Set a Record Last Year, Britain Planned to Limit Migration by Families of Students From Abroad

Illustration London, England. (Wikimedia Commons/Ilya Grigorik)

JAKARTA - British authorities said on Tuesday they plan to strip some international students of the right to bring their family members to the country, as part of measures to curb last year's record annual migration rate.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has vowed to reduce legal migration and said last week he was considering various options to reduce high arrival rates, as part of his pledge before general elections expected to be held next year.

The Home Office said the new measures targeting postgraduate students, except for those on research programs, would help reduce migration "substantially" and stop people using student visas as an undercover channel to find work in the UK.

"We have seen an unprecedented increase in the number of dependents of students brought into this country on visas," Interior Minister Suella Braverman said in a statement.

"It's a fair thing to do so we can better protect our public services, while supporting the economy by allowing the students who make the most contributions to continue to come here," he said.

The current rules allow postgraduate students taking programs lasting nine months or more to bring their spouses and children to the UK.

But the government says the number of dependents from there has jumped eightfold since 2019, to 136.000 last year.

The measures, which will become effective from January, come before the release of the annual net migration forecast for 2022 on Thursday. For the year ending June 2022, net migration reached an all-time high of 504.000.

The numbers will drop to pre-pandemic levels in the medium term, Braverman added, without giving a specific target.

High rates of legal migration, and the added pressure on struggling public services, have long dominated British political discourse and were one of the main drivers of the 2016 Brexit referendum.

In addition, the UK will remove the ability for international students to switch from student to work track before their studies are completed, the Ministry of Home Affairs said.

It is known that student visas make up the largest proportion of migration to the UK with 486,000 visas issued last year, the ministry added.