32,000 international students overstay UK visas

United Kingdom, 9th January: A UK think-tank has warned that around tens of thousands of international students coming to the UK on UK student visas every year are costing around £500 million to the nation.

As per the report by the Migrationwatch, the UK has around 32,000 international students overstaying their UK student visas. These figures are revealed by the UK Home Office data, the report maintains.

Majority of international students coming to the UK have the aim of staying there permanently by getting some work in the UK and never attend any college or institute.

And this has resulted in a huge unemployment in the UK as these migrants coming to the UK take jobs which would otherwise had been taken by the UK workers. The report maintains that the UK government has to pay huge money in terms of unemployment benefits apart from education and health costs and the economy also loses tax revenue when the migrant students get employed in the UK.

Andrew Green, chairman of the Migrationwatch, states that most of the foreign students on the UK study visas work illegally and that seems to the root cause of the problems for the UK economy.

Moreover, this also results in keeping the wages down in the UK and allows the UK employers to pose tough competition for the fair employers giving fair wages to the workers.

The UK has around 2.5 million people without having jobs and it is this unemployed UK population that expects some action from the UK government on the fake or bogus international students grabbing jobs that should have gone to the former.

Hence, the nation is urging for a significant reduction in the number of UK visas issued to foreign students wanting to study in the UK. The UK immigration minister Damian Green has already hinted at introducing tougher visa rules for those seeking to come to the UK for studying under-graduate courses in a bid to crackdown on increasing abuse of UK student visa rules.

The immigration minister has also reiterated to make sure that those coming to the UK do not misuse this visa for gaining employment here and they are genuine.