IN A LETTER published in yesterday’s edition of the paper, a foreign student appealed to the Cyprus authorities over the issue of work. He urged the government to allow students to take up part-time work, so as to finance their studies and presumably pay for their living expenses. He also claimed that the government’s refusal to grant work permits to foreign students was forcing them to apply for political asylum as this enabled them to take up a job and pay for their studies.
In effect, the government’s crackdown on students working has pushed up the number of asylum seekers, creating a much bigger problem than the one that was supposedly solved. There are currently some 4,000 applications for asylum, 90 per cent of which are believed to have been submitted by foreign students wanting to work in Cyprus. What can the government do now that students have found a way to get round the law? It will probably turn down most applications for asylum, but is all the additional paperwork created for the police worth the trouble?
No, it is not. Foreign students, who usually come from poorer countries than Cyprus, should be allowed to work part-time in order to pay for their studies or their living expenses – there is after all a labour shortage. And they would be putting a large part of their earnings back into the economy as they would have to pay tuition fees.
It is a very short-sighted approach by the government, which should perhaps consider how many thousands of Cypriots had worked their way through university. If the countries where they were studying practised the same short-sighted policy as our government they would never have been able to get a university degree.
This is why we would have expected the government to take a more liberal approach to the whole matter. At least, the number of asylum seekers would have been kept at manageable levels.
Grotesque sentencing policy
OUR prisons are chronically overcrowded. So you’d think the courts would think twice in passing sentences, looking for alternatives to prison when the offender does not pose a threat to society.
Clearly not, if the case of a young Russian woman is anything to go by.
Tatiana Odema was jailed for 15 days for failing to renew her pink slip on time: this despite the fact that she is four months pregnant and despite the fact that she is newly married to a Greek, thereby entitling her to automatic residency rights.
Why? What purpose is served by such a sentence, except to take up one cell and taxpayers’ money to keep her there? Europe has repeatedly told us we should not be jailing anyone for immigration offences, let alone a pregnant woman who has a right to stay and whose only crime was to delay a renewal application.
