A new route to emigrate to the UK but should you take it?

Hi guys, I'm always on the look out for interesting news stories that relate to topics that I have already blogged about and there was a story in the news this week about the UK relaxing a rule that allows foreign nationals from Commonwealth countries to join the armed forces. Currently, only 200 Commonwealth citizens per year can apply without having lived in the UK for five years. This measure has been introduced because there is a growing shortfall in this sector and that demand simply cannot be met locally. The armed forces are short of 8,200 soldiers, sailors and air personnel: this means that if you wish to pursue a military career and you want to move to the UK, well you get to bypass all the strict criteria for highly skilled migrants and get a job in the military where the barriers to entry are a lot lower. This is particularly interesting for Singaporean men who have served national service in Singapore as they already have at least 2 years of experience under their belt. Is this a loophole that will be one that many will want to take advantage of? Or am I allowed to be cynical and question why these jobs can't be filled with locals in the first place - why are locals shunning these jobs and saying no to a military career? In this post, I will look at the pros and cons of using this route to emigrate to the UK.

What kind of jobs are really on offer here? 

Let's be clear about what's on offer here: the system is allowing applicants to apply for a limited number of roles where there are shortages but it is not simply throwing the doors wide open for anyone to apply for any role. So for example, if you are an air defence system specialist, whether you get a job will depend on whether or not they require someone with that kind of skill. If there isn't a demand for your kind of skill, then you may be reduced to applying for a job that you're overqualified for, or where your specialist skills are not relevant at all and that will mean a lot less money. Are there good jobs in the British military? Yes there are, but these are the jobs that they have no problems in finding the right kind of locals locals to fill - they are struggling to find people to fill roles that nobody wants to do because of the unattractive nature of the job. It may be that the pay is low or that you may have to live in an isolated military base far away from civilization or that you may end up as canon fodder the next time the UK gets involved in yet another war like Iraq. So if you have no skills and are looking for a change of scenery, then coming to the UK to join the military here may not be a bad idea to broaden your horizons and learn new things. However, if you already have some specific skills you wish to use to further your career, then chances are, you're going to find it hard to find a role suitable to a person with your skills.

The money isn't attractive for those at the bottom of the food chain. 

I'm sure the five-star generals are earning a lot of money in the British military, but here's a reality check: the starting pay for recruits is £15,230 a year for recruits - that rises to £18,859 for privates and £34,160 for sergeants. If you live on the army barracks, then that can be rent-free (or heavily subsidized) accommodation as well. Under those circumstances, that can make your money go a lot further but really, that's not a lot of money unless you become an officer - then the salaries begin to look at lot more like those earned by professionals in the private sector. It really depends on what you want out of life: if you are a soldier who lives on the military base full time, you don't need to pay rent (or you will pay very little) and you're being fed three meals a day. On top of that, all your uniform is being provided so you don't even need to buy winter clothing - just ask the store manager responsible for uniforms for some winter wear and it will be given to you free of charge. As you don't need to spend any money, you can save most of what you earn. If you are content with that, then great - please sign up. But what if you want to buy a house, raise a family and do other normal things that your civilian friends do? The privates barely get £1,500 a month - that is not a lot of money and it doesn't go very far in a place like the UK. It's okay if you're single and have no dependents, but if you have a child, then you're in big financial trouble.

Why don't the locals want to take these jobs? 

That's simple - the starting pay is crap even though the career prospects aren't too bad at all. The starting pay of £15,230 a year is that of an unskilled labourer - someone who is incapable of performing anything complicated or difficult. This would be the kind of money that a cleaner at a train station would earn as cleaning a train station platform or toilet doesn't require a lot of skill or training. Cleaners usually get an hourly rate of approx £7.27 and how much they earn depends on how many hours a week they work, they can put in more hours to earn more money but it will work out to roughly about the £15,000 mark a year for a cleaner working full time. Many young people would think, good grief, I had studied hard in school, I have qualifications and aspirations yet you want to pay me as much as the cleaner at the local train station? No way! But of course, their qualifications are pretty irrelevant to the kinds of jobs they are going to do in the military, the armed forces are going to pay them decent money to undertake the necessary training to eventually do the more skilled jobs - to be fair, it is not a bad deal. You will earn more working at McDonald's compared to an army recruit, but that's hardly a fair comparison given the amount of training that the army is investing in you as a recruit. Nonetheless, a lot of young people out there are thinking more short term and will say no to a career in the military because of the low starting pay. So it is those who are already interested in a military career who will go down this path.

