The Guardian reports that Britain’s recent vigilant effort to weed out fraudulent visa applications from China is precluding legitimate students from attending UK universities this fall.  Professor Les Ebdon at Luton University estimates that the crackdown could effect up to 10,000 Chinese students and deprive universities of 77 million pounds.  According to Professor Ebdon, the increased scrutiny is believed to be a response to the tragedy in Morecambe Bay where 21 Chinese laborers drowned in February, despite the lack of evidence that those individuals entered on student visas. 

Professor Steven Lei of Middlesex University asserts that Chinese students have difficulty proving to immigration officials that they can afford university tuition.  The British embassy cannot always verify that a student has sufficient funds because parents sometimes do not receive pay slips, or an entire community contributes to send a student abroad.  Chinese citizens comprise the largest group of international students in Britain.  Because universities may set their own rates for international students (unlike their UK and EU peers), schools stand to lose a significant source of funding from the crackdown.  Despite earlier initiatives by Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Department for Education and Skills to recruit more international students, the department expressed deference to the decisions of UK visas, the inter-government agency that processes applications.

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According to The Guardian, deployment of the Inmate Management System (IMS) is being expanded after development at two prisons and an immigration detention centre.  The procedure, which the Home Office prefers to call a "visitor recognition system," saves records of visitors' fingerprints and their photographs on local computers.  Five additional prisons will be equipped with a new biometric security system to scan the fingerprints of a multitude of visitors and prisoners.  MIS, devised by a London firm, Unilink Systems and Software, is intended to speed up the processing of visitors and ensure inmates do not escape by swapping places with visitors.  Further, banned visitors can be more easily excluded and suspicious patterns of visits tracked.

This technology has proved successful.  However, fingerprint scanners can be fooled.  A Japanese professor used gelatin to transfer a copy of someone else's prints on to his finger. However, the resources for such techniques are unlikely to be available in prison.