• Friday, March 29, 2024
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BusinessDay

Why your U.K Visa application may be decided by robots

U.K Visa application

Nigerians in their thousands apply for a United Kingdom (U.K) work, study, or visitor visa requests weekly, however such Visa requests may not even be approved by a human being, no matter the amount of documentation provided.

According to reports, the U.K Home Office has been using a secretive algorithm to process visa applications, which immigration experts warn could be discriminating against some applicants on the basis of nationality and age.

The department’s “streaming tool” — which is used for all work, study, and visitor visa requests — grades applications as red, amber or green according to their level of risk.

These are then forwarded to caseworkers for further processing.

The Home Office has refused to provide any detail about the factors used to assess risk, or how regularly the algorithm is updated, because it fears this could encourage fraudulent applications.

Lawyers, say the algorithmic decision-making “may well disadvantage certain groups of people based on generic markers such as age, country of origin or whether they have travelled before”.

There is also a real risk of unlawful deployment, or of discrimination or bias that may be unwittingly built into an algorithm or introduced by an operator.

The Home Office’s digitisation of visa processes is part of a wider efficiency drive to manage the increased bureaucracy caused by Brexit.

The Home Office confirmed that the algorithm was being used to make sure visas were being “processed as efficiently as possible”, and made clear that human caseworkers always checked the streamed applications to make sure they met the “requirements of the immigration rules”.

The visa algorithm has attracted the attention of the chief inspector of borders and immigration, who issued a warning in a 2017 report that there was “a risk that the streaming tool becomes a de facto decision-making tool”.

He was particularly critical of the Home Office’s failure to take account of the danger of “confirmation bias”, in which the visa caseworker may unconsciously dismiss information that contradicts the algorithm’s streaming rating.

 

SEGUN ADAMS