But wait, it is not just about the money. 

There is a very toxic culture of bullying in some sections of the armed forces. I have talked about the same toxic culture in the Singapore armed forces in a previous post and ironically, I had read a piece about the same kind of bullying in Brazil. My conclusion is that it doesn't matter where in the world you are - Europe, Asia, South America - the culture of the military tends to bring out a certain kind of malice amongst people which manifests itself in the form of bullying. How far does it go? Well, let's start with the deaths at Deepcut Barracks with the unexplained deaths of four privates in the period of 1995 to 2002 - not only did they die under suspicious circumstances (they were either bullied to death, died as a result of negligence or simply murdered in cold blood), but an inquiry had uncovered that there was a cover up after the deaths had happened to try to hide any evidence of wrongdoing and till this day in 2018, the inquiry is still ongoing. This case is just the tip of the iceberg - the culture of bullying is endemic in the military and if you can't take it or if you can't navigate your way through such an environment, then you're not seen as a man, that you're not cut out for the military. The key difference of course is that in the UK, you choose to join the military  as a career whereas in Singapore it is conscription by national service. So many young people will simply look upon this aspect of life in the military and think, no thank you - I'd rather work in an office where there is a HR department to prevent this kind of shit from happening - it is simply not a risk I'm willing to take. It's not like the UK armed forces don't have a concept of HR, but they are more interested in helping cover up their mistakes than help their soldiers as we have seen in the Deepcut Barracks case.

Does this simply come with the territory? 

Many people who have had some experience in the military would look at what happened at Deepcut would simply shrug their shoulders and say, "yeah, that comes with the territory, you should know what you're getting into before you voluntarily sign up to join the army." That may seem cynical but there is an element of truth to it - you don't become a primary school teacher and then protest about how hard it is to work with children: it comes with the territory. So for example, when you look at the number of deaths amongst the people serving in the three armed forces (navy, army, air force) then of course the statistics are going to tell you that there's a lot more deaths per year than say primary school teachers killed whilst at work in the classroom or playground. Some people in the British military have even gone as far as to point out to me that whilst things aren't perfect in the organisation, at least they are not as bad as some other countries and they are better than a lot of other countries. It has become a much better place to work today compared to twenty or even just ten years ago. For example, the UK military is extremely gay friendly and has many policies to protect the rights of the LGBT community to serve in the military - contrast that to many countries where the attitude towards the gay community is extremely hostile. Likewise, veterans (particularly those who have been injured/disabled in service) are well taken care of when they leave the armed forces - that's just two aspects that the UK is doing much better than USA.

You're competing with people from much poorer countries. 

Someone from a poorer Commonwealth country like Nigeria, Ghana or Bangladesh will look at the prospect of earning £1,500 a month and think that it is a gift from heaven. Whereas someone from a richer Commonwealth countries like Singapore or Australia will look at that £1,500 a month and think that's not enough - so what will they do? Will they raise that £1,500 figure just to attract more people from places like Singapore, or will they simply take the applicants from Ghana who are more than happy to work for that amount of money? I can imagine the soldiers from the poorer countries living full time on the military base and sending a lot of what they earn back to their families, because in Ghana, people earn on average 800 Cedis or £125 a month. So even a a army recruit's salary in the UK is more than ten times that at £1,269 a month. By that token, a lot of the roles on offer will inevitably be filled by people from poorer Commonwealth countries. At least these people are going to paid the same salary as a local, white British soldier who has applied for the job - the UK system doesn't believe in trying to exploit these people by paying them any less than the locals. And if these people are grateful for the jobs, then I believe they will take their jobs seriously and serve with pride - quite unlike the situation I witnessed in Singapore when I served NS: nobody was there by choice and thus hardly anybody actually took any pride in anything they did. Oh, we were all just counting the months, weeks and days before we were done with NS.

An army of mercenaries: is that a bad thing?

