Cleverly Bullish as Restrictions on Legal Migrants Bringing in Dependants Take Effect

Home Secretary James Cleverly has predicted levels of legal migration will begin to fall as new visa rules came into force which—from Jan. 1, 2024—forbid international students from bringing dependants like children or elderly relatives with them. The ban affects everyone except those enrolling on postgraduate research courses, such as PhDs, and those whose courses are on government funded scholarships.

In the year ending September 2023, a total of 152,980 visas were issued to dependants of international students, many of whom are children who are entitled to free education while in the UK. His predecessor Suella Braverman announced the move in May, shortly before figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) showed net legal migration was running at 672,000 per year.

Immigration is set to be a major battleground at the general election later this year and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pledged that, as well as pushing through legislation in Parliament to force through the Rwanda policy, he will take tough measures to reduce legal migration. On Monday the Home Office also published provisional figures for the number of illegal immigrants who crossed the English Channel in 2023.

The figure stood at 29,437, down from the record of 45,774 arrivals in 2022. In December the ONS revised its net migration figures and said 745,000 more people had entered the UK legally than had left the country, in the year to December 2022. Reacting to those figures, Mr. Cleverly announced several measures which he said would reduced net migration by 300,000 a year.

One of the measures was to increase the minimum salary needed in order to bring a foreign spouse to the UK. It was originally raised from £18,600 to £38,700 but ministers later said it would go up instead to £29,000 and then be increased in “incremental stages” until spring 2025. Immigration minister Tom Pursglove said: “Our world leading universities rightly attract some of the brightest students from around the world to the UK.

But we have seen a surge in the number of dependants being brought by students, which is contributing to unsustainable levels of migration.” Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said: “Labour supports these restrictions on dependants for overseas students on shorter courses. However, this is nothing more than a sticking plaster.” “The Tories’ complete failure to tackle skills and labour market problems is undermining growth as well as increasing migration,” she added..