Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what proportion of Palestinians studying at UK universities have subsequently submitted an asylum application.

The Home Office publishes data on asylum in the ‘Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on the number of asylum claims where the latest leave held prior to claim was a study visa, broken down by nationality, is published in table Asy_D01a of the ‘Asylum claims and initial decisions datasets’. The number of student entry clearance visas issued, broken down by nationality, is published in table Vis_D02 of the 'Entry clearance visas datasets'.

Please note that there can be a delay between visa issue and asylum claim so time periods may not be directly comparable. Furthermore, the latest leave held prior to an asylum claim may have expired and/or may not be the visa that was originally used for entry. Therefore, although this data is indicative of volumes, we cannot calculate the proportion of UK university students that go on to claim asylum from published data.