Nigel Farage MEP backs Global Visas

The UK Independence party has added its weight behind a story we ran about loop-holes in the current UK student visa system. Colleges and visitors posing as students are exploiting the current rules in place for their own purposes.

The story was first brought to light by the BBC’s Donal Macintyre. The fact that rules governing the issue of these UK visas were only changed last year seems to be making no difference.

We have a real problem in this country of people saying they are here to study in order to gain a student visa; this is a known scam among certain visitors in order to gain entry into the country and then be given the right to remain for the duration of the course. We are not advocating that the whole system is corrupt, it is just a simple rule that colleges, and indeed students, should be penalised if they are found to have not been attending the course.

This problem is not a difficult one to police, and we thought on the face of it that the government had come up with a solution to the problem with the checks they have put into place.

However, this is not the case and we broke the story about colleges still taking advantage of the UK visa system on Wednesday.

An email we received from the offices’ of Nigel Farage of the UK Independence party agreed there was a problem;

“Thank you for your hard-hitting, and highly justified, criticism of the government’s procedures for verifying the status of students.

As though immigration-policy, as a whole, were not a noisome shambles, the government cannot even administer one of the few controls, which remain at its disposal.  This is surely too incompetent to be credible as a mere mistake, and the Conservatives have no solution either!”

So the problem with the current system has been highlighted, the question now is what does the government propose to do about it?