It's about time.

Every Pakistani student wanting to come to Britain will face tough new tests after a pilot scheme found that as many as four in ten applicants may be bogus.

Home Office figures have revealed that thousands of student visa applicants cannot speak English, despite claiming they want to study here.

Home Secretary Theresa May has now decreed that anyone wanting to come to study in Britain from Pakistan must be interviewed by border agency officials before a visa is granted.

An estimated 10,000 students apply to come to the country from Pakistan every year.

Currently, if paper applications raise suspicions, applicants may be interviewed in their home country. Of these, around 20 per cent are rejected.

But a recent pilot scheme in which every applicant was required to have a face-to-face interview found that up to 43 per cent should be rejected. A senior Whitehall source said that by far the biggest reason for them being turned down was poor English language skills.

The pilots have now been extended to other 14 other countries including India, China, Bangladesh, Egypt, Sri Lanka and Nigeria.

The source said: ‘Britain is open for business to the best and brightest. But the message to bogus students is clear – you will be found out and you will be stopped from coming.’

A damning report last month by the National Audit Office found that a flawed immigration crackdown may have allowed up to 50,000 bogus students into Britain.

The NAO estimated that around one in six of student visas granted went to workers whose intention was to take jobs.

Students make up two-thirds of the migrants coming to the UK from outside the EU.

Immigration minister Damian Green has said widespread abuse of the student visa system, the most common way for migrants from outside the EU to get into the UK, had gone on for too long.

Not Thai related. Closed

N.B. The above post, apart from the first line, is a copy and paste from The Daily Mail.

It is extremely poor netiquette, and possibly a breach of copyright, to do this without acknowledging and linking to the source.