Diplomatic ties ‘likely to spare other countries’ from visa brake

The government is unlikely to impose further visa brakes on international students from bigger countries owing to the diplomatic difficulties of doing so, legal experts have said. 

New immigration rules came into force on 26 March blocking nationals from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan from obtaining visas to study in the UK. 

The Home Office said the “emergency brake” was being applied due to the high proportion of asylum claims by students from these countries. 

The news has stoked fears that the government may impose the same policy on other countries, including major student recruitment markets for universities reliant on international fees. 

Government documents show that the threshold for consideration of a visa brake is a minimum of 100 asylum claims per year from a particular nationality on a particular visa type, with the number of asylum claims made while on that visa route accounting for at least 15 per cent of the total number of visas issued. 

This covers the “cohorts posing the most substantial risk of visa-linked asylum claims whilst still being proportionate,” the Home Office’s impact assessment says. 

The government’s approach has been to apply the ban based on the proportion of claims made, not the volumes of claims, with students from the four affected countries “among the most likely nationalities to claim”, according to the Home Office. 

However, countries whose students make up a large proportion of the UK’s international student population have also been linked to high asylum claim numbers. Of those claiming asylum from student visas in 2024, 40 per cent were from Pakistan, 17 per cent from India and 12 per cent from Bangladesh.

But experts say extending the ban to other countries would be politically difficult. 

Pat Saini, partner at Penningtons Manches Cooper, said that while there are fears the visa brake policy could become a “precedent”, she believed “there’s too much politics at play” with other countries linked to high asylum claims. 

The Home Office assessment states that once a nationality reaches the threshold, a broader assessment is triggered to decide whether to impose a visa brake. Factors beyond just the rate of asylum claims are taken into consideration including “migration considerations, national security, and growth”. 

The UK recently signed a free trade deal with India, for example – a key achievement for Keir Starmer’s government, which has made economic growth its primary goal. 

“I wouldn’t expect [visa brakes] to become the normal way of addressing this kind of trend,” agreed Shara Pledger, legal director and head of the global immigration team at Pinsent Masons. “This decision won’t have been taken particularly lightly.”

In its assessment, the Home Office also judged that the impact of applying the visa brake to the four chosen nationalities is proportionately small, reducing the number of study visas issued by an estimated 4,300. 

“Over the long term, given small numbers affected, and historic growth in student numbers, it could be expected that many of these student enrolments could be replaced by other nationalities,” the document says. 

Instead of further brakes, “it’s much more likely that we would see what we have experienced already for many years, where you would start to see a bit of an increase in refusal rates for applicants from certain countries,” said Pledger. 

Last year, study visa refusal rates hit their highest level since 2016 at 4.1 per cent, with countries like Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh among those affected.

“The difficulty with that from an institution’s point of view is that they have such little time to notice the rate increasing and react before they have started to damage things like their basic compliance assessment rates to maintain their student sponsor licence, for example,” said Pledger.

“In a sense, a visa brake makes it almost easier for an institution because they know exactly what’s coming [and] it’s not going to impact negatively on their figures.” 

The Home Office’s impact assessment also suggests that the government expects the ban will change how universities approach student recruitment, with institutions expected to “enrol students that are less likely to apply for asylum”. 

“Organisations may pivot to other student…markets or adapt their application process to select those most likely to complete the terms of their visa,” the document continues. “This could further reduce the number of asylum claims from countries that aren’t included in the brake.”

However, there are doubts about how feasible this is in practice. 

“Universities don’t know who is going to drop off a course and claim asylum,” said Saini, pointing out that the ban suggests the Home Office doesn’t trust its own caseworkers to root out students who may go on to claim asylum. 

“It is very difficult to spot these things,” she continued, adding that universities have already reviewed their recruitment practices in light of incoming changes to the visa compliance assessment metrics. 

helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com