our” way of life is being erased. The result is defensive nationalism and, increasingly, violence.

This is not inevitable. The problem is not globalisation itself, but the absence of global solidarity to accompany global interdependence. We have integrated our economies, but not our ethics. We have connected our markets, but not our imaginations.

So the question is: How do we reverse the tide? How do we turn globalisation into a force for peace, dignity, and cooperation rather than division and resentment?

Here are three foundations:

1. Global Education that Teaches Perspective, Not Propaganda
International exchange programs cannot simply be tourism or language practice; they must cultivate the ability to see oneself from the outside. To understand how one’s culture appears to others, how history shapes identity, and how dignity must be mutual. Education that only reinforces national narratives will always produce suspicion, not solidarity.

2. Freedom of the Press, Protected by Law, Not Politics
Real democracy depends on the ability to critique power. When the press becomes the instrument of governments, oligarchs, or corporations, societies fracture along invented fears. The crisis at the BBC this week is not a local scandal—it is a warning. If journalism cannot report freely, citizens cannot think freely. And if citizens cannot think freely, they cannot live together freely.

3. Cross-Border Economic Cooperation That Shares, Not Extracts
The problem is not diversity—it is inequality. When globalisation enriches a few and impoverishes many, resentment is inevitable. But when globalisation supports fair wages, sustainable industry, ecological responsibility, and shared growth, it strengthens stability rather than fear.

In short: global interconnectedness must be matched with global empathy.

We already live in one shared world. The question is whether we will learn to behave as if that is true.

Unity is not naïve. It is the only realistic future we have.

“We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race.”

–Kofi Annan