Migrants Overstaying Visas Account for Over a Third of Asylum Claims

Migrants who have overstayed their visas account for nearly 40 per cent of all asylum claimants, the Home Office has revealed.

Some 40,000 foreign nationals who came as overseas students, migrant workers or visitors last year sought asylum, raising fears that visas are being exploited as a backdoor route to permanent residency in the UK.

Visas grant permission to stay in the UK for a set period, often for no more than a year. But by claiming asylum, applicants can remain in the country indefinitely because the Home Office faces huge obstacles to deporting them, including human rights laws.

Visa overstayers now represent the biggest group of asylum claimants amongst the 108,000 who sought to stay in the UK last year. The numbers have more than doubled from less than 20,000 in only a year.

They now outnumber the 35,000 migrants who crossed the Channel on small boats to claim asylum and of some 33,000 further migrants who entered the UK via lorries, planes or other routes.

Of the 40,000 visa overstayers claiming asylum, 10,000 had lived in taxpayer-funded hotels or other state-backed accommodation despite entering the UK on the basis they would earn enough as workers to live without needing benefits, or as students with enough money to cover their tuition and living costs.

Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, has ordered officials to investigate whether visas are being exploited as a backdoor route to the UK and to check the migrants’ eligibility for asylum accommodation when they previously claimed they would not be a burden on the UK state.

“One of the things that became clear as we examined this really rather chaotic system that we inherited is that we have people who are in the asylum accommodation system who arrived in the UK on a student visa or a work visa, and who only claimed asylum at the end of their visa,” Ms Cooper said.

“They have gone into the asylum accommodation system even though when they arrived in the country, they said they had the funding to support themselves.”

The Home Secretary also confirmed she is considering restricting illegal migrants, including visa overstayers, from exploiting Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights to block their deportations.

Article 8, which protects rights to a family life, has been used by failed asylum seekers to prevent their removal as well as to bring relatives to the UK on the basis that it is a breach of their human rights to split up a family.

Ms Cooper said her review aimed to ensure the asylum system worked as Parliament intended it to do so and that there was a “proper sense of control in the system”.

The Home Office data showed that of the 40,000 visa overstayers seeking asylum, the biggest proportion – 40 per cent or 16,000 – had come to the UK on a study visa, including some who had applied for a graduate visa after studying for their first degree in the UK.

Some 29 per cent or 11,500 had a work visa. The standard skilled visa minimum salary is £38,700 while students have to show they have the £25,000 to £35,000 that they need to cover living and tuition costs.

An investigation by the National Audit Office, the spending watchdog, suggested there had been a 100-fold increase in migrants with skilled-worker visas claiming asylum in the UK. From just 53 asylum claims in 2022, it had risen to 5,300 in the first 10 months of 2024.

Of those asylum seekers who had originally entered on a visa and were living in asylum hotels or other state-funded accommodation, the most common nationalities were from the Commonwealth countries of Pakistan, Nigeria and Sri Lanka.

The Home Office estimated that more than 25,000 foreign nationals who entered on a visa had been provided with state-funded accommodation between 2022 and 2024.

More than 38,000 migrants are in hotels, up 8,000 since Labour came to power, costing the Home Office as much as £5 million a day. A further 65,707 are in dispersal accommodation.

Enver Solomon, the Refugee Council’s chief executive, said: “It’s essential the Government works quickly and fairly to determine who is a refugee and who has no right to stay here. This is the most cost-effective way of dealing with asylum applications, as well as the most humane.

“As the Home Office data shows, people can claim asylum having come to the UK on a visa when their home countries become suddenly unsafe. We know from the experiences of the refugees we support that the level of risk of a country can change rapidly. People can no longer return home and have no choice but to seek safety here.

“This is by no means the case for all asylum applications. Many people make applications as soon as they reach safety on UK soil, having been forced from their homes on desperate journeys through no fault of their own.”