“You tell me, are you finding it difficult to understand my English?” says Muhammad Ali.
Muhammad was in the UK to study between the ages of 18 and 26 but had his visa cancelled in 2014 when the Home Office accused him of cheating on an English language exam. He was one of 35,000 students whose visas were cancelled.
He was denied an in-country appeal, and returned to his home in Pakistan. He lost his career, has been unable to travel and, a decade later, some of his family still believe the Home Office over him.
“Who’s going to bring my time back? How long do I have to live with this tag of con artist or a cheat?”
Amelia Gentleman, reporter and author of The Windrush Betrayal, Exposing the Hostile Environment, tells Nosheen Iqbal how the government handled the initial allegations exposed on a BBC Panorama investigation in 2014, and explores why nothing has been done since to help those wrongly swept up in the aftermath.
Another former student Shana Shaikh has stayed in the UK but has been unable to clear her name.
“Our rights have been snatched away. We can’t travel, we can’t work, we can’t enjoy life the same as a normal person,” she says. “Every single day, we have a stress, we have anxiety, what is going to happen?”
Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian
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