The rising cases of breaching norms of immigration laws by overseas students have made the British authority introducing a new stricter point in visa regulations, especially targeting South Asian and African students.
Since last few years, the number of Indian students to Britain has seen an enormous rise. About 29,000 Indian students had received visas in 2008, a growth of 30% from 2007. Many of them obtained visas from bogus colleges and institutes that raised chances of entering as non-students by violating norms of immigration system.
To counter such abuses of law, the British government has introduced a stringent point based Tier 4 visas for Indian and non-European students.
Under the new visa rules, students will have to ensure about an unconditional offer from a licensed institute and have sufficient ‘cash’ amount for studying including course fee, study materials and living costs.
Furthermore, to counter those fake institutes, UK immigration office has made it mandatory for all schools and colleges offering visas to overseas students to register themselves with the UK Border Agency – the federal agency of UK that controls the visa, passport, customs and internal immigration, including asylum management.
There are more than 2,100 universities, independent schools and colleges registered as licensed sponsors and they are responsible for ensuring that international students comply with the conditions of their visas while they are in the UK.
Several Indian and non-European countries have protested against the new rules of Visa, as according to them the new visa rules have been made for checking the students of the Indian subcontinents and African students as often they do not have sufficient savings and part-time work to support their studies.
But, on the contrary, the UK Border Agency claimed that the new system would make the visa process simpler, more objective and more transparent; and provide the tool to agency to distinguish between ‘real’ student and the ‘fake’ student. Moreover, it would be easy to crack down the bogus colleges too.
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