In the first week of July, wedding halls, English classes and immigration consultants said they had all seen a surge in people preparing for new lives in the UK.
From July 9, new restrictions made it impossible for anyone who earns less than £18,600 ($29,000) a year to move a foreign spouse to Britain, or less than £22,400 if that spouse has a child.
To acquire British nationality, foreign spouses now have to wait five rather than two years to test whether a relationship is genuine, must be proficient in English and once in Britain, pass a Life in the UK test.
For Britons of Pakistani descent, April is by tradition the peak month for holidays and weddings in their parents’ homeland, before the summer heat becomes unbearable for those accustomed to northern climes.
More than a million people of Pakistani origin already live in the UK.
Wedding planners were rushed off their feet, English teachers overwhelmed and immigration consultants buried under mounds of paperwork as brides and grooms queued to file immigration papers by July 6, the last working day before the deadline.
The spike in applications has seen visa processing times double in some cases, from 12 to 24 weeks, as the UK Border Agency struggles to cope with the numbers, according to its website.
Nowhere has seen more intense activity than Mirpur, a Kashmiri town which supplied hundreds of thousands of migrants to work in the UK during the 1960s.
The boom was particularly marked in Mirpur, where Islamabad estimates 200,000 of Britain’s 1.2 million Pakistanis have their family origins.
Almost all the town’s 403,000 residents have relatives in the former colonial power, after a huge surge of migration from the area in the 1960s when a major dam was built, costing thousands of farmers their livelihoods.
At the time Britain needed more workers for its factories in the industrial cities of central and northern England, and granted immigration permits to many of them and their families.
Now with immigration an increasingly controversial issue in Britain, Mirpuris rushed to secure residency rights before the door was pushed tighter.
In Islamabad, the British High Commission said there had been a “significant increase” in the number of applications to join a spouse and live permanently in Britain ahead of the new rules coming into force.
The surge has caused delays in processing applications, the commission said, with some taking up to six months to be resolved.
For those who missed the deadline, the new rules mean new uncertainty.
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