A REPORT in the last issue of the Sunday Mail highlighted the desperate dilemma faced by foreign students struggling to survive in Cyprus.
The students – most of whom have come from developing countries – live on shoestring budgets that force them into squalid and cramped accommodation. “Most of us are forced to work illegally in order to survive,” one Indian student admitted. They all knew they faced deportation if caught, losing all the investment of a college education, but they had no choice if they were to survive.
Clearly, it’s not the government’s fault if Indian or Pakistani parents only provide their children with £50 a month on which to survive in an increasingly expensive European country. And no one is suggesting that Cyprus should subsidise these foreign students so they can live in more acceptable conditions.
But the government should seriously consider allowing foreign students to engage in part-time work during the course of their studies. After all, generations of Cypriot students – especially in times past when Cyprus itself was a place of desperate poverty – financed their overseas studies with part-time work in Britain or elsewhere.
Cyprus already has 38,000 legal foreign workers and an estimated 35,000 illegal workers. It has virtually zero unemployment. So it’s not as if allowing foreign students to work would cost Cypriot jobs. And it’s not as if any Cypriots would be willing to do the kind of jobs that foreign students would take to make ends meet.
Indeed, allowing students to work under strictly controlled conditions may even make the government’s battle against illegal immigration easier to wage. The immigration service is understandably worried that students may abuse their status to stay in Cyprus illegally, but by allowing part-time work they would be better able to ensure that students did not overstep the allowed limits, rather than trying to track down the illegal sweat shops and back street employers to which students currently resort.
It’s a win-win situation. Cyprus needs the labour – the tens of thousands of illegal workers prove that. The students need the work. Both can benefit from a change in the rules.
A disturbing message
A NICOSIA judge’s unprecedented decision to jail a man for speeding sends a welcome message to motorists that dangerous driving is no joke, backing up police safety campaigns with a serious deterrent that matches the gravity of the crime.
Indeed, sentencing, the judge highlighted the fact that police had pinpointed speed as the cause of the majority of fatal accidents, and that a custodial sentence was the only way to ram the message home – both to the convicted motorist and to others.
All the more disturbing therefore is the four-month sentence passed by a Larnaca court on a driver convicted of killing a Sri Lankan and abandoning the scene of the accident.
A Nicosia judge jails a man for 25 days for speeding because his behaviour might have endangered people’s lives. A Larnaca judge jails a man for just four months, because he was speeding, killed a man, abandoned the scene of the accident and later claimed he thought he had hit a dog. What kind of message does that send?
