by Uche Nworah

Created on: December 22, 2006   Last Updated: February 26, 2009

I must admit that I have been quite oblivious of what has been happening with regards to the United Kingdom Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP). Having since settled into my comfort zone after roughing it out back in the day with Germany's Bundesamt, I hardly keep tabs on immigration and visa issues these days except occasionally when a family member or friend requests for an invitation letter from me to aid their visa application back home, or ask that I assist in drafting visa appeals to the UK Immigration Appellate Authority; something that has so far been working out to my favour and to the favour of the appellants concerned. Such little successes have now made my circle of friends and family to believe that I have a magic wand but I don't.

Such assumptions have now led to referrals to outsiders meaning additional requests even from people that I do not know for immigration counselling. I have now inadvertently become an immigration lawyer' although my services have yet to yield any financial rewards for me, except the odd satisfaction I get that I'm helping my fellow country men and women.

But how do I work the magic'? Without trying to spoil market' for the battalion of Nigerian UK immigration lawyers digging their gold mines all over Peckham and Camberwell, Tottenham and Seven Sisters, and in all other locations with heavy immigrant populations, I really think that success with the United Kingdom immigration appeals process and hopefully in other western countries is based on a simple model, that of reading the grounds for refusal and sufficiently addressing them (point by point) in your appeal. It is ideal also to back your appeal with other supporting documents; this may even be simply re-attaching the same set of documents which the visa/entry clearance officers were in a big hurry to go through at the High Commissions or embassies.

In their roles as gatekeepers, these entry clearance officers never ever consider applicants' circumstances, they do not consider applications based on their individual merits and also make prejudiced, untrue and unfair assumptions about applicants leading them to generate almost the same set of grounds for refusal' documents from a template stored in their computer systems. Take for instance the case of my father-in-law, we had invited him to my sister-in-law's graduation at the University of Westminster and had forwarded all supporting documents with the invitation. He was denied the visiting visa on the suspicion that

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