2026-08-07
33 分钟This is The Guardian.
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Hello, my name's Johan Koshy, and I'm a deputy editor on The Long Read at The Guardian.
This summer, we're bringing you some of our favorite long reads of the year so far.
The story I've chosen today is I See It As Trafficking,
The Brutal Reality of Life as a Foreign Student in the UK by Samira Shackle.
Samira is someone who writes a lot of long reads for us and I always treasure reading her pieces
which take on complex, important subjects like a particular scandal or a state policy failure
that has gone under the radar or been largely forgotten.
The plight of international students in Britain was a perfect subject for her.
Now, international students might sound like a kind of niche policy area,
but they are actually, as Simira observes in this piece,
propping up our entire university sector and playing a strangely hidden role in the economy.
Now, some of this you might already know,
but the particular part of this story that was really news to me were the so-called education agents
whose job it is to find prospective international students abroad and tempt them to come here.
This was all totally fascinating.