UK government introduces new law stopping foreign students from bringing in family members

BRITAIN'S Home Office has announced plans to introduce a new Draconian immigration policy that will prohibit foreign students from bringing their dependents into the country to stay with when during the course of their study.

Under controversial plans to limit the number of migrants entering the country, the UK government is looking to place a blanket-ban on the families of all foreign students entering the country. Nigerian students are expected to be among the most severely affected by the new law which states that only those doing postgraduate research or government-sponsored scholarship students will be exempted from the development.

A Home Office spokesman said: “We are fully committed to seeing a decisive cut in migration. From today, new overseas students will no longer be able to bring family members to the UK but postgraduate research or government-funded scholarships students will be exempt.”

This law is designed to stop Nigerian students and others studying in the UK from bringing family as dependents except under specific circumstances. This is as the UK government aims to bring down immigration into the country which stands at about 1m.

Under the new rule, the UK will remove the permission for international students to switch out of the student route and into work routes before their studies have been completed to prevent misuse of the visa system. There will also be a review of the maintenance requirement for students and dependents and a crackdown on unscrupulous education agents who make use of inappropriate applications to sell immigration, not education.

A statement on the UK’s Home Office official site added that the new government restrictions to student visa routes will substantially cut net migration by restricting the ability for international students to bring family members on all but post-graduate research routes and banning people from using a student visa as a backdoor route to work in the UK. The Home Office also noted that this new rule was not at the expense of the government’s commitment to the public to lower overall migration and ensure that migration to the UK was highly skilled and provided the most benefit.

“The Office of National Statistics estimated that net migration was over 500,000 from June 2021 to June 2022. Although partly attributed to the rise in temporary factors, such as the UK’s Ukraine and Hong Kong schemes, last year almost half a million student visas were issued while the number of dependants of overseas students has increased by 750% since 2019, to 136,000 people,” a Home Office spokesman said.

He added that the proposal is aimed at allowing the government to continue to meet its international education strategy commitments while making a tangible contribution to reducing net migration to sustainable levels. The government has also made clear that the terms of the graduate route remain unchanged.