So yes, we're moving in the direction of an army of mercenary, but this is nothing new. The French Foreign Legion (Légion étrangère) has always been opened to anyone and everyone who wishes to sign up regardless of nationality, but it tended to attract recruits from former French colonies who are already French-speaking rather than people who don't speak French at all. Joining the French Foreign Legion had always been a legitimate route to escape poverty in these poorer French former colonies in Africa. The British have always recruited Nepalese (or Indian nationals of Nepali origin) for the Gurkha forces, so this is again nothing new for the Brits. Is this a bad thing? I don't think so - I am incredibly cynical about the whole concept of feeling notion of loyalty to one's country in the name of patriotism because of what I have seen whilst serving in the Singapore army. I do however, believe in running the military like a private company whereby you train your staff up properly, you treat them well and in return you have their loyalty. That principle can be exercised on a very local level, within an individual unit where the officers in charge create a very conducive environment for work. This is a responsibility that the officers in charge have to take, rather than assume that the soldiers will give their all and serve with pride because they are patriotic, so it doesn't matter how badly you treat them. So if we were to abide by this principle, then the nationality of the personnel really shouldn't better. Heck, in the private sector, there will be plenty of foreign talents recruited from all over the world in most big companies - thus this is nothing new.

How long do I need to serve before I can get nationality? 

Oh, I can't tell you for sure because they are constantly changing the rules. This latest initiative is yet another change in the law on this issue which had been changed 1998, 2013, 2016 and now in 2018. Yup, they just can't make up their minds on the issue. You have to be aware of the fact that you're dealing with a constantly moving goalpost here as it is a political football. The need to fill this shortage in the armed forces has to be set against the context of Brexit and one of the most right wing governments we've ever had, the details of this latest change hasn't been finalized yet - they may simply add a clause that says that none of the time spent in the UK with this work permit will count towards achieving indefinite leave to remain (ILTR, ie. permanent residency status). You only need to work 5 years in the UK before you can apply for permanent residency but if you're a full time student, then that figure needs to be 10 years - so that means that if your parents sent you to the UK to study when you were a young child, you'll automatically qualify for residency but after just 3 or 4 years at university, you still have a very long way to go. In light of Brexit, the government wants to reduce and not increase immigration to this country, so will they allow lowly skilled Commonwealth nationals earning modest salaries in the armed forces to use this route to gain residency and citizenship in the UK? It seems somewhat unlikely under the current circumstances - but until the new rule change has been made official, I would reserve judgment for now because they could potentially make it very hard for these soldiers to stay on in the country beyond their work permit.

Case study of Filipino nurses in the UK. 

There is a huge shortage of nurses in the UK and for many years, this shortage has been met by recruiting qualified nurses from English-speaking countries like India, Philippines and Jamaica. Filipino nurses have been quite popular with the NHS as the quality of training in the Philippines is relatively high compared to some of these other English-speaking countries and the staff are generally very hardworking (though there have been a few bad eggs amongst the many Pinoy nurses). The Filipino nurses are welcomed here in the UK as they provide a vital service in our hospitals: all they have to do is work for five years and they will get ILTR status and once they have worked in the UK for a further two years, they can naturalize as a British citizen. It is a pretty popular route for Filipinos who are desperate for well-paid work and even though working conditions in the NHS aren't ideal, the working conditions here and the pay is still much better than back in the Philippines. The pay may not be as good as some countries in the Middle East, but they can settle here in the UK and countries like the Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain will never give them citizenship (nor do the Filipinos working there want to settle there). So along with nurses, any Filipino trained in the medical field from physiotherapy to X-ray to dentistry is more than welcomed in the UK and the process for them to gain citizenship here is pretty easy because we need these medical professionals here. Now the question is whether the British public is willing to see a lowly paid, unskilled infantry soldier from Ghana in the same light as a highly trained Filipino nurse in an NHS hospital? 

Foreign Nurses vs Foreign Soldiers

After all, Filipino nurses are a lot more visible because anyone visiting a British hospital is likely to encounter a Filipino nurse and this interaction is usually pleasant - you're in hospital because you're unwell or you've had an accident, the nurses are there in your hour of need and they are there to help make you feel better. You're likely to emerge from the hospital feeling grateful for the presence of Filipino nurses in the hospital. Now contrast that to soldiers, they are mostly confined to their barracks and we generally have no interaction with them at all. As civilians, we are far more likely to interact with the police rather than the military when it comes to issues pertaining to law and order. The military deals with matters of national defence, so whilst we are able to appreciate the intellectual concept of defence, we're unlikely to view foreign mercenaries in the same light as foreign nurses due to the lack of interaction with the general public. Once in a while, sure you can have a celebrity like Joanna Lumley championing the rights of the Gurkhas, but otherwise if the government chooses to engage these foreign mercenaries on a fixed term work permit type arrangement that will not lead to permanent settlement in the UK,  the public will simply look the other way and there will still be plenty of migrant soldiers from poor countries like Ghana who will come to the UK, serve in the military, save up a lot of money that will allow them to retire like a king back in rural Ghana. For them, that is still a good deal as long as they leave eventually.

