‘I’ve lost everything’: International students wrongly kicked out of university over cheating allegations speak out

Naveed Khan came to the UK from Pakistan in 2000 and completed a BA in business studies. Six years after he finished his degree, he was accused of cheating in an English language test – an allegation he denies.

“It was such a shock. It felt like I was in a dark tunnel and I didn’t know where to go. The Home Office was pushing me again and again. I never dreamed this could happen,” he tells The Independent from Pakistan.

The 31-year-old, who had started a successful marketing business after graduating, was first made aware of the accusations when immigration officers raided his home in 2015. He was away at the time, but returned to find a letter stating that he was liable to be detained and deported.

Desperate to have his name cleared, Mr Khan contacted his solicitor who filed a judicial review. But three years later, he is still battling to have the case reviewed.

Unable to work without his immigration status, he has lost his business and fallen into a spiral of depression. Under growing pressure from the Home Office to leave the country, he returned to Pakistan in March.

"My future has been destroyed. This has killed me physically and mentally. I had a marketing business with six employees and I've lost it all," he said.

"I left the country because I’d lost everything, but my family in Pakistan don’t accept me now. They say they sent me for education and I did this. They believe I cheated, but I can speak excellent English. My life is gone and I can't recover."

Mr Khan is one of thousands of international students and skilled migrant workers who were accused of cheating in an English language test in 2015, and with no proper right to challenge the decision, told that their studies had been terminated and that they had no right to stay in the UK.

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Some were detained by immigration officials, lost their jobs, and were left homeless as a result, despite being in the UK legally. Others remained and worked desperately to clear their names, knowing that going home with such a slur hanging over them would have destroyed their reputations and barred them from jobs.

Migrant Voice, a support network for migrants, has today launched a campaign for justice for the thousands of international students wrongly accused, who have had their "futures destroyed", even though they paid tens of thousands of pounds into British universities and the economy.

They are calling for the students who were unfairly accused and let down four years ago to be allowed to re-sit a new English test and resume their studies.

Arjun Das, who came to Britain from Bangladesh in 2010 to complete a degree in accounting, was accused of cheating in the same test, and subsequently detained for 21 days in an immigration removal centre.

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“I came here as a student, but I am being treated as a criminal,” he says. “I did not cheat in this test, but I have had to pay thousands of pounds in legal fees to try to fight my case. It is ruining our life.

“Being in detention was terrible. My wife was trying to do her studies and it caused her so much stress that she had a stroke. I felt suicidal. I was being treated like I wasn’t human.”

Lawyers described their treatment as "arbitrary" and "disproportionate" and said the Home Office's hostile environment meant many people had been punished when in fact they had no involvement whatsoever.

Zubair Awan, Mr Khan's solicitor, told The Independent the Home Office has used a "sledge hammer to crack a nut".

"The former home secretary appears to have wanted to give the impression that this would not be tolerated. She thought that punishing all of these students would give her the best possible publicity and it would work well politically," he said.

Immigration barrister Patrick Lewis, who represented several students in successfully appealing their deportation, said: “This is so shocking. It goes against everything we assume would occur in this country in terms of due process, and it’s against individuals who are often the most vulnerable.

“The Home Office effectively cancelled people’s leave to remain based on the accusation that they had been involved in fraud but affording them no evidence for the basis of the accusation. The arbitrariness and hostility of it has been extraordinary.

“I know individuals who were establishing businesses, had high level degrees at prestigious universities, whose first notice of this was when immigration officers arrested them at 6am and deported them in this way.

“Many students used this fraud but there are undoubtedly many others were accused of involvement when in fact they had no involvement whatsoever. It is a sign of a hostile environment based on the contempt which seems to come into the approach taken by the Home Office.”​

The students were targeted by the Home Office after an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama in 2014 exposed systematic cheating at some colleges where candidates sat the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). The test is one of several that overseas students can sit to prove their English language proficiency, a visa requirement.

The firm, English Testing Services, identified 33,725 “invalid” tests taken by students it was confident confident had cheated. The students’ visas were revoked and they were told to leave the country.

Another 22,694 test results were classed as “questionable”, meaning the students who sat them were invited for an interview before any action was taken against them.

By the end of 2016, the Home Office had revoked the visas of nearly 36,000 students who took the test.

However, when ETS’s automated voice analysis was checked against human analysis, its computer programme was found to be wrong in 20 per cent of cases, meaning that more than 7,000 students were likely to have been wrongly accused of cheating.

An immigration appeals tribunal in 2016 found the evidence used by the Home Office to deport the students had “multiple frailties and shortcomings”.

Labour's Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott said, “The way the government has treated international students has been shameful, when they should have been trying to encourage them to come here.

"The claim that there was widespread cheating was false, and yet there has been no attempt to rectify the injustice of wrongful deportation. This all stems from including overseas students in the ridiculous target for net migration and the hostile environment. Both of these policies should go.”

Nazek Ramadan, director of Migrant Voice, said: “This cruel and unfair act of guilty-until-proven-innocent punishment has ruined the hopes, health, dreams, reputations, careers and lives of tens of thousands of students and has damaging implications for the reputation of our higher education.

“It’s a Windrush-style textbook example of thoughtless decision-making, compounded by the way the Home Office has made legal challenges difficult for the students.

“There is a simple, reasonable solution. We are calling for the students that were unfairly accused and let down four years ago to be allowed to re-sit a new English test and resume their studies.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “In February 2014, investigations into the abuse of English language testing revealed systemic cheating, which was indicative of large scale organised fraud. The Government took immediate robust action on this, which has been measured and proportionate, and so far more than 20 people have received criminal convictions for their role in this deception.

“There is no limit on the number of genuine international students who can come to study in the UK. Since 2010, the Home Office has reformed the study visa system to tackle abuse, and these reforms are working. The latest figures – for the year ending March 2018 – show that visa applications from university students are now 25 per cent higher than they were in 2010”.