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Indian migrants allege harassment

LONDON: When Pooja Tandon, a highly-skilled Indian migrant who works and lives in London, returned from a holiday in Switzerland with her husband — also a legal migrant — and 18-month-old baby the last thing she expected was to be detained by immigration officials at Heathrow airport and threatened with deportation.

“The detaining officer first questioned us about our current employment status and then said he was detaining us for further enquiry and if he was not satisfied with it then he would deport us. The officer took our passports and went away. After sometime he came back and said that his superior had instructed him to let us go with a ‘verbal warning’, We are really shaken by this incident. We felt being treated like criminals. We pay our taxes and national insurance and all other bills and are being threatened this way,” said Ms. Tandon. According to the Highly-Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP) Forum, which campaigns for the rights of migrants, Ms. Tandon’s case is not an isolated one and legal migrants are routinely “harassed” by immigration authorities.

“Some have stopped going on holidays lest they should not be allowed to return,” said Forum’s executive director Amit Kapadia.

“We regularly receive E-mails and telephone calls about harassment and discrimination that workers who are in the U.K. under the Skilled Migrant visa face when they return from trips abroad though they are fully legally entitled to re-enter the country,” he said.

In a statement, the Forum said in another recent case, an Indian doctor who has been in the U.K. for a decade was questioned by an immigration officer when he returned with his family from a holiday in India. In another case, a legal migrant from Nepal was allegedly detained at an airport in Northern Ireland for two days and threatened with deportation.

“He was asked why he was not working in his field of expertise. The fact is that Highly Skilled Migrant visas do not place any such restrictions,” said the Forum demanding an end to what it described as “unlawful behaviour” of immigration officials.

“We are always willing to cooperate with enforcement agencies but we will not tolerate racial discrimination, harassment and unlawful actions of their officials,” said Mr. Kapadia adding that the Forum would be forced to take legal action if such actions did not stop.

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