The UK government announced additional visa restrictions for international students on Tuesday (23 May), as the ruling Conservatives engaged in a verbal spat over the country’s surging immigration.
Only students enrolled in postgraduate studies classified as research programmes, which normally last longer than two years, will be permitted to bring dependents to the UK while they are studying under the new regulations.
Britain has stopped allowing EU citizens to relocate freely since the Brexit vote, but net migration is expected to reach historic highs this year.
Customised visa programmes for refugees leaving the Ukraine, Hong Kong, and Afghanistan have played a significant role in that. The number of students has increased as well, particularly from India and Nigeria.
That has sparked political controversy, and last week as right-wing Home Secretary Suella Braverman encouraged her own government to become stricter, cabinet infighting over the matter came to light.
The finance and education ministers, who respect the skills that immigrants bring to the workforce and the high international tuition fees that foreign students pay to attend UK colleges, are in opposition to her.
Braverman stated in a statement to parliament that the plans struck the “right balance” and that net migration will probably “fall to pre-pandemic levels in the medium term” as a result.
According to her, around 136,000 visas were granted to international students’ dependents in 2018—an increase of eight times from just 16,000 in 2019.
The switching “out of the student route into work routes” prior to graduation will no longer be permitted for international students.
However, the government insisted that it had no plans to remove the requirement that international students find employment before leaving the country and remain in the country for a further two years on the same visa.
According to Braverman’s statement, there will also be “improved and more enforcement activity” and a crackdown on “unscrupulous agents” who use education as a cover for immigration.
The minister, a hardliner on Brexit whose harsh rhetoric on immigration has caused division, claimed that international students were crucial to boosting the UK economy.
The government’s goal to “lower overall migration and ensure that migration to the UK is highly skilled and therefore provides the most benefit,” she added, should not be sacrificed in order to achieve this.
