UK Immigration

[Dirk Koopman]

On Mon, 2006-05-22 at 18:10 +0100, Andy Armstrong wrote:
> Has anyone here immigrated to the UK or know a decent UK immigration  
> lawyer? As a UK citizen I've never felt the need but I have a friend  
> from the US who's getting jerked around all over the place by our  
> lovely immigration people.

I know an American lady that has been through the mill, who might well
be willing to give info. Mail me off list.

Technically I am an immigrant, but I seem to be one of the ones that got
away (to the extent that I had to ask the IND for a letter that I was
indeed *not* a UK citizen). 

I can give one piece of advice (as a result of that): spider the IND
(Liverpool) website looking at the HTML source for phone numbers (some
of them are well hidden). Most of them will give out a message "out of
hours" saying what the hours are and then "in hours" are permanently
engaged. 

However, some do ring and ask to be put through to the complaints dept.
They tend to be very helpful and will suggest that you make a complaint,
because then someone is obliged to ring back within two hours. 

I went from waiting for 2 months to 15 hours to getting my letter...

Dirk