Mrs May announced tighter rules for visa applicants including English language requirements, evidence of student funding, and stricter rules for institutions sponsoring applicants.
She expects these rules will cut student visas by more than 25 per cent. The Home Office granted 362,015 student visas between June 2009 and June 2010, an increase of 35 per cent on the previous year.
Mrs May said in a speech to Parliament: “Under the previous government the student visa system became the symbol of a broken and abused immigration system. Labour claimed that it had capped unskilled immigration at zero, but it was happy just to sit back and watch as unskilled migrants abused the student route to come here.
“We had too many people coming here to work and not to study, we had too many foreign graduates staying on in the UK to work in unskilled jobs, and we had too many institutions selling immigration, not education.”
In February 2010, a BBC investigation exposed fraud in the student visa system. BBC reporters posing as illegal immigrants were able to buy two visa letters from private colleges accredited by the Home Office for £200 and £150. A visa letter, alongside a bank account with several thousand pounds, is sufficient to obtain a student visa.
Visa letters are issued by a wide range of institutions from universities to small private colleges.
The Home Office will now require institutions that issue visa letters to be accredited by either Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education inspection body) or its devolved equivalents. It will also require students to achieve a minimum level in English. In order to get a visa, those outside of universities will have to present a test certificate from an independent test provider.
UK Border Agency Officers will be able to refuse a migrant who cannot speak without an interpreter.
Mrs May described how some colleges are simply fronts for immigration scams or offer very low quality services. “One institution has an intake of 90 per cent international students and asks only for GCSE-level qualifications to do a supposedly degree-level course. Another college’s own sales agent actually helped a student to cheat in their entry exam,” she said.
“We want to attract only the best and the brightest to Britain. We want high-quality international students to come here, we want them to study at genuine institutions whose primary purpose is providing a first-class education, and we want the best of them – and only the best of them – to stay on and work here after their studies are complete. That is exactly what we are doing across all the immigration routes: tightening up the system, tackling the abuse and supporting only the most economically beneficial migrants.”
Yvette Copper, Labour’s shadow home secretary, warned that the measures could harm the higher education sector. She told Parliament that the changes risked the loss of nearly 12,000 jobs in education and another 12,000 in the rest of the economy.
“Some of the damage has already been done,” she said. “Anecdotally, some universities are already noticing a significant drop in applications from foreign students as a result of the signals being sent out by the Home Secretary’s consultation. Does she believe that the 80,000 drop in student visas to which she has referred will consist entirely of visas for bogus students on bogus courses, or does she believe that some legitimate students, too, will be put off as a result of the measures that she has announced?”
Mrs May also announced plans to cut net migration from hundreds of thousands per year down to tens of thousands.
She said later in the year she would set out plans to break the link between temporary migration and permanent settlement, and look into possible changes to the family migration route.
“I will be bringing forward proposals to tackle sham marriages and other abuse, promote integration and reduce the burdens on the British taxpayer. We aim to reduce net migration from the hundreds of thousands back down to the tens of thousand,” she said.
