Steve Moxon blog

Proving the continued hopelessness of the UK immigration system, the Government today concedes that its student visa system is hopeless.

Why has it taken 13 years to finally admit this?

I exposed it as a complete farce in early 2004, when it was all too obvious that most applications were fraudulent.

What have they done since then? Nothing. Just the 100% spin of introducing a 'points' system.

This was not to change anything at all about the administration of visa applications. All they did was fuse together the Managed Migration and Work Permits UK sub-departments and carry on as before. Nobody who wasn't obliged to fulfil any work criteria before the advent of the 'points system' was so obliged afterwards.

So it is that to be entitled to a student visa, the '40 points' you need comprises a letter from an educational institution saying you're applying for a course (30 'points'), and some bank statements that purport to show you have some money (10 'points'). It is nothing to do with work. And of course, the letter can be from one of the hundreds of sham colleges or a simple forgery.

On this basis you can come in and be a student and work at the same time; and even if you're here only for a 15-hours-per-week English language course, you can bring in your dependants (or those you so purport to be), and they too can work! And not part-time but full time! The student him/herself is supposed to work only part-time (20 hours), but nobody ever checks.

The changes announced today include that a student will be allowed to work only 10 hours a week. Big deal! Given that nobody checks anyway, then there's no difference between being allowed to work 10 or 20 hours. Your education establishment will have to be one that appears on a new list. This will be the third generation of the Home Office's inept listing of supposedly bona fide colleges. There was such a list when I worked in Managed Migration. Then as now, it is mainly comprised of bogus colleges, not the bona fide ones which should be all that there are on the list. A new list will be no different to its two predecessors, because staff are never properly allocated to run checks, or checks that are in any way sufficiently robust. From this likely bogus college you will have to obtain not a letter stating you've applied, but that you've been accepted on to a course. Another big deal not. It makes no odds to the bogus college or the forger.

The changes that betray a real admission that the system is hopeless are that unless you're doing a degree-level course then dependants will no longer be allowed [well why was this ever allowed?!]; and that you have to speak English to just below GCSE level. But these measures address only a small portion of the massive abuse and will have little impact. As ever, measures are easy to get round. We know that there are considerably more visas granted to supposed degree-level students than the university admissions systems shows are actually here; so it's clearly quite easy to defraud the system re higher-level courses. As for English certificates: anyone can send in a bogus certificate and come here anyway. The English language test is designed to sweep away the sham beginner English courses that are (in a manner of speaking) everywhere, but this will just lead to more sham advanced and intermediate English courses.

The massive fraud will continue in this as in all avenues of migration to Britain, until there is the political will to address it. There is no sign of this. It has served the interests of a political class which seeks revenge on the mass of ordinary people for not behaving according to the prescription and prediction of the 'progessive project' (neo-Marxist rhetoric). That is what has produced the myriad manifestations of 'political correctness', not least the deliberate near complete compromising of our borders so that the UK citizenship can be diluted by an influx of a new mass of people imagined to be free of any resistance to the 'progressive project'. And the less they have in common culturally with the indigenous populace, so much the more likely [from the weird viewpoint of the 'political-correctness' fascism (for that is what it is) of the political-class] as not possessing 'counter-revolutionary' attitudes. Bizarre as this 'thinking' certainly is, it's an all too real major aspect of the times in which we live.