I’ve been building a contact list of people who could offer valuable insights regarding my project. I’ve looked for experts in the field of immigration, lobbying/litigation, self-employment, and the creative industries. I’ve been lucky to receive really valuable insights from the people I’ve reached out to, and here is how it’s been going:
I reached out to the policy team at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and, although they explained they were busy at the moment, they were able to connect me with Mahlea Babjak from the Migrants’ Rights Network. At MRN, Mahlea is the coordinator for the London Project, which fights for equal rights for migrants in the UK, and got back to me with extremely helpful information. I emailed her explaining my project, and she got back to me saying she was interested and we arranged a time to chat over the phone.
During our phone call we discussed her background, which also includes being an international student, what my research was so far regarding self-employment for international students, and what the goals for my project were. Mahlea became interested in my cause of lobbying for self-employment to become legal for international students, mentioned I had some solid groundwork to go further, and that she would be willing to help in preparing documents and reaching out to MPs once parliament was in session. Hearing this was amazing and gave me lots of hope for my project. We ended our conversation hoping to stay in touch, and she also connected me with Naomi Bulliard.
Naomi is the Head of Strategy at UAL’s Centre for Sustainable Fashion and introduced me to the Fashion Roundtable, which has done tons of work for international workers’ rights in the fashion industry and has lobbied the government to make fashion more sustainable.
Fashion Roundtable’s website has a graph explaining their process to influence policymaking, which I found useful and applicable to my campaign:
Another person I got in touch with is the UK Council for International Student Affairs. Julie Allen, UKCISA’s Director of Policy and Services responded to my email regarding international student self-employment and gave me her insights on the subject. She mentioned that a key hurdle is that migrants’ permissions are reflected on the visas’ purposes that they’re issued. For example, an investor visa is mainly for people to invest in British organizations and a student visa is mainly for people to come study in the UK, not work. So, although students are allowed to work in most industries 20hrs per week, they can’t freelance as the purpose of the visa is not for students to start their own businesses. A second hardship Julie mentioned is that since students are only allowed to work a maximum of 20hrs a week, if they were to freelance it would be much harder to keep track of the hour limit. Hurdles such as these are root to why the self-employment restrictions exist, and I understand why the limitations exist. However, I still believe there is room for change with the back-up that allowing freelance has shown to not be a major problem in Canada and Australia.