Student Visas - Home Affairs Committee Contents


Written evidence submitted by MigrationWatch (SV3a)

In the course of your committee hearing on 8 February, I promised to send you a note about various estimates of the scale of abuse of the Student Route.

You asked (Q249) how many of the 200,000 students arriving in recent years we believed, as a rough percentage, to be bogus. I replied 20-25%, including overstayers.

In paragraph 8 of our written evidence we gave an estimate of 32,000 students in higher education in the year to March 2010 who had overstayed or intended to do so. This was taken from our paper "The Cost of Bogus Students" which, in turn, was based on a Home Office paper entitled "Overseas Students in the Immigration System".

The Home Office paper used two different methodologies. For Higher Education and English language colleges they selected a sample from institutions that had been subject to a roll call investigation; this gave an average of 14% of students who were potentially non-compliant. However, the 2% non-compliance for universities was based on institutions that were applying for Highly Trusted Sponsor status so they could, as the paper recognised, be expected to be more compliant than average. Given that universities accounted for 51% of the students involved, the extent of non-compliance (3,000 of the 32,000) could well be a significant underestimate.

There are two other ways in which the 32,000 could be an underestimate. First, it assumes that all those recorded as continuing their studies will return home afterwards but some will later decide to stay on after expiry of their visas.

Secondly, the looser controls on Tier 4 which we explained to the Committee could well lead a higher proportion of bogus students than in the past.

It should also be noted that 50,000 student visitor visas were issued to visa nationals in 2010. This could be a further source of overstayers.

The total could thus be of the order of 40,000-50,000 or roughly 20%, as I mentioned.

Dr Huppert (Q256) referred to a figure of 2,895. This is the Home Office figure for potential non-compliance at universities which we rounded to 3,000 and which was included in the 32,000 for hither education, including universities. I have dealt with his other question (Q255) above.

I hope that this letter gives you some useful further background and also explains why I was reluctant to get into this kind of detail in the course of an oral hearing.

February 2011



 
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