According to official immigration figures announced here on Thursday, Indian skilled workers, medical professionals, and students maintained their dominance in the UK’s visa count during the last year.
According to figures compiled by the UK Home Office from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for the fiscal year ending September 2023, Indian citizens topped not just the Skilled Worker visa route, but also the Health and Care Visa route.
Indian nationals continued to be the biggest group of students permitted to stay on the relatively new post-study Graduate visa option, accounting for 43 percent of awards.
“While ‘Skilled Worker’ visas have only seen a modest rise in the past year (+9 percent), ‘Skilled Worker – Health and Care’ visa grants have more than doubled (+135 percent) to 143,990. Indian (38,866), Nigerian (26,715), and Zimbabwean (21,130) nationals saw the largest increases on this visa compared with the previous year,” the Home Office analysis notes.
While the Health and Care visa numbers show a 76% increase in Indian applications, the Skilled Worker route had an 11% decrease, falling from 20,360 visas in the fiscal year ending September 2022 to 18,107 visas in the fiscal year ending September this year.
“There were 133,237 sponsored study visa grants to Indian nationals in (the) year ending September 2023, a small increase of 5,804 (+5 percent) compared to the year ending September 2022, but their number is now nearly five times higher than in the year ending September 2019. Indian nationals accounted for over one-quarter (27 percent) of all sponsored study grants to main applicants in the latest year,” the analysis notes.
Indian nationals continued to hold the biggest share (27%) of tourist ‘Visitor’ visas issued, followed by Chinese (19%) and Turkish nationals (6%).
Since a crackdown on abroad students bringing dependent family members to the country was announced earlier this year, the current numbers reveal that Indian nationals are not the top-ranking country in the category.
“There were 60,506 dependants of Nigerian nationals in the year ending September 2023, an increase of 59,079 compared to 2019, and 9,435 more visas issued than to main applicants in the same period. Indian nationals had the second highest number of dependants, increasing from 2,127 to 43,445 in the same time,” the analysis finds.
Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman informed the House of Commons in May that only overseas students enrolled in postgraduate research degrees would be permitted to bring family members, including children and elderly parents, as dependants.
Meanwhile, in the context of the India-UK Migration and Mobility Partnership, two-thirds (64%) of voluntary returns of unlawful migrants to the UK were Albanian, Indian, and Chinese nationals.
The Conservative Party-led UK government has pledged to reduce total migration numbers, and the most recent ONS data show a slight decrease.
The most recent ONS migration numbers for the year ending June 2023 indicate net migration to the UK of 672,000, down from 745,000 for the same time the previous year, which was revised higher by the ONS under the new methodology.
Outside the European Union (EU), the top five nationalities for immigration flows into the UK were Indian (253,000), Nigerian (141,000), Chinese (89,000), Pakistani (55,000), and Ukrainian (35,000).
“The latest numbers are higher than 12 months ago but are down slightly on our updated figures for (the) year ending December 2022. It is too early to say if this is the start of a new downward trend,” said Jay Lindop of the ONS Centre for International Migration.
“Before the pandemic, migration was relatively stable, but patterns and behaviors have been shifting considerably since then. More recently, we’re not only seeing more students arrive, but we can also see they’re staying for longer. More dependants of people with work and study visas have arrived too, and immigration is now being driven by non-EU arrivals,” she said.
