Glad to know we are not alone in the world with student visa problems, students that hate to leave when they graduate.


RUADHAN MAC CORMAIC
New Government proposals to regulate the working hours of Ireland's foreign student population could lead to greater exploitation rather than eradicate it, especially for the many young Chinese here

AS HE TELLS IT, Junyu Wang was having a meal in a Chinese restaurant on Parnell Street in Dublin not too long ago when gardaÃ* from the immigration bureau arrived and ordered staff and diners to stay put. "They said, 'everybody sit down, don't move, give us your ID'," he recalls. "If you're illegal, they arrest you." It's a conversation about Government plans for new student work permits that leads him to the story of the restaurant raid, but in Wang's eyes the two are filaments of the same thread. Slowly but unmistakably, he is saying, the screw is tightening on Ireland's Chinese students.

It's a year since Wang, concerned that there was no representative group for the students who make up the bulk of Dublin's Chinese community, founded the Overseas Chinese Organisation, a voluntary body that helps those who need advice on their rights or who run into trouble with employers or landlords. There's no shortage of visitors: in the past year the group has resolved some 200 employment cases, and nearly every file on Wang's desk tells of a compatriot who was unfairly dismissed or denied the minimum wage.

Under draft Government proposals sent to the social partners last month, all non-European Economic Area (EEA) students with a part-time job offer will soon be required to apply for a work permit, providing details of the position, the employer's identity, the salary and hours. It will be the biggest change in the student visa regime since 2000, when the Government decided to allow all non-EEA students to work part-time to help finance their studies. That scheme allows students to work 20 hours a week during the college year and 40 hours out of term.

The Chinese will be among the groups most affected, but while many see the idea as a useful way of reducing exploitation by giving the Government a record of where each student is working, and under what conditions, Wang worries that it could also have the opposite effect. "Tuition fees are very expensive and they have to work because they have to pay for rent and food," he says. "Twenty hours might not be enough to pay for tuition fees, rent and food and everything, so sometimes they work two or three part-time jobs."

Wang fears the regulation could lead many to take cash-in-hand work, "like a slave, where you're paid very little money", and believes it would be typical of the Government's approach to non-European students. "The Government doesn't care. They just want non-EU people to come here and pay tuition fees. Then when you graduate, they kick you out."
While Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong have settled in Ireland since the 1950s after being drawn by the potential of the catering trade across post-war Europe, China's progressive integration into the world's economy since the 1990s led to a shift in the profile of its émigrés. Remittances from old emigrants became less important and support for overseas study (mostly confined until the 1970s to a few exchange programmes with the Soviet Union) became a plank of China's national development strategy.

As a result, Chinese student numbers have risen rapidly across Europe, with hundreds of Western education agencies vying with one another to lure the sons and daughters of the boom abroad. Dublin Business School now has 22 agents recruiting prospective students in China, including nine in Beijing, five in Shanghai, two in Dalian and one in Chengdu. The result of such efforts is that in some Dublin language schools there are classrooms composed entirely of Chinese students. And though their numbers are smaller, the universities, which stand to gain three times more in fees from a Chinese student than they do from an Irish one, have followed suit.