This is a guest post by Eastender
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I got a phone call the other day. Unknown number, at my workplace. I picked up the phone and a strange voice says to me, in Bengali:
- Hello bhaiya, how are you?
- I’m good thanks, who’s this?
- My name is Nazrul. You won’t know me, but my sister is a tenant in your family’s house in Dhaka.
- Oh I see. Are you calling from London?
- Yes, I just arrived here last week.
- Student visa?
- Yes.
- So how did you get my number?
- Your mother gave it to me before I left.
- Okay, no worries. You settling in okay?
- Well, I went to the college today and filled up my registration papers.
- Where’s the college?
- In Whitechapel?
- And where are you staying?
- Quite far, Green Street.
- Sharing?
- Yes, five other guys, they’re all students as well.
- How did you find them?
- Oh, the college sorted it out for us. They’re all new, like me. We’re all enrolled at the same place.
- Okay, that’s good. So how are you liking it here so far?
- Well, it’s only been a few days, I’m still trying to figure out how things work. But seems alright so far.
- Are you looking for work? It’s a bit rough out there.
- Yes, bhaiya, that’s the next step for me. I’m going to start looking soon.
- Yes, you should. The job market’s not good, hasn’t been good for a long time now. So the sooner you start looking the better.
- Yes, some of my roommates are saying the same thing. They aren’t having much luck.
- Hope you don’t mind my asking this. Have you brought enough with you to see you through?
- Well, I brought 400 pounds, bhaiya. It’s running out rather quick, I’m finding.
Silence at my end. I’m stunned by what this boy is telling me. After a few seconds, I regain my powers of speech.
- Well if I were you, Nazrul, I really would get out and start looking right away. Your money won’t last you more than a few weeks at best. You’ll find yourself in trouble once that happens.
- I know, bhaiya. Where should I look, would you say?
After giving him a few suggestions, I had to hang up and get back to work. But this phone conversation has stayed with me for the past fortnight. The more I ask around, the more I talk to friends and acquaintances in east London, the clearer it becomes that a frightening problem is taking shape under our very noses.
What has happened and why?
In the last two months, a near-complete breakdown in the visa system that allows foreign students into this country has resulted in the arrival of tens of thousands of “students” from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and various African countries. Many of these are “students” in name only, many have arrived with far less than the minimum amount needed to support themselves. In effect, they have come here as economic migrants, as menial workers, taking advantage of very lax visa conditions for students that did not exist up until recently.
So how did this latest fiasco come about? Two things have come together to cause it –
1) a spectacular piece of bungling by the Home Office
2) the amoral rapacity of the so-called “Visa Colleges” in London.
About the second cause, most people including the government are already aware of this. People have been writing about it for years now, and still nothing changes. The government sits on its hands, watches complacently as the basic standards of education and even domestic security are violated again and again. These colleges are nothing but a bunch of money-hungry sharks, with no regard at all for the welfare of the students they bring in. They are little more than legalized traffickers in people. But in spite of much talk the authorities have no intention of doing anything about it, primarily because of the very short-term thinking that each new student is bringing in 3,000-4,000 pounds cash into the UK economy.
Let’s explore the first cause a bit more. What has just happened here is plain irresponsibility. In the past, the embassies in each country were required to practice a lot of discretion in deciding who they would give visas to and who they would refuse. This simple system has now been thrown overboard. The Home Office has recently changed the rules such that anyone possessing:
i) an offer letter from a college and
ii) 1,000,000 Bangladeshi Taka (about £10,000) in the bank for a specified period of time becomes automatically eligible for a visa.
The effect of this has been unbelievable. A MASSIVE surge of Bangladeshi ‘students’ has come into London in the last few weeks. The lowest estimate I’ve heard is 25,000 new students, others put it as high as 50,000. It’s simply unprecedented. Some people with just a primary education back home are now twisting the rules, getting hold of fake certificates, in order to come to London. Since the collapse of the Gulf Arab labour market in the wake of the credit crunch, the UK has become their destination of choice. It is now easier and cheaper to enter the UK with a student visa than at any time in the past.
There are those who would actually like to study. Even these valid students are coming here after being fed reams of misinformation by the ‘agents’ of the visa colleges in the cities of South Asia. They are being told that they can find odd jobs in London right away and support themselves that way. So they come over with very little money, but once they are here the truth hits them square in the face. Nazrul above brought 400 pounds with him. I’ve heard worse news from friends. Boys (and they are the vast majority of them boys) coming here with 100 pounds or less in their pockets.
