November 1, 2009 - By BNP News

A BBC Radio 5 show has revealed shocking details of how the “crackdown on bogus student visas” announced earlier this year by Government ministers is nothing but another lie.

According to the radio show, broadcast today, immigration officers have warned their senior officials that “new rules designed to stop bogus students entering the UK are not working.”

The new rules were introduced after it was revealed that tens of thousands of “students” had entered Britain by enrolling in fake “colleges” set up by other Third World immigrants.

Under these rules, non-EU students are supposed to apply to registered institutions and prove they can support themselves.

Their papers “proving” all of this are, however, “verified” in the students’ home countries, said the BBC show. This makes UK-based staff unable to challenge the ‘students’ upon their arrival in this country.

In addition, one Heathrow Airport immigration officer said that staff are simply overwhelmed by the volume of student arrivals.

Earlier figures revealed that 200,000 Pakistanis had applied for visas to enter Britain over the past few months.

A large number of these would have been “students” and an entire industry in generating “student visas” has sprung up in Pakistan and India.

According to the immigration official quoted in the show, it is not uncommon for over 1,000 “students” to arrive at Heathrow every day.

“On occasions we’ve had to shut the hall as we couldn’t cope,” the official said. “That has led to planes being backed up … to not allow them to proceed into Heathrow until we could clear what we’ve got.”

The official said he and his colleagues are powerless to challenge the most suspicious visa holders.

“If someone presents a case like that to a chief immigration officer, they take a look at the size and the number of people in the hall, and they turn around and say, ‘Look, because of the pressure of work, they’ve got a visa, get them into the country’,” he said.

“It would take two officers off the desk for hours just to present a case to send them to a detention centre,” he continued, adding that he believed that people who have been denied entry to the UK on other grounds are able to enter the UK on bogus student visas.

“We have an awful lot of students who have been refused five, six, even up to nine visas to come here to this country, whether it be for working holidays or student applications,” he said. “And they’re now coming here.”

He went on to say that even the list of “approved institutions” contains colleges which he and his colleagues know have a history of awarding fake qualifications.

“It beggars belief that these places can be graded the way they are, when we know for a fact that we’ve proved and got signatures from the passengers that they paid for their certificates,” he said.

The immigration officer told BBC Radio 5 live about a recent case of an Indian woman in her 50s who presented herself as a student enrolling on an advanced course, despite the fact that she could barely speak English.

“She was going to do an ACCA accounting course, of which when asked in Hindi what ACCA meant, she didn’t have a clue,” he said.

“She wasn’t even able to say in her own language what the course was going to entail.”