Refused Entry to UK. Will this affect my Student Visa application?

Question

I lived in the UK as Visiting Student for less than 6 months. 4 months later, I tried to go back to United Kingdom for a two weeks vacation. But I was denied the permission to get into the country because the Border Officer did not believe that I was genuinely seeking entry for the limited period as stated, since I was going to stay with a former classmate and his Family.

The main problem was that when he asked me about my relationship with this classmate I said we were friends, and then they called him and he said we were in a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship.

Honestly we had never discussed what label we world give to our relationship and I naively never imagined this was a very important issue for Immigrants. I really was not seeking for a way to stay illegally on the UK.

I tried to explain this to the Officers, but they said they would not believe anything else I said because I had already lied once. After that I was on detention for a few hours in which they took my fingerprints and then sent me back to my country on the next available flight. My passport now has a black cross on one of the pages.

In the documents they gave me, it says I was not allowed in the UK because:

1. I failed to give satisfactory or reliable answers to an Immigration Officer's Enquiries
2. I did not have an entry clearance valid for the purpose for which the application for leave to enter was made

Now I was offered a place to study a PhD in London and a full scholarship (uni fess and a stipen about £200 more than the embassy aks to have per month). I would like to know if the previous situation could affect my application to get a Student Visa? What should I do when explaining the past refusal?

Answer 1

If you have been detained and removed from the UK, you will need to declare it when you apply for your student visa. It's best to include a copy of your removal notice(s) with your application and to put their reference numbers on the form.

For your question about whether a removal affects future applications, yes of course it does. It is not an automatic show-stopper, but it reflects upon your credibility and your amenability to comply with a visa's terms and conditions.

Based upon what you wrote, they thought you were concealing a relationship and this generally signals an intent to settle in the UK by making an Article 8 claim (jumping queue). People who are maintaining romantic relationships invariably try to downplay their significance during a landing interview and there's a very grey area between 'friends' and 'boyfriends' that confuses a lot of people. They also believe (rightly or wrongly) that some people on student visas are trying to form a permanent relationship and settle here (probably that's why they called your bf... to catch a discrepancy). If a relationship suggests intimacy and you describe it as 'friends', they will think you have lied. Once they catch someone in a lie, however innocent, they will start on the removal track and it's all but impossible to recover from it.

What should I do when explaining the past refusal? The narrative in your question is fine, you can reword it a bit and put it in your application. They are not asking for a confession of guilt and they will not appreciate a long-winded contrivance that attempts to gloss over the story (it will just dig you in deeper). You can write one or two paragraphs that stick to the facts and that will be fine. The rest of your application should be of the highest quality (using a high street solicitor with a practice area in student visas if need be).