Sudan in the arithmetic of exclusion

Shabana Mahmood, the UK’s Home Secretary, announced on 4 March that the current UK government would no longer issue study visas to citizens of four countries: Sudan, Cameroon, Afghanistan, and Myanmar. The decision forms part of a broader attempt by the Labour government to address immigration, an issue that has long occupied a central place in British politics. Immigration policy was one of the key areas in which Labour criticised the previous Conservative government, accusing it of pursuing an approach that was both ineffective and, at times, inhumane.

During the election campaign, Labour positioned itself in opposition to policies such as the Rwanda scheme, introduced by the Conservative government, which proposed deporting certain asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing. The scheme attracted criticism from legal experts, humanitarian organisations, and the opposition, and it ultimately became entangled in legal disputes between the two governments after the Labour administration scrapped the agreement. In distancing himself from what many critics described as a harsh and historically racialised immigration framework, Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised a new direction. He pledged, in the labour manifesto, an immigration policy that would be “fair and properly managed.”

Yet the recent decision to suspend study visas for citizens of the four countries raises questions about whether that promise is being upheld. The policy took effect immediately, affecting Sudanese students who had already planned to begin their studies in the United Kingdom in the coming academic year. Among the four countries listed, Sudan’s inclusion has generated particular scrutiny. Although the measure is presented by the Labour government as an attempt to address the UK's immigration crisis, the justification provided by the Home Office reveals significant inconsistencies when examined more closely.

According to Mahmood’s statement, Sudanese nationals were included because some had sought to “exploit” the generosity of the British immigration system by claiming asylum after entering on study visas. However, the numbers cited by the Home Office tell a very different story. Applications for asylum by Sudanese nationals who initially entered the UK on study visas rose from 30 in 2021 to 120 in 2025. There are no zeros missing from these figures: thirty in 2021 and one hundred and twenty in 2025. Mahmood characterised this increase as a 300 percent rise. While mathematically accurate, the framing obscures the broader context in which these numbers exist.

During the same period, more than 350,000 asylum applications were filed in the United Kingdom overall. Within that larger system, the supposed “exploitation” attributed to Sudanese students becomes statistically negligible. Even if one counts dependents alongside the primary applicants, the total number of asylum claims originating from Sudanese students remains extremely small in proportion to the overall asylum caseload. By the Home Secretary’s own numbers, approximately 380 claims emerged from a pool exceeding 350,000 applications. That represents roughly less than one percent of the total. Yet the political narrative emphasised the 300 percent increase rather than the minute proportion of cases within the broader system.

The broader statistics regarding Sudanese study visas make the policy even more difficult to justify. Between 2021 and 2025, Sudanese nationals were granted 320, 350, 290, 260, and 260 study visas respectively. These numbers represent an extraordinarily small share of the overall study visa programme. In percentage terms, Sudanese students accounted for approximately 0.07%, 0.056%, 0.063%, 0.06%, and 0.06% of total study visas across those five years. Again, there are no missing zeros and no misplaced decimal points. Sudanese nationals were not among the top four nationalities receiving study visas in any of those years. Indeed, they did not even appear among the top twenty.

The inconsistency becomes even more striking when considering other nationalities. One country, Pakistan, appears among the top four recipients of study visas and among the top four nationalities claiming asylum through this route. Yet Pakistan was not included in the Home Secretary’s restrictions.

Furthermore, the path taken by Sudanese students to obtain a study visa is neither simple nor inexpensive. Applicants must first demonstrate English language proficiency through internationally recognised examinations. These certifications are costly and are not subsidised by the British government. After clearing this hurdle, prospective students must secure funding for their studies, often through highly competitive scholarship programmes that require extensive personal documentation and detailed explanations of their academic ambitions. Contrary to the image of widespread exploitation suggested in official rhetoric, only a small fraction of these students receive financial support from UK-funded scholarships, typically estimated at around five to ten percent of cases. Even after navigating these financial, bureaucratic, and linguistic barriers, applicants can still be denied a visa.

In other words, the system already imposes multiple layers of scrutiny and filtering long before a student ever arrives in the United Kingdom. The claim that Sudanese students represent a significant source of abuse appears increasingly difficult to sustain. Rather than revealing a structural problem within the immigration system, the available data instead suggests a policy response driven more by political symbolism than by empirical evidence.

Beyond the Home Secretary’s statistics

Focusing exclusively on the Home Secretary’s statistics risks obscuring a broader and far more complex reality. In Sudan, education itself is already a privilege. Studying abroad represents an even rarer opportunity. For those who manage to obtain such opportunities, education is rarely an individual project; it is a collective investment. Students who travel abroad often carry not only their own aspirations but also the hopes of extended families and communities who see education as one of the few viable paths toward social mobility.

To focus solely on the relatively small category of students who eventually seek asylum risks reproducing a narrow, and arguably class-biased, understanding of the issue. The statistics cited by Mahmood represent only the visible surface of a much larger social crisis. Long before the current war erupted, Sudan already faced a severe educational emergency. Approximately seven million children were out of school even before the outbreak of conflict. By October 2023, only six months after the fighting began, that number had risen dramatically to around nineteen million. At the time of writing, the figure remains staggeringly high, with roughly fourteen million children still outside the education system. In practical terms, this means that four out of every five children in Sudan are currently unable to attend school.

