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P’s story: his wife had to leave Singapore, his newborn waited a long time for citizenship

March 6th, 2017 | Family and Divorce, News, Your Stories

In December 2016, to commemorate International Migrants Day, AWARE released a policy brief calling for greater equality and inclusion for foreign spouses of citizens. We later heard from P, a Singapore citizen, about the difficulties he has faced due to the current immigration rules.

P is a semi-retired Singapore citizen married to a Thai woman. Although their marriage was registered in Singapore six years ago, P’s wife was only given a Long-Term Visit Pass (LTVP), which has to be renewed every six months. P and his wife produced the same documents each time, but on the fourth renewal, their application was rejected by ICA without explanation.

The ICA officer then said that there was no choice but for his wife to leave Singapore for three months before she could return and stay for a month on a Short Term Visit pass. This process – which P finds unacceptable, especially in cases of marriage – repeats if subsequent applications for LTVP are unsuccessful. P’s wife was thus forced to leave the country.

P wrote an appeal, which was also rejected without explanation. He then called ICA and spoke to an officer to appeal again, and succeeded this time. He thought that this system of having to appeal and requiring applicants who are able to ‘challenge’ the ICA is arbitrary and ‘clearly not right’.

The process of making multiple trips to ICA and submitting the same documents every six months was ‘a waste of time’ and ‘unproductive’ to P. Dealing with the uncertainty of each renewal status was also stressful.

P also faced hurdles applying for citizenship for his son who was born overseas. He said it was a ‘simple’ process with little paperwork. However, his application kept getting delayed and every enquiry about its status was met with ‘we are looking into your case’. After enquiring with ICA and 11 months later, he wrote directly to a high-ranking officer in MHA. Eight hours later, an ICA officer called and informed P that his son’s citizenship was approved.

During this period, P said he could not access polyclinics for his son’s immunisations or when his son fell sick, which resulted in him having to pay higher prices at private clinics. There was also always a nagging worry about unexpected healthcare costs such as hospitalisation.

“This policy has caused a lot of unnecessary financial and emotional hardship,” said P. “Spouses of citizens should have priority in getting PRs and eventually becoming citizens.”