Immigration stations

Student visas, UKRI inflation woes and scrutiny of the OfS

There is a lot of news breaking this morning, but we must once again begin the Playbook with one eye focused on the Office for National Statistics and its Thursday release of UK net migration data.

Playbook readers are now well versed in the rhetoric surrounding what will potentially be a difficult dataset for a government that has long made immigration central to its messaging. It was something of an open secret that the Migration Advisory Committee’s “rapid review” of the graduate route visa, ordered by the Home Office in March and delivered last week, seemed to have been commissioned in the hope that it would provide the government with justification for clamping down on the post-study rights of international students.