Families of international students in Britain will face new restrictions.
With 486,000 granted in 2016, students constituted the largest single category of non-immigrant visitors to the United Kingdom.
LONDON: As part of attempts to reduce annual net migration, which reached a record last year, the British government announced on Tuesday that it will eliminate the entitlement of some overseas students to bring family members into the country.
As part of his campaign pledges ahead of an election due next year, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has committed to curb legal migration and indicated last week that he was studying a range of alternatives to lower the high levels of arrivals.
The interior ministry has stated that the new regulations will assist reduce migration “substantially” and prevent individuals from using student visas as a backdoor method to find work in Britain.
“We have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of student dependents being brought into the country with visas,” stated Interior Minister Suella Braverman in a statement.
This is the right thing to do since it will help us keep the students who contribute the most to the economy here while also protecting our public services.
According to the government, the number of dependents has increased eightfold since 2019, reaching 136,000 people last year. The current rules allow postgraduate students enrolled in courses lasting nine months or longer to bring partners and children to Britain.
Initiated in preparation for Thursday’s release of yearly net migration estimates for 2022, the reforms will take effect in the new year of 2019. Net migration hit a record high of 504,000 for the year ending in June 2022.
Without providing a specific timeline, Braverman said that numbers should return to pre-pandemic levels in the medium future.
For a long time, high legal immigration dominated British political debate, and it was one of the main motivations of the Brexit campaign in 2016.
Foreign students in Britain will no longer be able to change their immigration status from “student” to “work” while they are still in school, according to the country’s interior ministry.
It further said that of the total number of visas issued in 2016, 486,000 were for students.
