Ben Moller, Britain’s Deputy High Commissioner to India, opened with a positive case for the bilateral relationship at the Cambridge India Business Dialogue late last month.
Pointing to UK campus expansions across India and noting that British-educated Indians were statistically more likely to invest in the UK, he framed student mobility as a long-term economic pipeline, a theme echoed by fellow speakers Lord Karan Bilimoria and ICICI Bank CEO Raghav Singhal.
But that warmth existed alongside an insistence on separating “legal” from “illegal” migration. The UK processes “a huge number of visas” from India, he said, and while “legal migration is fantastic and promotes growth,” both governments were working closely together on irregular arrivals.
He drew an explicit line: “More of the right people and less of the wrong people.” It’s a framing that sits uneasily alongside a 30% fall in UK study visa applications in Q1 2026 and a sector asking which signals to believe.
When I questioned him on whether that framing was producing unintended consequences for international students, specifically the political discourse around the Graduate Route visa, his response was measured. “We are trying to find the right balance,” he said, acknowledging a brief dip in visa numbers following the change in government, but arguing the UK was still successfully attracting students. Migration, he added, “is a very important part of the political discourse and rightly so”.
It was a careful answer. Whether it was a sufficient one is harder to say.
The numbers tell a more turbulent story
Figures reported by The PIE News showed Indian students falling from nearly 140,000 in 2022/23 to 111,329 in 2023/24, a decline of over 20%. A partial recovery followed, with a 31% increase in Indian student visa grants in Q1 2025 year-on-year, but a Q4 2025 grant rate of 85% complicate any claim of stability. Germany, Australia, and New Zealand have all recorded rising Indian student interest in the same period.
The Graduate Route sits at the centre of this volatility. Its reintroduction in 2021 drove the surge in Indian enrolments that saw Indian students overtake Chinese nationals as the UK’s largest international cohort. The 2025 immigration white paper proposed cutting its duration from two years to 18 months, a change confirmed in March 2026 and effective from January 2027.
HEPI has flagged this as a primary concern, noting that post-study work rights are a significant driver of where students choose to study. Indian nationals still received 95,231 sponsored study visas in the year ending December 2025, 23% of the total, and led Graduate Route extensions with 90,153 granted. The pipeline is real. The question is whether policy is working with or against it.
India’s High Commissioner to the UK, Periasamy Kumaran, added that overt activism in the field of student immigration advocacy risked producing further backlash, and that the balance would sort itself out as part of a natural cycle, the UK’s need for innovation would inevitably pull Indian students back in.
The logic has some basis, but it sets aside the burden students carry in the meantime. A prospective master’s student from Chennai weighing a September 2026 application cannot wait for market equilibrium. She is already factoring in a shorter Graduate Route, higher maintenance fund requirements, rising tuition fees, and a securitised political climate.
Diplomacy and the binary problem
Moller’s distinction between legal and illegal migration is reasonable as far as it goes. Irregular migration routes, small boat crossings, fraudulent documentation, visa overstays – all of them represent a genuine policy challenge, and governments have a legitimate interest in addressing them. But the language of “right” and “wrong” people carries implications that often leads to conflation in public discourse.
The language of “right” and “wrong” people carries implications that often leads to conflation in public discourse
Asylum seekers, refugees, and those arriving via refugee family reunion routes made up around 16% of total UK immigration in 2025. Of the 100,625 people who claimed asylum that year, approximately 39% had arrived legally before making a claim. The top nationalities claiming asylum via small boat crossings are predominantly people fleeing documented conflict, whose claims sit squarely within the Refugee Convention.
An Eritrean escaping conscription into an authoritarian military who crosses the Channel in a dinghy is, under this framing, a “wrong” kind of arrival. The binary does not accommodate these cases cleanly and immigration systems, by their nature, are full of them.
The problem is not that the legal-illegal distinction is wrong. It is that once “right” and “wrong” enter the political discourse, they don’t stay calibrated. They travel into tabloid coverage, into the perceptions of parents and agents in Mumbai and Chennai, and into the enrolment decisions of students who register tone as readily as policy. The 2023 dependant ban illustrates this: aimed at misuse of the student route, it collapsed the dependant-to-student ratio from six per 20 to one per 20 by September 2025, with documented collateral effects on legitimate student enrolment.
The wider picture for UK higher education is not comfortable.
Postgraduate enrolments are falling; English universities face a proposed £925-per-student levy; and a sector positioned as both economic export and soft-power instrument of the UK-India relationship is asking which set of signals represents the real policy direction.
The UK-India CETA, signed in July 2025 and projected to add £25.5 billion annually to bilateral trade, represents a genuine commitment. So does the expanding network of UK campuses opening across India.
The relationship has rarely looked stronger on paper, and there is an appetite on both sides to keep building it. Whether the balance Moller described can be found and what it costs in the meantime for students remains unanswered.
