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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