Student fears telling family of visa scam
The ‘‘shame and embarrassment’’ of being deported is too much for one Indian student, who is keeping it all from his family until he turns up back on their doorstep.
Rahul Reddy, 29, completed an IT course in Auckland in July and planned to stay and work for a year on a poststudy open work visa, but when he applied, he was told there were problems with his original student visa and he faced deportation.
For three months, Reddy has been in Auckland with no job and fighting to stay while his family has continued to send him money, completely unaware of his situation.
He is one of about 40 students facing deportation while they go through an appeal process. Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce said ‘‘most of them will go home’’.
Fraudulent agents operating in India are not new but the issue will be a talking point when Prime Minister John Key heads to Mumbai and New Delhi today.
Key said he would not be raising it, but he expected it to be discussed.
‘‘All I’d say is that in the end we have to have a system that is robust and fair and that means people follow the rules and if we don’t, that means we’re sending a message to these agents, including in India, that if you flout the rules you get away with it.’’
Foreign students have been in the spotlight as politicians debate how to deal with record levels of net migration.
According to the latest figures from Statistics New Zealand, 70,000 more people arrived in New Zealand than departed in the year to September 2016. Student visas made up 20 per cent of the 125,600 migrant arrivals - another annual record - during the same period.
Documents obtained by Labour under the Official Information Act show that Immigration New Zealand’s Mumbai office has recorded a ‘‘significant rise’’ in financial fraud, with 640 fraud cases detected as of August - up from 75 in April - involving nearly 300 agents.
There were student fraud cases at 60 education providers in New Zealand, including 47 cases at a single institution.
A crackdown on fake bank documents had led to new types of fraud, including ‘‘rent-an-uncle’’ loans where students claimed their finances came from family members who could not easily be verified.
Thirty new agents were applying for registration in India each month, although they were treated as ‘‘untrusted’’ until proven otherwise, with nearly 80 per cent eventually declined.
A quarter of the new agents were ‘‘phoenix’’ cases, involving older companies that had rebranded under a new identity.
Joyce said India was ‘‘undoubtedly the most difficult market for international education for pretty much all the English-speaking countries’’.
‘‘I’d be particularly concerned if it was just New Zealand having these experiences but actually the UK, Canada, Australia ... they have the same challenges in India,’’ he said.
The Government is cracking down on dodgy agents with legislation and a drive by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) to put particular agents on notice.
The first letters from NZQA to agents who have had a high number of visas declined for their students have been sent out this week.
Reddy said it was the agents and immigration officials who approved his visa who were to blame.
‘‘I’m frustrated because it comes down to the agent and the immigration officer and them not checking the documents properly.’’
Getting deported would be a permanent mark on his passport and would prevent him getting a decent job back in India, Reddy said.
‘‘My family have no idea. They have spent all their lifetime savings on me and if I had to tell them I was being deported, I don’t know what I’d say.’’
‘‘It’s embarrassing ... in 42 days I could be on my way home,’’ he said.
Joyce disputed that the students involved did not play a part in their situation, saying they signed a declaration that the information they submitted was accurate.
‘‘We do have to have a system that says, sorry, but if you do end up in New Zealand and you’re not supposed to be here and you’ve done it wrong, then we do go through a process where quite a few go home.
‘‘They’re not here to migrate, you don’t get a student visa to migrate.
‘‘The expectation is that you do go home, some do stay but about 75 per cent of all the people who come here to study go home,’’ he said.
Clamping down on the problem would be helped by legislation that came into effect on June 1.
Joyce said any provider or agent who ‘‘misbehaves’’ would faces a series of sanctions, with the most extreme putting them out of business.
Likewise, if a provider was caught deliberately using student agents who created ‘‘massive volumes of applicants’’ of whom 80 per cent were rejected, Immigration New Zealand and NZQA would shut them down.
Export education generates more than $3.5 billion a year for New Zealand and it will soon be the country’s fourth largest export industry.
Joyce said the linkages that international students created between New Zealand and their home countries were priceless.
‘‘I’ve been to Malaysia and met a guy who is 65 years old and is the deputy chief minister in a province in Malaysia, who is still talking about how wonderful a country New Zealand is and how wonderful his time was at Lincoln University in the 1970s,’’ he said.
"They have spent all their lifetime savings on me and if I had to tell them I was being deported, I don't know what I'd say." Indian student Rahul Reddy