The United Kingdom is considering tightening its rules on how many relatives migrants can be allowed to bring into the country.
According to the U.K authority, it disclosed that out of all the migrants in the country, Nigerian migrants bring in the most relatives.
A report disclosed that Nigeria and India have so far emerged as the countries with the highest number of students bringing their relatives to the United Kingdom.
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This is coming after Home Office immigration figures showed a startling inconsistency across different nationalities coming to the UK to work and study.
The report shows that Nigerians accounted for 40% of all dependants who accompanied foreign students in the 12 months to June despite Nigerian students making up just 7% of all foreign students during the period.
Some 34,000 Nigerians were given study visas in the UK, bringing with them a total of 31,898 dependants. A similar ratio was recorded for work visas, with 8,972 Nigerians issued with one in the 12 months to June bringing with them 8,576 dependants.
By comparison, the figures show that 93,049 Indian students who came to the UK last year brought with them 24,916 dependants, while 114,837 Chinese students came to Britain with 401 dependants.
British statistics show that in 2019 the year before Covid struck, about 14,000 UK study and work visas were issued to Nigerian nationals. That number, which includes dependents, almost quadrupled in 2021.
“There were 117,965 grants to Indian nationals in the year ending June 2022, an increase of 80,569 (+215%) compared to 2019. Chinese nationals were the second most common nationality granted Sponsored study visas in the year ending June 2022, with 115,056 visas granted, 4% lower than the number seen in 2019 (119,825).”
“In the other top 5 nationalities, Nigerian nationals saw the largest relative increase in Sponsored Study grants compared with 2019, increasing by 57,545 (+686%) to a record high of 65,929, making them the third largest nationality group in the latest year,” the U.K Home office said.
The Home Office disclosed that this is the highest on record in their time series, with the substantial increase representing both recovery from lower numbers during the Covid-19 pandemic but also an increase in the pre-pandemic period.
According to the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the number of international migrants from Nigeria in 2020, was 1.7 million up from 990,000 a decade earlier.
Nigeria accounting for the highest number of dependants in the U.K doesn’t come as a surprise at all, as Nigerian citizens continue to migrate out of the country in droves.
Nigeria is currently witnessing a massive brain drain, as most of its skilled workers and experts in different sectors have migrated to Europe in search of greener pastures.
This increase in migration has been attributed to the myriad of problems ravaging the country, with problems such as Insecurity, Unemployment, Devaluation of currency, poor infrastructure, etc all of which have forced its citizens to ‘Japa’.