Student Visa Cancelled

[keskUsor]

Hi all,

I had been on student Visa for 3 years before my latest Visa was recently cancelled, by the reason of change of circumstances, at Heathrow airport and I was sent back to my home country due to a problem with my attendance at my college and working over 20 hours per week. It was decided by the immigration officer that I was no longer a student but was there for the purpose of working.

I was planning to do masters at Westminster University this coming September. Does anyone know of a similar situation and have an idea of how my new Visa application will be treated and what are the chances of getting a new student Visa for UK, considering that I will be enrolled to Westminster Uni and have the intention of full attendance? And also does anyone know if there will be a restriction of 1 or 5 or 10 years on my entry to UK?

Thanks,

[RobinLondon]

Just out of curiosity, how did the Immigration Officer at Heathrow know that you were not attending and were also exceeding the legal number of working hours per week?

[keskUsor]

I couldn't answer some questions about my college that I was supposed to and they found some records of my employment in my dairy and contacted my employer and got the confirmation from them, though, there is no proof of me working over 20 hours. They just decided that I was there for the purpose of work but not study...

[Frontier Mole]

There has to be some thing else to this?

If you had a student entry visa from an ECO there is a presumptive right of entry. It is unlikely an IO would ask too many questions unless there was some other piece of information that pointed to there being a problem.

Sorry to sound like the IO but a few questions:-

What was the last university / college you attended?
Was it a private educational establishment?
How long had you been enrolled with the establishment?
Is that establishment still listed / approved?
What subject did you study - was it a degree level course?
How often did you attend?
What were your exam results - pass / fail?
You worked - was it a small or a large company?
How many hours in term time did you work - what were your contracted hours?
Out of term time what hours did you work?

If the IO had prior information from whatever source that suggested any of the points above were outside of immigration rules that was certainly the reason you were flagged up. The rest of the rules in regards students are mainly maintenance & accommodation based, which is unlikely to be questioned as the student visa application would have dealt with that side of things.

You were very unlucky or there was information on the system that pointed to you as an individual or from a group that became of interest. This happens in such cases where a private college is raided and, say, there is no teaching facility. All the overseas students registered there become of interest and your file gets flagged. It also happens with raids on businesses; some of the large companies are now so worried about the fines they are handing over information about suspect employees.

[Nowty]

It does not surprise me, my brazilian girlfriend on a student visa always gets tons of questions everytime we come back from holiday. We went to Amsterdam for the new year in 2006 which was actually 1 week before her course started and 2 weeks after she arrived in the UK. The IO did not read her passport very well and had assumed she had been at college for 6 months. She was asked all sorts of questions about her college which she had not even attended yet. The IO got very heavy very quickly and acused my girlfriend of all sorts. If I had not been there to intervene and put the IO straight, who knows what would have happenned.