Spouse migration from the Indian sub-continent to the U.K.: a permanent migration stream?

"This paper will describe trends in spouse migration [from the Indian subcontinent] using the U.K. example, which is believed to be reasonably representative of other European countries. To do so, it will have to consider both the re-unification of pre-existing families of immigrants, and the migration of new spouses both of immigrants and of members of ethnic minority populations who were themselves born in the receiving country. These two streams are not entirely conceptually separate, and there is no unambiguous way of separating them in the published U.K. statistics. However, it is clear that the former stream of pre-existing family members dominated up to the 1980s and that it is now being augmented and replaced by the latter stream of new spouses."