EDITORIAL: The British government is preparing to impose strict visa restrictions on students, including from Pakistan, it says, are more likely to claim asylum. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has traditionally been associated with lenient immigration policies and a sympathetic approach to asylum seekers, though it favours the broader trend across Europe of tightening immigration controls.
During the recent years, Britain has seen a steady rise in asylum claims, mostly from migrants forced to flee their home countries due to wars imposed by US- led Western nations. Included in them, of course, also are economic migrants as well as those experiencing political repression.
The issue has assumed urgency in the aftermath of the Labour Party’s poor showing in the recent local elections while the far-right, Reform UK, made substantial gains by reaching out to usual labour constituencies, including trade unions, and highlighting the increasing level of legal migration blamed for impacting wages and employment prospects for the native workers.
As a matter of fact, for quite some time, immigration has dominated the political discourse in that country; it was one of the major reasons Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016. The key cause of voter dissatisfaction — as generally seen everywhere — is the increasing cost of living that has affected many households.
The Labour’s loss though has been attributed, in large part, to its soft stance on the asylum policy, allowing the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage to exploit the same to his party’s advantage. Embittered by the experience, some Labour members of parliament are said to have urged the government to take a more decisive approach and bring down net migration.
A policy document, the Immigration White Paper, to be released in a week’s time, is to set out how exactly the government plans to reduce net migration. Some of the details that have emerged in media reports suggest the Home Office is trying to build intelligence to spot patterns in the profiles of people who are most likely to abuse work and study visas as a loophole to claim asylum.
Already Pakistani, Nigerian, and Sri Lankan visa holders, say reports, have been earmarked as the most likely to go on to apply for asylum.
Unfortunately, this seems more about preconceived notions than evidence-based critical considerations. As pointed out by the director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, the key question, one that is hard to assess from the outside, is if they have the information to accurately decide who is likely to claim asylum. In any event, the talent and skills of foreign students and researchers can, and do, make outstanding contributions to the host country’s economic growth, innovation, and other fields of human endeavour.
Among the Pakistani immigrants in the UK have been two Nobel Laureates, a physicist and a female education activist. Their work, surely, has benefitted the country they made their home.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025