Home Office’s ‘strategic incompetence’ is to reduce immigration, says Dr Asiya Islam

Asiya Islam’s visa arrangements have caught local, national and indeed international attention as a test case for the UK’s immigration ideology, but when she drops in to Hot Numbers in Trumpington Street for coffee she’s just another young person in the village who’s had a busy morning.

Born in Aligarh, a city half-way between Delhi and Agra, she acquired a degree in English and women’s studies from Aligarh Muslim University.

Dr Islam came to the UK for a master’s in gender, media, and culture at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2009. After completing her master’s degree in 2010, she worked as equality and diversity adviser at the LSE before moving to Cambridge in 2015 for a PhD. She completed her PhD in September 2019 and is currently on a three-year fellowship at Newnham College.

After 10 years in the UK she would have received long-term residency, but this didn’t happen. The rules state that you can’t be out of the country for more than 540 days during that 10-year period and Dr Islam overshot that during the time of her research in urban Delhi in 2016/17. Although she was out of the country for 320 days for non-professional reasons, it was 645 days including fieldwork.

By 2019, she was due to be granted residence status but, instead, she was shunted on to a temporary visa, causing consternation in Cambridge’s science community.

“I was on a Tier 4 visa to study while doing my PhD,” she notes. “That expired at the end of January 2020 and I applied and was given a Tier 2 visa to work until October 2022, which is when my fellowship runs out. It could be exactly the same situation in 2022 – and I’d have to go back to India. I’d hoped that after ten years I’d get a settlement visa.

“And all of this costs money. The university is supportive but doesn’t cover visa costs unfortunately, but has been supportive otherwise.”

Indeed the process is costly: applying for a settlement visa cost her £3,500, including £800 for super-priority processing of her application.

“I didn’t get the visa and there is no refund. That’s how they operate. There’s huge cost implications to this process that aren’t mentioned very much. All of these visas cost thousands of pounds. A lot of it is just a business operation. I don’t think it costs £3,500 to process a visa – so where is that money going? One part goes to the Home Office, another part is allocated by the Home Office for the NHS, so as someone on a work visa you pay twice, because you’re already paying in taxes.

“You can’t even track the application online. You apply and you wait.”

Shockingly, since her application process became bogged down, Dr Islam has had “no direct contact with anyone from the Home Office”.

“The thing about the Home Office is a complete lack of any human side to the decision-making process. My case is very straightforward, all the documentation is in place, it just got stuck on a technicality it shouldn’t have – if a person had paid it due attention it would have been fine.”

What makes this case even more troubling is that Dr Islam’s research is generating significant insights into the working lives of women in India.

“There were several conclusions from my PhD study, some empirical, so yes there are young people in work that’s meaningful, but it’s poor-quality work and they often drop out later. To study precarious work we need to study people’s lives and I could show how these women were dropping in and out of employment. That’s significant not just for India but in studying precarious employment around the world.

“There’s already some research on factories and doing piece work from home. I’m particularly interested in emerging forms of work and these women are going into work which requires different skills, so they have to speak a little bit of English, work a computer and perhaps sell something – all completely new types of work for them.

“It’s not necessarily an employment model that should be followed as the quality of work is quite insecure, not just for young women but young people. I don’t think it’s particularly sustainable. It’s very much part of the emerging economy but that doesn’t mean it’s good for everyone in India, it’s very differentially distributed.”

Her case, says Dr Islam, is not unique.

“The Home Office makes it look like an isolated case, but it’s not, other academics have gone through the same thing.

“The Home Office doesn’t understand what an academic is and is actually being hostile to academics – we need to keep talking about it. There needs to be some sort of accountability and there isn’t right now.”

So is this inefficiency or incompetence?

“It’s strategic incompetence,” Dr Islam replies witheringly. “They are incompetent but it’s deliberate, hence the lack of contact and the lack of accountability. It’s bad – for me personally it’s been very difficult and stressful but I’m thinking of all the cases beyond me, all those others... it’s scary. What’s going to happen next?

“It’s empty rhetoric to say ‘we want to attract the brightest and the best of global talent’ because if they lived up to that, a case like mine wouldn’t be happening now. There’s a complete mismatch between what they’re saying and what they’re doing.”

Dr Islam is aiming to continue her work after 2022.

“I am an academic, that’s what I do and what I plan to continue doing. I have a fellowship at Newnham College so the natural thing for me to do would be to eventually get a lectureship. But I have to do five years of continuous Tier 2 work before I can even think of applying for settlement again.”

“The case [of Dr Islam] has highlighted a fundamental hole at the heart of government,” said Cambridge MP Daniel Zeichner. “The tension in policy terms is this: if universities are to be at the heart of Britain’s success in the coming decade and beyond, then if it’s not going to be open for overseas applicants, it’s not going to be a success.”