The country’s economic conditions deepen this crisis further. Sudan’s poverty statistics paint an equally bleak picture. According to governmental estimates, more than 23 million people, around 71 percent of the population, now live below the poverty line. Before the war, that figure stood at approximately 21 percent. The dramatic increase reflects not only the devastation of conflict but, far more importantly, the collapse of economic infrastructure across much of the country. In these circumstances, families increasingly depend on financial support from relatives living abroad. Members of the Sudanese diaspora, including students studying overseas, often play a critical role in sustaining households back home. Many students on study visas adopt extremely modest lifestyles in order to send remittances that help their families meet basic needs such as food, shelter, and healthcare.

These realities must also be situated within the wider humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Sudan today. The country is widely described as experiencing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, a phrase that has been repeated so frequently in international headlines that it risks losing its urgency through repetition alone. Yet the scale of the crisis remains staggering. By the end of 2025, more than nine million people had been internally displaced, while an additional four million had fled the country as refugees. These numbers represent not only statistical indicators but also the disintegration of communities, livelihoods, and social institutions across the country.

In response to this crisis, the United Kingdom has contributed humanitarian assistance, including approximately $135 million channelled through the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Country-Based Pooled Funds. Some may argue that questioning British policy in this context risks overlooking the significance of such contributions. Yet humanitarian assistance and immigration policy are not separate moral domains. Examining the tension between the United Kingdom’s humanitarian commitments abroad and its restrictive immigration measures toward those directly affected by the crisis brings us to the final and perhaps most important dimension of this debate.

British embroilment

Sudanese society is, of course, not free from responsibility for its own political crises. Domestic actors, elites, and military factions have played decisive roles in shaping the country’s current trajectory. Yet to frame Sudan’s predicament purely as a matter of internal failure ignores the historical and geopolitical structures within which these crises have unfolded. Many of the structural inequalities that continue to shape Sudan today can be traced back to the colonial period, when Britain governed Sudan between 1898 and 1956.

During this period, colonial administration pursued a model of development that was both selective and extractive. Economic policy was structured around the production of cotton, particularly through large irrigation schemes such as the Gezira project, which integrated Sudan into the global economy primarily as a supplier of raw materials. Infrastructure, education, and administrative investment were concentrated in regions that served this export-oriented economy, while large parts of the country remained systematically neglected. In effect, colonial policy reduced a complex and historically rich society into an agricultural appendage of imperial markets. Development followed cotton, where cotton could not be cultivated profitably, investment rarely followed.

The consequences of this uneven model of development did not disappear with independence. Instead, they left behind deep regional inequalities, fragile institutions, and political tensions that have continued to shape Sudanese politics for decades. Recognising this history does not absolve Sudanese actors of responsibility, but it does complicate contemporary narratives that portray Britain’s role purely in terms of humanitarian generosity.

Even if one sets aside the long shadow of colonialism, Britain’s involvement in Sudan’s more recent political trajectory remains difficult to ignore. In 2013, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group widely accused of committing some of the most severe atrocities in Sudan’s current conflict, was formally established by the Sudanese government. Around the same period, the United Kingdom, then still a member of the European Union, began pursuing closer cooperation with Sudanese authorities on migration control. This rapprochement formed part of a broader European effort to curb migration flows from the Horn of Africa toward Europe.

By 2016, this cooperation had developed into a structured political dialogue under the framework commonly referred to as the Khartoum Process, a European initiative designed to manage migration routes across East Africa and the Horn. Critics have long argued that such arrangements risked legitimising and empowering security actors within Sudan whose human rights records were already deeply contested. The RSF, originally emerging from the Janjaweed militias implicated in atrocities in Darfur, gradually gained visibility and institutional recognition within regional security frameworks during this period. While it would be simplistic to claim that European policies created the RSF, international engagement with Sudanese security structures undeniably formed part of the environment in which the group consolidated its power.

Shabana, as she did recently, can lay blame at the Sudanese door. Regardless, her government is embroiled in the devastating life Sudanese are living today. United Kingdom officials were putting pressure on African diplomats to avoid criticizing United Arab Emirates, the main backer and supporter of RSF. They, at the FCDO, went the extra mile by removing any mention of a possible genocide by RSF in a critical assessment report. United Kingdom used its position as a pen holder at the Security Council to obscure Sudanese government efforts to call UAE responsible for this mess. She might try to dodge, blaming the Tories, but what would she say about British military equipment used by the genocidal RSF milia as recently as March 2025. Three weeks ago, her colleague, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, avoided calling a spade a spade. Instead of calling UAE responsible for what RSF is doing, she put all the foreign actors on the same boat. That is the playbook of the government: misinformation and disinformation.

This broader context matters when evaluating policies such as the suspension of study visas for Sudanese nationals. When political leaders frame migration restrictions as necessary responses to “abuse” of the system, the narrative often omits the historical and geopolitical factors that contribute to displacement in the first place. The surge in asylum claims from Sudan cannot be understood without acknowledging the war, the humanitarian collapse, and the international dynamics surrounding the conflict.

The purpose of raising these issues is not to argue that Sudan should simply be joined by additional countries on the Home Office’s list of restrictions, nor to demand an immediate reversal of the policy itself. Rather, it is to challenge the framing through which the policy has been justified. When a government presents its actions as a defence of national generosity against exploitation, the statistical evidence and historical context deserve closer scrutiny.

What emerges from that scrutiny is a less comfortable conclusion. The figures used to justify the policy are statistically marginal, the humanitarian crisis driving displacement is immense, and Britain’s own historical and political relationship with Sudan is far more entangled than official rhetoric suggests. In this light, describing current policies as expressions of generosity becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.