The UK Home Office is reportedly imposing tighter restrictions on work or study visa applications from Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka over concerns that individuals from these countries are more likely to overstay their visas and seek asylum.
According to Whitehall officials, the government is collaborating with the National Crime Agency (NCA) to develop data models aimed at identifying visa applicants who may attempt to exploit routes to claim asylum after arrival.
This move comes in light of Home Office data disclosed in March, revealing that nearly 10,000 individuals who entered the UK legally on study or work visas had later sought asylum and were living in state-funded accommodations such as hotels. The most frequent nationalities among these asylum claimants were Pakistani, Nigerian, and Sri Lankan.
As part of the crackdown, officials may assess the financial documentation -- such as bank statements -- submitted by visa applicants to determine their eligibility for asylum support. Intelligence-led profiling may also be used to deny visas to applicants whose profiles match those deemed likely to submit asylum claims.
The Guardian previously reported that the government is seeking to reduce the number of student visa holders who later apply for asylum. The Times added that officials are attempting to build intelligence that would help caseworkers recognize trends or patterns in profiles of people who could potentially abuse the visa system and claim asylum.
They identified Pakistani, Nigerian, and Sri Lankan visa holders as those most likely to eventually apply for asylum. Authorities, in collaboration with the NCA, are developing a system designed to flag and potentially reject visa applications from individuals whose profiles suggest they are likely to seek asylum after arriving in the UK.
However, Madeleine Sumption, Director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, expressed scepticism about the reliability of such models.
“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.
“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. Without being on the inside, it really is difficult to know.
“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,” she said.
On the question of potential legal challenges for 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.”
