UK family kicked out of Bermuda after 20 years
(Daily Mail): A British family who lived in the overseas territory of Bermuda for 20 years were ordered to leave because its government is clamping down on immigrants from the UK. Stephen and Kirsty Tomlinson and their two children were given barely a month to get off the North Atlantic island after his workplace burned down. Now the couple have swapped sandy beaches and sunshine for concrete and drizzle after returning to Mr Tomlinson’s home town of Hull, east Yorkshire. They were ordered to leave despite their daughter Holly, 12 and son Joseph, six, being born in Bermuda.Mr Tomlinson had worked as a spray painter, while his 41-year-old wife ran a beauty therapy business and had clients including Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas.
Mr Tomlinson, 45, said: ‘My daughter is crying herself to sleep at night and the kids ask ‘When are we going home, Daddy?’
‘I don’t understand how they could do this to us after we’d been there so long. We had to sell all our belongings and get out, despite having worked hard and paid our way.’
Stephen had friends fight for their right to stay but the Bermudan Government refused to be swayed.
He fears more ex-pats could be ordered to leave Bermuda as its government tightens up immigration and has called on the Foreign Office to intervene. While Bermuda has granted permanent residency to Britons living on the island since 1989, the couple missed the cut-off point by just two years. In 2010, the Government announced it would make it harder to gain and renew work permits in a bid to boost employment among citizens of the island.
Category: World News
The UK Foreign Office and the British Overseas Territories Minister should be intervening only to reverse this lunacy and ensure it doesn't happen to anyone else. There is no way a British citizen should be kicked out of any British territory, Cayman included, for rollover or whatever reason. The law which grants extensive freedoms to people living in Britishterritories to freely come and go to England/Europe as I understand it, is the same law that empowers the Immigration departments of British territories to treat British Citizens like aliens in that the arrangment is not reciprocal, and the British citizens get kicked out in circumstances such as these, and the ridiculous rollover we have here in Cayman. Its abominable, its inhumane and it should be stopped. Its time the Foreign Ofrfice stepped in and sorted this out once and for all.