A new ban on students coming to the UK from four countries where there is war and human rights abuses will lead to more people using small boats, campaigners have warned.
Interior Minister Shabana Mahmood announced a visa ban on students from Sudan, Afghanistan, Myanmar and Cameroon on Tuesday afternoon. It will come into effect on March 26.
The Minister of the Interior said that it is an “abuse” for people from these countries to request asylum “in the country” after finishing their studies. Sources from the Ministry of the Interior say that study routes should not be the mechanism for requesting asylum. But critics say there are very few safe and legal alternatives.
Sudan is currently being torn apart by war and Afghanistan is accepted to be a repressive regime where women and girls are routinely persecuted and denied their rights, and any opponents of the ruling Taliban regime are punished. According to Amnesty International’s latest country reports, Myanmar has seen a rise in atrocities committed by the ruling junta in the five years since the military coup, and arbitrary detentions and human rights crackdowns have been documented in Cameroon.
According to the Home Office’s own data, the number of people from each of these countries who are granted student visas and then make asylum claims is only in the hundreds, in some cases less than the number who cross the English Channel in small boats on a moderately busy day. Only 13% of total asylum applications last year came from people who had previously arrived in the UK on a study visa.
Louise Calvey, director of the charity Asylum Matters, said: “Our government says it wants to stop people crossing the dangerous and often deadly English Channel to seek refuge. But its approach is doing exactly the opposite.
“This government has already suspended applications for family reunification, now it wants to ban a small number of people from leaving conflict zones to continue their education and then apply for asylum rather than being sent back to danger.
“It is leading people who will continue to need protection into the hands of human traffickers. This next attack on what was a safe and regularized method of travel is just the latest in a series of anti-refugee laws that completely ignore the reality that people whose lives have been shattered by war need shelter, and if they do not have a safe route to seek it, they will be forced to find more dangerous ones.”
Mahmood said: “Britain will always provide refuge to people fleeing war and persecution, but our visa system must not be abused. That is why I am taking the unprecedented decision to refuse visas to those nationals who seek to exploit our largesse. I will restore order and control to our borders.”
