The Great Immigration Scandal by Steve Moxon

Author:Steve Moxon
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Immigration, parliament, policy, government, whistle-blowing, whistle-blower, demography, economics, psychology, expose, asylum, Home Office, civil service, scandal, cover-up, migrants, racism, anti-racism
ISBN: 9781845404024
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11 - Storyline: Bogus Students, Sham Marriages

Problems of how Managed Migration applications are dealt with apply in common to all the various types of applications we deal with (such as dependent relatives, au pairs, working holidaymakers, domestic workers in a private household ... a long list), but there are additional major procedural inadequacies that bedevil particular types of applications other than ECAA: those for students and marriage. The trouble is that these are by far the two largest types of applications. Out of several dozen kinds, students make up the best part of a half of all cases, and those intending to settle as married partners of someone already settled make up a very large portion of the remainder. Yet these are the case types which are dealt with by the most cavalier adherence to immigration legislation, despite clear knowledge by the Home Office that very widespread abuse is taking place.

In common with other caseworkers, I soon got the impression that quite a lot of the student applications were, shall we say, dodgy, if not almost cheekily fraudulent. The high proportion of applications which did not contain the required information, or the absolute minimum that might just enable us to give the benefit of the doubt was striking.

As I did at the start of doing this job, when most people think of students they think of university undergraduates and these are what I assumed I would mostly be dealing with. But this was not the bulk of the people who applied. Most were coming here (ostensibly, that is) for part-time courses, especially English. In these cases the answer on the application form to the question about the hours per week of tuition was almost invariable: 15 hours. This just happened to be the absolute minimum hours per week that under the rules a course could be considered as full-time; and under the rules you can’t come to Britain as a student if your course is not full-time. What seems to be happening, then, is that there is a wholesale working of the system - a collusion between ‘students’ and the colleges (or should that be ‘colleges’?) to get people into the country posing as students when in reality they are here just to work, or mainly to work. This may be on the black market or it could be ‘legitimate’. If you are granted leave to enter/remain a student then you get what is known as a Code2 stamp in your passport that states you are not allowed to have recourse to public funds but that you are allowed to work - part-time, supposedly. The stamp can get you above-board employment, and if you can get your foot in the door then of course many employers turn a blind eye to the distinction between full- and part-time. In any case, a lot of work extra to basic agreed hours can mean in effect that the worker is full-time rather than part-time. What’s more, a student can bring his partner

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