Hunger, homelessness and worse
Many have already run out of money. In recent days, we in the community in east London have heard of students sleeping in mosques, we’ve heard of students begging for money after Eid and jumma prayers from the people coming to pray. We’ve heard of Jobcentres being invaded by several hundred people every day (see the video) and we’ve heard of Jobcentre managers handing out money for food to particularly needy people simply out of the kindness of their hearts. These ‘students’ are not allowed to miss attendance, otherwise many of them would have already fled to the regions where they might have found some income source. But under the new rules, that would make them illegal right away.
The job prospects for these people are obviously very very bleak. This is the worst recession in the UK since the Great Depression, unemployment is almost 10% and still rising, at least until the middle of next year. More than half the Poles who came here have gone home. In this situation we have all these students coming in, with no money and few skills and a very weak grasp of English. They won’t even be able to find Christmas retail jobs at the moment.
We have the dreaded winter months coming up. What will happen to these kids then does not bear thinking about. If you are in the Whitechapel or Mile End area, I’d ask you to observe closely, they’re often hanging about major street corners, bus stations, loitering about with a dazed disoriented look about them. I saw a young man yesterday, hed had obviously slept rough overnight, wrapped in a woollen chador and wearing Bata sandals on his feet.
So that’s the sum of it. It’s bad out there, getting worse. The choices are basically continued suffering, students fleeing London and going illegal, a not unlikely rise in street crime, or going home (which I’m guessing most wouldn’t be able to afford either).
There is one other option – becoming part of the underground slave labour system. It is well known in the community that owners of Indian restaurants like cheap labour from back home, so that they can keep their costs down and their margins healthy. Indian and Chinese restaurateurs were complaining recently that that the Home Office had created a worker shortage by cancelling work visas for unskilled workers from back home. The government countered – ‘why don’t you hire some of the east Europeans who are here already?’ The restaurateurs said, oh but they don’t understand the culture of the kitchen, the language and the terminology of the kitchen.
What they wanted was essentially carte blanche, to keep bringing over their male relatives from the villages of Bangladesh and Pakistan. That avenue was stoppered. Instead the government has now opened up a new avenue – foreign students. Many of these students will end up in restaurants, where in exchange of room and board, they will be paid a pittance, far far less than the minimum wage. Numerous other Asian-owned businesses engage in this kind of exploitation – they hire needy students and pay them peanuts, safe in the knowledge that the students have nowhere else to go in a job market this vicious. We’ve heard of people working at the TV channels full-time for a monthly wage of 500 pounds. I doubt the restaurant owners will be that generous. Even worse exploitation is now on the cards.
This is not the first time the Home Office has implemented such stupid rule changes. A few years ago, thousands of South Asian doctors were encouraged to come to the UK. But then very suddenly, in 2005-2006, they changed the rules preventing non-EU doctors from getting permanent training posts. This was a very cruel disruption in these doctors’ career progression and many had to leave the UK to restart their careers, some going back home, some moving to Australia or the USA. In the meantime, there were news reports of a Sikh gurudwara in North London opening a food kitchen to feed out-of-work Indian doctors.
If you know people of influence, (politicians, councillors, policymakers, local MPs, charity organizations), if you have friends and contacts in the media, please get in touch with them. This situation needs to be addressed and demands urgent investigation. To those who are in a position to look into the matter more closely and take appropriate measures, you will be doing these poor folks a huge huge favour.
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A video report of this issue is coming soon. Stay tuned.
23 Comments
Are these the guys that hand out ‘London Lite’ every day?
They are the ones. 4 hour shifts every evening for minimum wage. Except now there is only one paper to give out, the Londonpaper having shut down recently.
This feeds right into BNP scaremongering tactics which they will use because they can point at the idiotic policy which allows students to come in from Southasian countries via putative “Visa Colleges” and flood into Britian to effectively become an underclass.
I think it’s important for Brit-Asians to address this issue since the Left don’t want to touch it and it then becomes inflamed with racial undertones because the BNP are then the only people who take it up as their “cause”.
Eastender, thanks for very bringing the plight of these poor kids to our attention.
This situation is a shame and the Home Office should be asked some very hard questions.
This is NOT a Muslim problem. The students are coming from countries like India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and from all over Africa. So I repeat, this is not a Muslim problem. It is a “Home Office stupidity” problem, another sordid example of this administration putting the welfare of the country at the very back end of its priorities and discovering ever newer ways of creating social and economic problems.
Well worth highlighting. We had one of these sham colleges up here in Bradford calling itself ‘Yorkshire College’. The police raided it and the bosses were convicted of using the college as a front for drug smuggling. The actual students were innocent – they thought they’d applied to a genuine outfit.
The Home Affairs Select Committee delivered a damning report on this issue just two months ago. Has anything happened? No. It’s gotten even worse.
These are the members of the committee who are tasked with looking into this issue.
