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Nigerians, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans applying to work or study in the UK face Home Office restrictions over suspicions that they are most likely to overstay and claim asylum, Whitehall officials have claimed.
The government is working with the National Crime Agency to build models to profile applicants from these countries who are likely to go on to claim asylum.
Whether such a scheme would be successful depends on the strength of the models and the intelligence they work with, according to a migration expert.
Nearly 10,000 asylum claimants who had arrived in the UK legally on work or study visas were living in taxpayer-funded accommodation, such as hotels, at some point last year.
Data disclosed by the Home Office in March showed that of those asylum seekers who had originally entered on a visa but then ended up in government accommodation, the most common nationalities were Pakistan, Nigeria and Sri Lanka.
The Guardian revealed on Saturday that the government planned to reduce the numbers of UK student visa holders who make asylum claims.
Officials will be instructed to use the bank statements submitted by visa holders as part of their assessment when deciding whether to grant them asylum accommodation.
According to the Times, the Home Office is attempting to build intelligence to enable caseworkers to spot patterns in the profiles of people who are most likely to abuse work and study visas as a loophole to claim asylum. They have earmarked Pakistani, Nigerian and Sri Lankan visa holders as the most likely to go on to apply for asylum.
Officials are working with the NCA to build a model that would reject a visa claim from a person who fits the profile of someone likely to go on to claim asylum.
Madeleine Sumption, the director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said it was difficult to assess whether the government and the NCA would be able to create such a model.
“The key question, and one that is hard to assess from the outside, is do they have the information to accurately decide who is likely to claim asylum after they arrive. Because obviously it can be quite difficult.
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“Whether it’s effective will depend on whether patterns are obvious enough for them to accurately be able to do it, or whether it will lead to some more arbitrary outcomes. Without being on the inside, it really is difficult to know.
“I could imagine scenarios where it could have quite a big impact. I can also imagine scenarios where it actually only affects a relatively small number of people,” she said.
Asked if the government’s plans could lead to legal challenges on the grounds of discrimination, Sumption said: “I’m not a lawyer, but the government has a fair amount of discretion on work and study to decide whether someone gets a visa or not when someone’s coming from outside of the country.
“There are cases when there are potentially some legal avenues, but broadly speaking the government is allowed to discriminate on many different grounds when granting work and study visas.”
