One of the developers who works for me here is Zimbabwean, he had a visa to work here but, having just won promotion to a more senior position in the development team, is now having real difficulty getting his visa renewed - its looking like they won’t do it.
Now i don’t know the ins and outs of his situation. I don’t want any legal advice here, since - at the end of the day - this isn’t my problem and i’ve been on the boards long enough to know thats not how this whole schebang works.
I do know however, that whilst he is a great coder, he is a complete tool at dealing with real life problems. He’s damn good at his job and i’m not prepared to let him screw this up because he hasn’t realised there are people out there who can help him, or has missed some clause or opportunity that he wasn’t aware of etc.
So does anyone know any volunteer/advice groups that i can get him to talk to? or point him towards? Unfortunately he can’t afford a lawyer, and i can’t (long story involving work rules) fork out the cash for him to go see one.
IANAL, and there probably aren’t that many parallels, but I had to go through two work permit applications for a Canadian national who wanted to come and work for us in the UK (he was working in our Toronto office at the time). For the first permit, I had to show that I couldn’t hire anyone from the UK to do this job. This was in fact true, since we’re working in a very small, esoteric area, but they required proof that I’d advertised (at quite large cost) in two pertinent journals. I recall that the renewal of the work permit was much easier the second time round, and he’s now been in the country long enough to get landed immigrant status, or whatever it is we call it (basically that’s it, he won’t have to apply ever again for a WP).
FWIW, apart from the rather stiff requirements to prove that we’d tried hard to recruit locally (which I guess I can see the point of), all the people I dealt with at the Department for Education and Employment seemed quite reasonable.
Dunno if that helps any; it’s anecdotal at best. Probably your best bet is to go with Glyndour’s suggestion.
In my experience, most SAns and Zimbabweans arrive in the UK on either a work/holiday visa or an ancestry visa. I am a South African who went to the UK on a work/holiday visa. If this is the visa that he was on, then, no, they won’t renew his visa and technically he should not have been working full time. Unless the rules have changed since I was there (and I don’t think they have because my best friend just went through this) I know that you cannot renew a work/holiday visa (they are valid for 2 years). It is very possible that he might have to go back to Zimbabwe while the company applies for a work visa on his behalf. There are other ways around the visa thing, including getting a student visa (there are certain regulations and you have to really be studying). The best bet is to get him to talk to an immigration lawyer or follow Glyndour’s suggestion.