In recent years, the refusal rates for UK visit visas have climbed astronomically. With over 260,000 visit visas rejected in 2018, critics are accusing the Home Office of being unjustly restrictive in the applications which they accept.
Hostile environment
Before the ‘hostile environment’ of Theresa May’s Home Office in 2010, the refusal rate for visit visa applications from Africa was 14% which, by only 2017, had doubled to 28% while rejections for other applicants from around the world remained at an average level of around 16%.
In fact, one inquiry uncovered the rejection rate for Africans is twice as high as those applying from elsewhere, prompting allegations of the disproportionate reject of and racial prejudice towards African nationals.
Academics being targeted?
Academics in particular are facing worryingly high rejection rates. Due to the difficulties surrounding the application process, Africa’s best and brightest are left as outcasts of the UK’s many conferences and summits.
This April showed a shockingly low turnout for the LSE Africa Summit in which only 1 of 25 researchers from Africa managed to secure a visa to attend, echoing that to past events in which 17 and 7 delegates were unable to attend the European Conference of African Studies and the World Community Development Conference due to visit visa complications. Tim Allen, director of the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa, expressed his disdain for the situation: “People feel demeaned and abused”, he said, “they experience it as racism”.
A letter posted in the Observer penned by 70 of the UK’s senior academics warned that the current state of affairs is “undermining ‘Global Britain’s’ reputation as well as efforts to tackle global challenges”, highlighting the urgent need for a change to these barriers against cultural and intellectual exchange in the UK. The World Health Organisation (WHO) echoed this view last year in their warning that the UK’s immigration system is ‘closing the door’ on academic cooperation, though as of yet no action has been taken to address these troubling concerns.
Little reason other than racial?
The Home Office has continued to fuel suspicions that it is working with racial bias in its common belief that applicants are seeking permanent and illegal residence within the UK – a “ludicrous” suggestion, according to Dundee West MP, Chris Law, as the professional academics being refused entry “are [not] going to abandon their life’s work, their jobs, and their families”. To make matters worse, one has no right to appeal a visitor visa unless on human rights grounds – such as to visit close family.
The absurdity of some individual rejections is alarming and has prompted critics to accuse the Government of being ‘institutionally racist’. Foday Karama, a social anthropologist who was hoping to attend an Ebola workshop funded by the Wellcome Trust, was denied a visit visa for having “not proved [he] was a researcher” – despite supplying extended correspondence between himself, his university and those inviting him to the UK. Brenda Ireo, a social worker from Uganda, encountered similar issues with her application after being denied entry for not having children in her home country to return to.
Lost opportunities
The reputation of ‘Global Britain’ is already in steep decline, with the UNESCO chair in refugee integration, Professor Alison Phipps, refusing to host further conferences in the UK considering the ‘de-facto travel ban’ in place today. Moreover, LSE conferences are now being hosted in Belgium, and invitations to UK-based events are being largely rejected by African academics to save them the abject humiliation of being refused which can also severely impact their careers and limit further opportunities.
As current plans stand, the future of international research in Britain is looking only to deteriorate further: after 2021, all applicants from the EU will be subject to the same application process – and, unfortunately, the same nonsensical and discriminatory barriers against progress. Alongside the Windrush Scandal and the other failures of the Home Office to act with compassion and sound-judgement, the outrage surrounding visit visas is yet 
another tarnish on this Government’s record.
Without strong and targeted opposition to all these issues, the future of the UK as a world-leader in cultural and intellectual exchange appears as nothing short of a pipe-dream; the isolationist anti-paradise of a post-Brexit Britain will be a bleak and boring place when contrasted with the conference halls of Ghent, buzzing with the sound of Africa’s most well-respected scholars.
Harry Sanders | Immigration Advice Service | mail me |
