UK Visa Updates 2025: Certain nationalities may not be able to apply for UK visas. A new government crackdown may limit visa applications from nationalities believed to be most likely to overstay and seek asylum in the UK.
People from nations including Pakistan, Nigeria, and Sri Lanka may find it more difficult to travel to the UK for work and education under Home Office plans, as initially reported in the Times.
According to ministers, there is a specific issue with people who enter the UK lawfully on employment or study visas and then apply for asylum, which would allow them to remain there permanently if approved.
“Our upcoming Immigration White Paper will set out a comprehensive plan to restore order to our broken immigration system,” a Home Office official stated.
Due to an investigation into the quality of the data, the Home Office has not released departure check information since 2020, making it unclear which countries are most likely to overstay their visas.
Many departures from the UK may not be documented, therefore people who don’t have a departure record may not have been in the country at all.
Limiting visas would have “likely to be quite small” effect on the number of asylum claims, according to Prof. Jonathan Portes, a senior fellow at the academic think tank UK in a Changing Europe.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today program, “I think the impact here is not designed primarily to be about numbers overall, but rather to be about reducing asylum claims which are perceived as abusive.”
The government is working to lessen system abuse when someone enters the country purportedly as a student but soon changes their mind and applies for asylum.
More than 108,000 asylum claims were made in the UK last year, according to recent Home Office data, the most since records have been kept in 1979.
Of all nationalities, Pakistanis made the most asylum claims (10,542 in total). In the same time frame, about 2,862 citizens of Sri Lanka and 2,841 citizens of Nigeria filed asylum claims.
According to the latest recent data for 2023–2024, there were 732,285 international students in the UK, the majority of them were from China (98,400) and India (107,480).
In 2024, there were fewer UK work and study visas than the previous year.
Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to decrease both legal and illegal migration since taking office as prime minister last year. However, he has previously refused to provide a net migration objective, claiming that a “arbitrary cap” hasn’t worked in the past.
Making it illegal to jeopardise the lives of others at sea, targeting small boat crossings, and creating training programs for industries that currently depend on migrant workers are all part of Labour’s proposals to limit migration.
The previous Conservative government, according to Sir Keir, failed to reduce net migration levels “by design, not accident.”
The number of persons entering the UK less the number departing, or net migration, reached a record 906,000 in the year ending in June 2023 before dropping to 728,000 in the year ending in June 2024.
The decline seems to have been influenced by new regulations that previous Prime Minister Rishi Sunak put in place in an effort to lower the number of migrants.
The previous Conservative government prohibited care workers from bringing family members to the UK and raised the minimum wage for skilled foreign workers wishing to enter the country from £26,200 to £38,700.
Pressure on Labour to alter the immigration system was already present, but it might have increased following Reform UK’s victories in the local elections last week.
Across a number of primarily Tory-held councils that were last contested in 2021, Reform won 677 of the approximately 1,600 seats that were up for grabs on Thursday.
Reform promised to freeze non-essential immigration in their general election manifesto. People with specific talents, such those in healthcare, would still be permitted entry into the UK.
Sir Keir responded to last week’s results by saying he understood the “sharp edge of fury” that voters were feeling as they turned away from the big parties, and that this would motivate him to “go further and faster” in implementing Labour’s pledged reforms to public services and immigration.
The Refugee Council’s chief executive, Enver Solomon, stated that it was appropriate that they were “protected from harm and given a fair hearing in the asylum system” because “some people on work or study visas may find their lives at risk because the political situation in their home country has changed.”
Prior to the local elections, plans were already underway to address overstaying.