UK visa applications for some nations, including Lanka, could be restricted: Report

Visa applications from nationalities, thought most likely to overstay and claim asylum in the UK, could be restricted under a new government crackdown, BBC said yesterday.

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Under Home Office plans, first reported in the London Times, people from countries such as Pakistan, Nigeria and Sri Lanka may find it more difficult to come to the UK to work and study.

Ministers believe there is a particular problem with those who come to the UK legally on work or study visas and then lodge a claim for asylum - which if granted, would allow them to stay in the country permanently.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Our upcoming Immigration White Paper will set out a comprehensive plan to restore order to our broken immigration system.”

It is not clear which nationalities are most likely to overstay their visas as the Home Office has not published statistics on exit checks for people on visas since 2020, due to a review into the accuracy of the figures.

Many exits from the UK can go unrecorded, meaning those without a departure record were not necessarily still in the country.

Prof. Jonathan Portes, a senior fellow at the academic think tank UK in a Changing Europe, said the impact that restricting visas would have on the number of asylum applications was “likely to be quite small”.

“I think the impact here is not designed primarily to be about numbers overall, it’s designed to be about reducing asylum claims which are perceived to be abusive,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“When you have someone who comes here ostensibly as a student and then switches quickly to the asylum route... that is an abuse of the system - the government is trying to reduce that.”