Fresh off the plane from Denmark, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has embarked on another Scandi-inspired immigration and asylum policy blitz, much to the consternation of some of her parliamentary colleagues. Among her announcements is a deceptively simple plan to impose visa bans on several countries whose nationals are abusing study visas to gain entry and then claim asylum in Britain.
She has been criticised from some quarters for the timidity of this proposal. Indeed, new Office for National Statistics (ONS) data on student migration suggests she should go much further. But the criticisms are also somewhat unfair: despite being outnumbered around the Cabinet table and outgunned by the vested interests of Labour’s wider electoral coalition, she has established an important precedent for immigration restrictionism.
The policy backdrop to Mahmood’s announcement is the record-breaking surge in asylum claims in recent years – 101,000 last year, down only slightly from a peak of 105,000 in 2024, each more than double the annual numbers of just a few years ago. The political backdrop is that the British public are absolutely furious about this general state of affairs, even if many of the Home Secretary’s colleagues would prefer to avert their eyes.
However, contrary to popular belief, the massive surge in asylum claims is not solely about the small boats. Half of all claims are now made by those who entered the country with valid leave to work, study, join family members or just to visit as tourists. In 2021, around 2,700 migrants on study visas claimed asylum, a mix of students themselves and the dependants of students. By 2024, the figure had increased six-fold to 16,000. Another 13,000 followed in 2025.
So if Mahmood is to get a grip on the asylum system, dealing with the inflow from study visas has to be part of her approach. This will help with the migrant hotels too, as it is not just Channel migrants who end up accommodated at taxpayer expense when they claim asylum (although this is another area where Mahmood is cracking down).
This makes sense tactically too. While Britain remains party to international agreements such as the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and lacks a Rwanda-style deterrent, stopping the Channel crossings is a non-starter. Indeed, removing asylum claimants is just incredibly hard in general, so better to stop likely claimants arriving in the first place, whether by legal or illegal routes.
Accordingly, Mahmood will impose wholesale bans on issuing study visas to nationals of Afghanistan, Cameroon, Burma and Sudan, as well as banning work visas to Afghans. The bans are justified on the grounds that nationals from these countries are disproportionately likely to claim asylum. In the case of Afghans, 95% of those arriving on study visas in recent years went on to claim asylum.
But as critics have pointed out, the absolute numbers involved are derisory. In fact, from 2021 to 2025, just 14,660 study visas were issued to nationals of these countries – 0.6% of the 2.5 million study visas issued over this period, and barely 0.3% of the 5 million immigration visas issued in total.
To even begin to make a dent in study-to-asylum numbers, visa bans would have to be extended to countries such as Pakistani, Bangladesh, India and Nigeria. These four countries accounted for 54% of legal entrants (on all routes) claiming asylum in 2025. Afghans – mostly on work visas – came in at 2.3%, and Sudanese at about 1.5%. Cameroonians and Burmese numbers were negligible.
This is unlikely to happen at the moment though. Over 513,000 study visas were issued to Indian students (excluding dependants) over the last five years, with another 169,000 going to Nigerians, 137,00 to Pakistanis and 49,000 to Bangladeshis, accounting for 42% of all international students.
The definitive account of how universities have become increasingly financially dependent on international students, and the distortions to which this has given rise, such as the ‘Deliveroo visa’ phenomenon and satellite campuses, can be found on pages 83-92 of ‘Taking Back Control’, the Centre for Policy Studies report on legal immigration authored by Robert Jenrick and Neil O’Brien back in 2024. The key takeaway is that many universities have settled on a business model which boils down to selling access to UK labour markets, rather than top-flight degrees. This appeals in particular to migrants from developing and middle-income countries.
If Mahmood were to threaten this business model with large-scale visa bans, the university sector would scream blue murder, the vice-chancellors would go ballistic and the stakeholders would be enraged rather than engaged.
Yet this nettle will need to be grasped sooner or later. One reading of new ONS data is that many student migrants see their visas not just as a way to work below the radar, but as a bridge onto visas offering the prospect of long-term settlement. As the ONS has belatedly acknowledged, ‘student behaviours have changed in recent years, with students staying for longer and many transitioning onto different visas’. For example, of those who arrived in the year ending June 2023, 61% (294,000) of students and their dependants transitioned to a different visa type after two years; a higher number and proportion than the 44% (59,000) of those who arrived in the year to June 2021, and far higher than was the norm before 2021.
Another interesting feature of the latest update is the first published age profile of student migration. Most British people who go to university tend to do so before the age of 25 and tend not to return in later life. Yet 28% of study visas for international students went to those aged 26-35, and 5% to those aged 36 and over. The numbers for their dependants are even more telling: 36% to those aged 26-35 and 15% to those aged 36 and over, not to mention 39% to children. These characteristics reinforce the idea that under the new immigration system, much supposedly student migration is for the purpose of work and settlement, rather than study per se.
Many of these migrants are likely to run into a problem in the next few years. Now salary thresholds have been raised, migrants coming off study visas and the graduate visa route are going to face much higher barriers to extending their stay in Britain. If work routes to settlement are increasingly closed to student migrants from developing and middle-income countries, then we might reasonably expect asylum claims made by students to increase. The immigration system is often like that – when one part is tightened up, pressure increases elsewhere and flows continue. As much as she might want to pre-empt this possibility with wider visa bans, the Home Secretary’s colleagues are unlikely to give her the leeway to do so.
However, credit where credit is due. She was previously the first Home Secretary ever to issue blanket visa bans because foreign governments were refusing to take back their own nationals who had committed crimes in Britain (no doubt to much wailing and gnashing of teeth among Foreign Office mandarins). Now she is also the first Home Secretary ever to have issued visa bans because of the outcomes or characteristics demonstrated by particular national groups.
In this case, it was about the abuse of the immigration system itself but almost identical arguments can be made based on things like crime, educational attainment and fiscal contributions. For example, Somali migrants are seven times as likely to end up living in social housing as British nationals, and on average pay just a tenth of the income tax paid by the average Canadian migrant.
These are germane data points when thinking about how to make our immigration system work better for Britain. This has long been accepted on the right of British politics, in no small part due to the data analysis in ‘Taking Back Control’. The argument has now been conceded by a Labour Home Secretary. Political constraints mean that Mahmood is unlikely to be able to fix immigration and asylum herself. But she is setting precedents that will be useful for future governments.
