IT’S the backdoor method of getting a UK passport without risking your neck on a cross-Channel dinghy.
First, convince the Home Office to issue you with a student or work visa, then jump on a plane and when you land here, make a claim for asylum.
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Back in March, I wrote on these very pages demanding a crackdown on these “regular arrivals”, some of whom are gaming the system.
Well, two months on and the Government seems to have listened.
The Home Office is pledging to restrict work and study visas for people from countries including Pakistan, Nigeria and Sri Lanka, who are most likely to overstay and claim asylum.
A tougher regime can’t be implemented soon enough, and it must be watertight so immigration lawyers aren’t able to wreck it.
Unlike returning migrants to France, this is a policy very much in Britain’s own hands.
Although the media and political focus is on the small boats, more asylum claims come from legitimate visa holders.
Last year 40,000 asylum claims were made by people with a UK visa — 37 per cent of the total — while just over 35,000 asylum applications came from migrants who crossed from France on dinghies.
Taxpayers may be surprised to learn that 10,000 people who arrived with Home Office-stamped UK visas were being housed in hotels or similar accommodation last year, after claiming asylum.
Foreign students, to get a visa, need to prove they have enough money of their own to support and accommodate themselves.
They also need to show that they intend to return home afterwards.
So something is clearly going badly wrong — and the British public is footing the bill.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper now wants to bar visa holders from being housed in hotels.
During my 40 years at the Home Office — retiring as Director General of the UK Border Force in 2013 — I witnessed the visa application process first hand.
Acting as a visa officer in Bangladesh, I had to weed out the bogus claims from those who wanted to better themselves with a qualification at a British college.
Sometimes, it wasn’t easy. There are those who appear legitimate — with their paperwork in order — but are in fact gaming the system.
Someone would come in with a bank statement showing they had £30,000 in their account.
Our people could phone their bank and they would say it’s true.
Then you’d hear the applicant had turned up at a soup kitchen in the UK with no money, saying they were destitute.
The would-be “students” — or organised criminals — pass the £30,000 from one applicant to another.
Some crooked colleges in the UK are also in on the scam, providing proof of enrolment for bogus students.
‘GENUINE FROM BOGUS’
The UK visa-vetting process needs to be tougher, so that we don’t fall for any of these tricks.
When I became Head of the Immigration Service (Ports) Directorate under the Tony Blair government, I was charged with reducing asylum intake.
This meant putting real pressure on UK visa posts to make sure they were doing their jobs properly, and refusing visas where necessary.
Visa applicants are fingerprinted and photographed when they make their applications.
So, when they then apply for asylum the Home Office knows who they are, what country they are from and why they came to Britain.
Now, some people will say, “Getting a student visa was the only way I could get to the UK, to then claim asylum for the persecution that I’m suffering in my homeland”.
The visa rules aren’t, however, there to facilitate asylum claims but to sift genuine applicants from bogus ones.
In my day, visa applicants were interviewed and had their documents thoroughly assessed by experts with local knowledge gained by living abroad.
But nowadays, applications are often assessed remotely, online, by an assortment of lower-grade staff, led by managers with limited experience of immigration fraud.
‘FAIR BUT TOUGH’
A weak visa system is easily gamed by bogus asylum seekers looking for an easy route into Britain.
And once someone is in the asylum system, it’s very difficult to deport them.
Lawyers can launch seemingly endless appeals and weaponise the European Convention on Human Rights.
Recent cases include an Albanian criminal who avoided deportation after claiming his son doesn’t like foreign chicken nuggets.
Then there was the Pakistani paedophile who was jailed for child sex offences but wasn’t booted out of Britain because it would be “unduly harsh” on his own kids.
Last year 108,000 people claimed asylum in Britain — the highest since records began in 1979.
Of those, more than 10,500 came from Pakistan, one of the countries that will be targeted in the proposed crackdown.
Despite cancelling the Rwanda scheme, Sir Keir Starmer says he wants to reduce both legal and illegal immigration.
Well, returning to a thorough, fair but tough visa regime will help on both counts.
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