A cap on the number of children foreign students can bring into the country is being considered by ministers as they look for ways to tackle “bad migration”.
They are concerned that some overseas students bring as many as six dependents with them and suspect that some are using it as a back door to settling here permanently.
Ministers are understood to be looking at ways to tighten the rules, which allow students to bring in a spouse and any dependent children, as long as they can support themselves.
Sources said that the cap was “potentially” one solution, although a final decision was yet to be made.
Suella Braverman, the home secretary, and Nadhim Zahawi, the Cabinet Office minister, are said to be discussing plans to cut the number of dependents, in the latest sign of tension at the heart of the government over migration policy.
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While Liz Truss is considering liberalising some forms of immigration in an attempt to boost growth, last week insisted that she still wants to cut net migration to below 100,000, less than half the present level.
Zahawi said today that the government wanted to “bear down on bad migration”, citing international students as an area of concern.
“International students are . . . a really positive thing for our universities, for our communities,” he told Sky News.
“But if you look at the number of dependents that come with international students, you’d expect most international students may bring one dependent, or if they are doing a PhD they might bring their wife and maybe a child. There are some people who are coming to study in the UK who are bringing five, six more people with them. Is that right? No.”
Zahawi said “we have to make sure that they’re coming to legitimately study here”, arguing it was “the right thing to do, to look at bearing down on abuse of a system”.
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Ministers believe that students from some countries are more likely to bring a large number of dependents, while similar students from other countries bring only one or two, seeing it as a sign that in some places a dependent visa is thought of as the easiest way into Britain.
But Zahawi suggested that rules could be relaxed to make it easier for skilled workers to come to Britain. “Look at gigabit broadband. We need more engineers who can splice the actual technology together to deliver gigabit broadband. If we need another 200 or 300 engineers to come in to be able to do that at pace, I think people will support that,” he said.
He denied splits with Braverman on the issue, saying that he held weekly meetings with her to discuss both legal and illegal immigration, which he insisted the government “want to stamp out”.
Accepting that voters would judge the government on whether they followed through, Zahawi said that “time is against us, delay is our enemy. We have to move at pace to deliver this stuff”.
Nadine Dorries, the Brexit-backing former culture secretary, also urged Braverman to loosen the rules on telecoms workers. “We need right now . . . 3,000 Spanish telecommunications engineers who are in Spain. We need Suella to say they don’t need the English language test to have a short-term, six-month, nine-month visa, to come here and help with [gigabit] rollout programme,” she told the BBC.
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“That would get us from 70 per cent gigabyte rollout to 95 per cent. That is an agenda for growth.”
But at fringe events at the Conservative Party conference last month, Braverman said it was her “ultimate aspiration” to get net migration back to the “tens of thousands”, despite a similar broken promise by David Cameron.
Net migration stands at 239,000 a year, after Boris Johnson ditched Cameron’s target of getting it below 100,000 in 2019.
Braverman also provoked a row with universities by saying: “I think we have got to definitely substantially reduce the number of students, the number of work visas and in particular the number of dependants on those sorts of visas.”
Despite a government policy to increase the number of foreign students, a key export industry for Britain, Braverman added that “we have too many students coming into this country who are propping up, frankly, substandard courses in inadequate institutions”.
