I’m talking these days about Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel Prize winner in Literature, because of what happened to him in the fall, when Washington revoked his visa. «Have I ever behaved badly towards the United States of America? Have I broken any laws somewhere?” he asked himself. Who knows – this is not information – if Soyinka’s statement back in 2016 had anything to do with that decision, when he announced that if Trump was elected to the Oval Office, he would renounce his permanent residence in the country. Almost a decade later, he may have been hit with the bill for that.
But I didn’t come here to talk about Soyinka. He is the parasitic idea that has settled in my head after reading that London has closed the granting of visas to students from Cameroon, Sudan, Afghanistan and Myanmar. According to the British Ministry of the Interior, between 2021 and 2025, requests for this type of visa increased by 470%, which would have become a Trojan horse for the Executive to access refugee status on the islands. The justification for the measure, apart from an underlying rejection of it, is based on several pillars, which range between the economic cost of maintaining the asylum and refuge system – the Government indicated in a press release that it exceeds 4 billion pounds a year – and an alleged violation “of our visa system,” said the Minister of the Interior, Shabana Mahmood, daughter of Pakistanis, by the way. What Labor is hiding is that this policy of rejection and exclusion – very similar to the Danish one, one of the most restrictive in Europe – also seeks immediate political gain, now that the Eurosceptics of Reform UK are rising in the polls thanks to their anti-immigration speech.
And I return to Soyinka, who also said last fall: «Those who expect me to attend an event in the United States, do not waste your time (…). And if they want to see me, they already know where to find me. Although it is easy to refute the argument, that is more or less the answer that Sudanese and Cameroonian students who until now wanted to continue their education in the United Kingdom should give. Because, at the end of the day, you should go where you are loved, not where you are used.
