We all know that the Home Office has a very hard job to do, but the apparently* sudden withdrawal of a university’s licence to educate students from outside the EU does nothing to improve its reputation.
For the upheaval does not serve only to prevent only new students from joining their course but dismisses existing students too. Not all of these, it is acknowledged, have broken any immigration rule & are here entirely legally (& at great expense). It is hard to understand how this can be legal, or even politically acceptable, at a time when London is using the Olympics to boast of its attractions, just because, in some cases at least the university simply has not got the right paperwork.
A short news item in The Times recently informed us that the special emergency teams of passport checkers at Heathrow, recruited to cope with Olympic visitors at great expense mainly from the ranks of civil servants recently retired or made redundant, will be kept on to cope with the rush of new student arrivals this month. Perhaps their services will not be needed after all as any students who are not already part way through their course will have second thoughts about risking theior money by coming here.
*For those in the know it is not perhaps totally unexpected: the HFCE website states that they have been in close touch with London Metropolitan University since its Tier 4 licence was suspended on 16 July.
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