The reality behind the Home Office's latest announcement on asylum work and study visas

The Home Office has made another announcement ahead of tomorrow’s statement of changes. As of 26 March 2026 sponsored study visas will be closed to nationals from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan and skilled worker visas for Afghan nationals.

The Home Office has said that this action is needed to tackle “widespread visa abuse”. Let’s start with “widespread”, before moving onto “abuse”.

How “widespread” are asylum claims by nationals of these four countries on visas?

You will note in the media coverage that percentages are being reported rather than the actual number of people involved. This is because the number of people from these four countries who were on a visa and claimed asylum last year is very small.

Last year up until the end of September there were 110 Afghan nationals on a work visa who claimed asylum, and 550 people on a student visa. There were 180 people from Cameroon on a student visa who claimed asylum, 330 from Myanmar and 120 from Sudan. A total of 100,625 people claimed asylum in the UK last year.

You will also note that media reports talk about the number of people who have arrived on a work and study visa and claimed asylum “over the past five years” – again this is based on the Home Office providing this distortion of the figures and does not reflect the current situation. For example, if you look at the actual data you can see that there has been a large drop in the number of people on student visas claiming asylum in the last year.

Is there any evidence of “abuse”?

Moving on to look at the Home Office’s claims of “abuse”. The first point to understand here is that we are talking about people who have made valid applications under the immigration rules and the Home Office has granted them leave. I cannot overemphasise the hurdles that people from these countries will have already had to overcome to get to this stage. It is simply not possible to abuse this system.

The next point to understand is that a person does not need to hold refugee leave to actually be a refugee. I personally know people who have been in the UK on other visas and who are unquestionably refugees in fact. They just, understandably, do not want to go through the utterly degrading and dehumanising process that is the UK’s asylum system while they have any other option possibly available to them.

So there will be many people who are refugees but are in the UK holding a different form of leave. As the UK has made it more and more difficult for people in work and study routes to navigate a path to settlement in the UK, more refugees will be pushed out of those routes and into the asylum system, usually once they reach the end of their current leave and realise that they have no alternative if they want to remain safe. Again, this is something they are perfectly entitled to do and the UK has an obligation to recognise and grant protection to people who are refugees.

The grant rate for Sudanese people claiming asylum is 94% and for Myanmar it is 83%. I am not going to get into the Afghan grant rate because it has been artificially pushed down by the Home Office clearly taking a policy decision to refuse most claims, and this will ultimately be resolved by the tribunals but it means the data is very unreliable at the moment.

For Cameroon the grant rate is 48% for general asylum claims, however for the last year that the Home Office published data, 2023, there were 40 asylum claims from Cameroonians based on sexual orientation that were decided, and 39 of those were grants – a grant rate of 98%. This decision will disproportionately affect queer Cameroonian refugees.

Conclusion

The Home Office makes reference to 190,000 visas having been granted in humanitarian routes in 2025, presumably in an attempt to demonstrate some semblance of humanity. The bulk of this figure refers to the extensions of leave granted to Ukrainians who have been in the UK for years. The real resettlement figure for 2025 is 6,417.

The promise of new safe routes, repeated with this announcement, is similarly meaningless given the Home Secretary has explicitly tied this to an undefined concept of “order being restored to the asylum system”.

What is actually being done here is the removal of more “safe and legal” routes which is an incredibly effective way of ensuring that people who want to claim asylum in the UK will do so via a Channel crossing.