Some of Britain’s lower-grade universities are awarding educational visas to foreign students “indiscriminately” so they can benefit from their higher tuition fees, an immigration expert has claimed.
Robert Bates, who is research director at the Centre for Migration Control think tank, told The European Conservative that “the main function of many British universities now seems to be the distribution of British visas to foreign nationals.” He added:
It has long been known that the business model of several dozen low-quality institutions is predicated on admitting thousands of overseas students each year, who do not come to study, but instead see the tuition fees as a price worth paying for long-term residency in the UK.
Leaked Home Office figures obtained by The Daily Mail over the weekend show that more than a third of the 6,136 foreign students who went on to claim asylum last year were sponsored for study visas by just six educational institutions.
Bates told this publication that the news shows that “the dam has well and truly burst.” He said that unless government officials take “drastic action, including preventing many so-called universities from awarding visas at all, the problem will only get worse. Universities will carry on indiscriminately awarding places to ungenuine students.”
Conservative Party commentators have also called for the right to issue visas to foreign students to be restricted to the best-performing universities.
One of the universities highlighted in the Mail report said in defence that “this issue is a result of the government’s asylum policy, which allows visa switching in a way that is outside the direct control of the universities concerned and is not a failing of the higher education sector.”
Higher education body Universities UK International added that in order to “recruit international students, universities must meet very high standards set by government.”
But Bates told The European Conservative that the problem lies with “left-wing faculties” who “do not care what overseas students do once in the UK. Their only concern is increasing the funds that they can direct toward nonsense research into British colonialism or gender studies.”
The Home Office described the “exploitation of our student visa route” as “unacceptable,” and said it has “introduced a package of measures to clamp down on abuse.” But it did not respond to calls for some universities to be stripped of the right to hand out student visas.