Relief for foreign students overstaying UK visas

08 January 2008

Students allege harassment. Tories attack the policy directive.

LONDON: British immigration authorities are reported to have been told to take a lenient view of foreign students who overstay their visas, and not to deport them immediately unless there is evidence of corruption or fraud against them.

This follows complaints that even students facing genuine delays in renewing their visas, were being harassed.

A Chinese student at Manchester University was served deportation orders even though she had already applied to extend her visa, but the process was delayed because she got her bank account details wrong.

Lin Homer, chief executive of the Border and Immigration Agency (BIA), who personally intervened to halt the student's deportation, told the BBC: "She corrected and sent us another form of payment, actually an old fashioned postal order, which arrived a day or two after her leave expired and because of a toughening up of the rules that was refused and enforcement action was taken - now that seemed to me to be us taking our toughness a stage too far."

To prevent such cases, the Director of Enforcement at BIA, Jonathan Lindley, sent out a memo to regional directors last month expressing concern over "enforced" removal of students without taking into account the circumstances or duration of their overstay.

The memo, leaked to the Daily Mail newspaper, pointed out that because of the recent changes to immigration laws there had been a rise in the number of refusals for students who applied to stay in the UK after their visas had expired. Applicants who were out-of-time even by one day were being refused leave to remain and a "proportion of these refusals have led to removal, some of which have been enforced".

According to the Mail, the memo said: "I am surprised that any of these cases have come sufficiently high within enforcement teams' priorities to merit such quick removal action. Please instruct your enforcement teams not to proceed with enforcing any student refusal cases unless they are deemed, at least at inspector level, to be a priority due to harm [a reference to the Home Office system of gauging how harmful it is for an illegal immigrant to remain in the country]."

Tories attacked the move with shadow home secretary David Davis saying, "It is astonishing that warped government priorities are dictating that our immigration authorities turn a blind eye to those with no right to stay in the U.K."

Fee-paying foreign students are assiduously wooed by Britain's cash-strapped universities as they pay three to four times more than their British counterparts.

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