Can you cope with the cultural isolation? 

For the Filipino nurses working in the UK, they have the comfort of knowing that there will always be some Filipino nurses in the hospital where they are working and there is a network of Filipino expatriates in the UK which they can easily plug into when they arrive here. How would you feel if you were the only soldier from Singapore who gets put in a military unit somewhere up in Scotland, a few hours' drive away from the nearest big city? It would mean being able to adapt to the new environment very quick, learning to make new friends and that's actually quite a big ask. If you have already lived in the West before - say you have done your degree in the UK, then you may not find that such a big challenge. But for a Singaporean soldier who has never ever lived outside the UK, being thrown into a military unit like that and be expected to simply hit the ground running is going to be extremely difficult - the majority of the people in the unit will be British people who have a completely different culture and if there are other foreign soldiers, they're likely to come from poorer Commonwealth countries like Jamaica, Nigeria or India. It is vitally important to make friends quickly in such a situation because life is so much easier when soldiers take care of each other - but if you're socially awkward and are unable to fit in, then you are going to be left floundering without this vital network of social support from your peers.

What will happen when you finally quit the military?

Okay, let's say hypothetically, you do come to the UK, you work with the military for 5 or 10 years, however long enough to gain residency status in the UK, then you finally quit the military - then what? Integrating back into civilian society would be a challenge to say the least. At least for the local, British military personnel who are trying to find a job in the civilian world after a decade in the military, they have a whole network of friends ranging from family members and relatives to the people they went to school with - well guess what? If you are from somewhere like Singapore, then your family members, relatives and old classmates can probably help you find a job in Singapore but not the UK. I'm not saying it is impossible - it is very challenging. After all, when I graduated and started looking for a job in the London I was pretty much in the same situation and was just applying for various positions I came across on the internet. You can of course also ask people you don't know very well or even complete strangers for help. But it is clear that many people who have left the military have problems finding an equally well paid job in the civilian world, some adjust better than others, some manage to retrain for careers in an unrelated sector - but this transition is always going to be a rather daunting challenge regardless. So if you think that you can serve for 5 to 10 years in the military, get residency status in the UK than somehow just transition to working in the civilian world, that may be a much harder route than you think.

So should you consider this option?

For the right people, yes why not? Absolutely! I have to point out thought that I don't think there's a one size fits all approach to the issue of finding the best job in the world - no, you can only find the best job that is most suitable for you as everyone is a unique individual. So some people would find themselves quite suitable for the military, whilst others are not: a lot of it depends on your character and upbringing. So if you are a Singaporean who is considering a career in the army, then it is nice to know that there's more than one army you can sign up for and having more choice is always a good thing. Imagine if you've studied hard to become a doctor and there's only one hospital you can work for; or that you have trained to become a chef but there's only one restaurant in the country you can work for! That may happen if you lived in a tiny, isolated island nation like Niue, but otherwise simply having more choice allows you to compare and contrast the different options on the table, then pick the better one, the one more suited to your needs rather than simply accept the only option available. If you have both a love for British culture and the military, then this route can become a lot more attractive than joining the armed forces in Singapore. I have done some research into comparing the pay between the UK and Singapore armed forces and in a nutshell, for the officers, the pay is actually about same (but we're not taking into account the cost of living, this is just a straight forward numerical comparison between the two systems) but for the non-officers, the British armed forces are a lot more generous than the SAF in Singapore, by a very long way.

So there you go - what do you think? If you're so very desperate to get out of Singapore, would you sign up for the British armed forces, knowing that it could mean a job in the UK? Or would you think, no thanks I'm actually better off in Singapore - let someone from places like Ghana and India take those jobs, I don't want to compete with them? Or are you already rushing to apply? So, do let me know what you think, leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.