Keith Vaz MP, (Chair) Labour Leicester East
Tom Brake MP, Liberal Democrat Carshalton and Wallington
Karen Buck MP, Labour Regent’s Park and Kensington North
James Clappison MP, Conservative Hertsmere
Ann Cryer MP, Labour Keighley
David Davies MP, Conservative Monmouth
Janet Dean MP, Labour Burton
Patrick Mercer MP, Conservative Newark
Margaret Moran MP, Labour Luton South
Gwyn Prosser MP, Labour Dover
Bob Russell MP, Liberal Democrat Colchester
Martin Salter MP, Labour Reading West
Gary Streeter MP, Conservative South West Devon
David Winnick MP, Labour Walsall North
Action is needed and quite urgently.
This is a rather important issue and I want to stick to it. So I’ve removed comments by and to “shitoon” because they’re diverting this thread away from the discussion. Thanks.
Why, damn-it, are my comments being “moderated”?
Understood.
Now if only Britain was as brilliant as the Obamaians, then there would be a BAILOUT fund for all Bangladeshis whom home office bungled into such penniless entry. Allocate 5000 pounds min for all misappropriated Bangali arrived eg since 1-1-09, paid dividently into monthly govt checques (checks).
In these hard times govts need to be extremely innovative, humanative!! even UK.
I just cannot see how this can be a problem created by the British government.
Students coming here should have adequate funds to sustain themselves while they are here studying. Bangladesh government should take responsibility and make sure that Bangladeshis coming here to study have enough financial support during their period of stay in the UK.
Gerritt, its not Bangladesh govt’s responsibility to make sure Britian’s visas are allocated to financially sound applicants. It is British govt who are allowing a lax visa system to large scale potentially homeless candidates, for apparently other econo-political reasons.
If this is British govt’s solution to support Indian restaurants from going belly-up during recession, by providing imported cheap labor then, as I said earlier, it is ALSO British govt’s responsibility to sustain those cheap labor from going under, with reasonable Financial benefits during their ‘orientation’ period.
And if cheap labor is not the purpose of this exodus, then it needs to be stopped.
If it is not your job to control who walks into your own house, then whose is it? When a rich country throws open its doors and abolishes even the minimum entry barriers, surely you cannot pretend to be surprised if poor people from every corner of the third world make a beeline for your borders?
With all the malicious parties involved here is seems a tad peculiar to suggest the home office is “creating” this underclass. Woefully incompetent they may be, but if the blame should be pinned on anyone it should surely be the fake colleges and the overseas “advisors” of these poor souls, the people who actually lie to them and encourage them to come here in the first place.
What I find more worrying about this article is that we appear to be developing a criminal underclass. One consisting not just of “students”, whos desire to work is admirable when compared with some of the resident youth, but also their restaurant employers. This problem is apparently “well known in the community”. Either way, should the author have any evidence of this, I’ll take his apparent concern seriously, if he can assure me he has taken his evidence to the police.
Exploiters are always there – fake colleges, fake restaurants, false advisors, third world conditions back home, extortionists, frauds, corrupt visa officers, and even adventurous ‘students’. Investigation will probably find ALL of them culprit.
Yet the final FILTER for prevention of exploitation are always the visa-issuing Embassy offices, not just British but worldwide. eg the US embassies in Bangladesh check colleges, proof of funds, school results and background (reason for returning) for every student, before issuing visa. Whenever this filter fails, and mass exodus of questionable candidates occur, then obviously the visa-issuing Embassy system has either broken down, or some kind of hanky-panky is on to open the sluice gates.
This could be embassy corruption & bribery, immigration policy change, or failure of Home Office to identify the loopholes etc, all of which merge into a British Govt responsibilty. Therefore “investigation” and correction needs to take place at the Home Office itself (governed by Dept of Justice?).
Always wondered how Faisal managed to make it to the UK. Always assumed he’d come here clinging onto a lorry from Calais or had tricked some poor UK Bengali sister into marrying him.
Anything for the super Bangladeshi patriot and defender of Bangladeshi nationalism to escape Bangladesh !
SHITOON UPDATE
Shitton have since discovered after meeting him that Nazrul is religious, has a beard and prays Namaz. They are now working with Hopeless Murray to have him deported (and ideally “interrogated”)
It is a big problem if you think it is , this world belongs to all and whoever comes will make a place for himself with or without anybody’s help ,and nobody is going to be on this earth forever.
Actually it is really unexpected for bangladeshi student they really want make better future their. Cant any body tell how much average bangladeshi student will get per hour of part time work.
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The same as anyone else doing part time work hopefully
I know somebody who got visa few days ago and booked a flight today to come london for studies but he was told that the college he is applied its closed its one subject which he applied for. Today afternoon, home office frozen 52 colleges around london, not sure whether it is true or not… anyways that student postponed his flight and waiting in back home until college lets him know the status of course. Something is wrong in this student visa system!