Migrant carers from India's Kerala await justice in UK visa 'scams'

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - KOCHI — It took Arun George half a working life to scrape together £15,000 ($19,460) in savings, which he used to secure a care worker job for his wife in the UK.

But in barely a few months, he lost it all.

George — not his real name as his wife doesn't want to be identified within their small community for the shame associated with having returned without a job — paid the money in late 2023 to the managers of Alchita Care.

The BBC has seen evidence of the payment to Alchita Care, the private domiciliary care home in Bradford that sponsored his family's visa. He did it at the behest of a local agent in his town in the southern Indian state of Kerala.

It was the promise of a better life for their child who has special needs that prodded the couple to dip into their savings and take such a risk. But when they got to the UK there was no work.

"We kept chasing the care home, but they made up excuses. After I pleaded with them, they forced us to undergo some unpaid training and gave my wife just three days of work," George said. "We couldn't carry on and came back to India a few months later."

George believes he has been scammed by the company and says the ordeal has set him back at least by a decade financially. His family is just one among hundreds of people from Kerala seeking work in the UK who have been exploited by recruiters, care homes and middlemen.

Most have now given up hope of getting justice or their money.

Alchita Care in Bradford has not responded to the BBC's questions. Their sponsorship licence — which allows care homes to issue certificates of sponsorship to foreign care workers applying for visas — was removed by the Home Office last year.

But at least three other care workers who sent thousands of pounds to Alchita Care and uprooted their lives from Kerala told us that the jobs they had been promised did not materialise.

One of them, still in the UK, said his condition was so precarious that he was surviving on "bread and milk" from charity shops for the past few months.

Like George, Sridevi (not her real name) says she was charged £15,000 for a visa sponsorship by Alchita Care. She spent another £3,000 to get to the UK in 2023.

She's unable to return to India, scared of facing family members and friends from whom she took a loan to make the trip.

"I struggle to even pay for my rent and meals," she said. Her job is a far cry from the stable eight-hour work she was promised, she says. She is sometimes on call from 4am to 9pm, driving from one patient's home to another, but gets paid only for the few hours she is actually with the patient, and not the full shift.

Thousands of nurses from Kerala, desperate to migrate to the UK every year, are estimated to have been exploited after the government added care workers to the UK's shortage occupation list during Covid. This allowed people to be recruited from overseas as long as they were sponsored.

For many, the care worker visa was a golden ticket to a better life as they could take family along.

Baiju Thittala, a Labour party member and the mayor of Cambridge, told the BBC he had represented at least 10 such victims over the last three years.

But the cross-border nature of these exploitative schemes means it has been incredibly hard to pursue justice, he said. Very often the victims have made payments to care homes or middlemen domiciled outside India which leads to "jurisdiction problems", he added.

Secondly, lawyers are expensive and most care workers, already in deep debt, can hardly afford to fight it out in the courts.

Thittala estimates at least 1,000-2,000 people from Kerala, directly or indirectly victims of these schemes, are still in the UK.

There are also hundreds of people scattered across Kerala's towns who lost money before they could even leave home.

In the town of Kothamangalam, the BBC spoke to some 30 people who had collectively lost millions of dollars while trying to obtain a care visa that allows professionals to come to — or stay — in the UK to work in the social care sector.

All of them accused one agent — Henry Poulos and his agency Grace International in the UK and India — of robbing them of their life savings through fake job offers and sponsorship letters.

Poulos even made some of them take a 2,500km journey to Delhi for visa appointments that were non-existent, they said.

Shilpa, who lives in the town of Alleppey, told the BBC she had taken out a bank loan at a 13% interest rate to pay Poulos, who gave her a fake certificate of sponsorship.

"I thought the UK would offer a good future for my three daughters, but now I am struggling to pay their school fees," she told the BBC.

"I have lost everything. My wife had left her job in Israel so that we could move to the UK," said another victim, Binu, breaking down. He made a comfortable £1,500 with his wife in Israel but has now been forced to take his children out of private school in Kerala because there's no money anymore.

Neither Poulos nor Grace International responded to the BBC, despite repeated attempts to get in touch with them. The police in Kothamangalam said Poulos was absconding in the UK, and they had sealed his local offices after receiving complaints from six people.

The previous Conservative government in the UK admitted last year that there was "clear evidence" that care workers were being offered visas under false pretences and paid far below the minimum wage required for their work.

Rules to reduce its misuse were tightened in 2024, including increasing the minimum salary. Care workers are also now restricted from taking dependents, making it a less attractive proposition for families.

Since July 2022, about 450 licenses allowing employers to recruit foreign workers have been revoked in the care sector.

Since the beginning of this year, sponsors have also been explicitly prohibited by the Home Office from passing on the cost of the sponsor license fee or associated administrative costs to prospective employees.

Top police officials in Kerala, meanwhile, told the BBC they were still investigating these cases in India and would work with Interpol agencies to crack down on agents, if necessary.

But for the hundreds who've already been exploited, justice remains elusive, and still very much a distant dream. — BBC