Indian skilled workers, medics, students dominate UK visa tally

LONDON: Indian skilled workers, medical professionals and students held on to their domination in the United Kingdom’s visa tally over the past year, according to official immigration statistics released here on Thursday.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) data collated by the UK Home Office for the year ending September 2023 shows that Indian nationals topped not only the skilled worker visa route but also the health and care visa route. In the students’ visa category, Indian nationals continued to represent the largest group of students granted leave to remain on the relatively new post-study graduate visa route, representing 43 per cent of grants.

"While ‘skilled worker’ visas have only seen a modest rise in the past year (+9%), ‘skilled worker–health and care’ visa grants have more than doubled (+135%) to 143,990. Indian (38,866), Nigerian (26,715), and Zimbabwean (21,130) nationals saw the largest increases on this visa compared with the previous year,” the Home Office analysis notes.

While the health and care visa figures mark a 76% rise in Indian applicants, the Skilled Worker route saw a small decline of 11 per cent to drop from 20,360 visas in the year ending September 2022 to 18,107 in the year ending this September. “There were 133,237 sponsored study visa grants to Indian nationals in (the) year ending September 2023, a small increase of 5,804 (+5%) compared to the year ending September 2022, but their number is now nearly five times higher than in the year ending September 2019.

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Indian nationals accounted for over one-quarter (27%) of all sponsored study grants to main applicants in the latest year,” the analysis notes. Indian nationals also continued to account for the highest proportion (27%) of tourist ‘Visitor’ visas granted, followed by Chinese (19 per cent) and Turkish nationals (6 per cent).