UK Targets Nigerian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan Nationals in Student Visa Crackdown.
By Caroline Ameh
The UK government is set to impose new restrictions on student and work visa applicants from Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka amid rising concerns over visa overstays and a growing trend of asylum claims from these nationalities, according to senior Whitehall officials on Tuesday.
In collaboration with the National Crime Agency (NCA), the Home Office is developing data models designed to identify applicants from these countries who are deemed likely to use study or work visas as a pretext to later apply for asylum. Officials claim that profiling such individuals could enable the government to proactively deny visas to those who fit high-risk patterns.
Home Office figures released in March revealed that nearly 10,000 individuals who initially entered the UK on legal work or student visas went on to claim asylum and were housed in taxpayer-funded accommodations, including hotels, in 2023. The most common nationalities among this group were Pakistani, Nigerian, and Sri Lankan.
The government’s efforts are part of a broader crackdown aimed at reducing what it perceives as the misuse of student visas. As first reported by The Guardian, officials are being instructed to scrutinize the bank statements submitted with visa applications more rigorously, using them as part of the assessment process for asylum accommodation eligibility.
According to The Times, the Home Office’s goal is to enhance intelligence capabilities that allow caseworkers to detect patterns in applicants’ backgrounds. The objective is to reject visa requests from individuals matching profiles deemed statistically more likely to abuse the system.
Migration experts have raised questions about the feasibility and fairness of the initiative. Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, noted that the scheme’s effectiveness would heavily depend on the accuracy and reliability of the intelligence gathered.
“The key question, and one that is hard to assess from the outside, is do they have the information to accurately decide who is likely to claim asylum after they arrive. Because obviously it can be quite difficult,” said Sumption.
“Whether it’s effective will depend on whether patterns are obvious enough for them to accurately be able to do it, or whether it will lead to some more arbitrary outcomes,” she added. “I could imagine scenarios where it could have quite a big impact. I can also imagine scenarios where it actually only affects a relatively small number of people.”
When asked about the potential for legal challenges on the grounds of discrimination, Sumption said: “I’m not a lawyer, but the government has a fair amount of discretion on work and study to decide whether someone gets a visa or not when someone’s coming from outside of the country.”
“There are cases when there are potentially some legal avenues, but broadly speaking the government is allowed to discriminate on many different grounds when granting work and study visas.”
The Home Office has not yet released further details on when the new profiling models would be implemented or whether they plan to extend the scrutiny to other nationalities in the future.
