Politicians have woken up – far too late – to the dangers of mass uncontrolled migration. But the backlash has already begun.

Over the past two years, violent confrontations have occurred in places as different as Southport, Ballymena, Middlesbrough and Tamworth. In Northern Ireland, violence erupted last week after the attempted murder of a British man, allegedly by a Sudanese asylum seeker.

These are no longer isolated flare-ups. Public anger is reaching boiling point.

We can take one step immediately: imposing a visa ban on high-risk countries.

Exemptions can be made for world-class scientists, medical specialists and senior state officials. But for everyone else, if you’re on the ‘red list’, you’re not coming in.

This policy costs next to nothing, requires barely any red tape and could be executed with a few strokes of a ministerial pen. It is far less revolutionary than it sounds.

In 2025, Donald Trump introduced full visa bans on citizens of Afghanistan, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, saying that many of those countries had ‘taken advantage of the United States’.

And for the first time since the 1970s, America has recorded ‘negative net migration,’ with more people actively leaving the country long term than arriving.

In Britain, Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf has said his party will slap full visa bans on countries that refuse to cooperate with his party’s deportation plan. In April, this policy was extended to include any country demanding reparations for Britain’s role in the Transatlantic slave trade, with Mr Yusuf saying: ‘The bank is closed and the door is locked.’

Restore Britain and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) have unveiled ‘red lists’ of their own, while Kemi Badenoch has said Trump’s model is ‘viable’ in Britain.

The biggest surprise has been the forceful use of visa bans by Labour’s Shabana Mahmood. In 2025, the Home Secretary threatened to bar tourists and business travellers from Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo unless those countries started taking back their illegal migrants.

Then, in March this year, Ms Mahmood suspended student visas for nationals from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan, alongside a total ban on ‘skilled work visas’ for Afghans. Ms Mahmood was criticised for leaving Pakistan and Bangladesh off the list – despite both countries being the worst offenders for using higher education as a back door into the asylum system.

The Government must now enforce more stringent restrictions. I am not suggesting that everyone in these countries represents a risk to the British population. But the crisis requires a swift correction.

First on the list must be Sudan. A mind-boggling 46 per cent of Sudanese ‘students’ coming to Britain use their visas as a stepping stone to claiming asylum. The system is being cheated against a backdrop of criminal activity.

The Sudanese prison population in Britain has risen by 151 per cent since 2021. Among those inmates are Deng Chol Majek, the asylum seeker jailed for a minimum of 29 years after a ‘demonic’ screwdriver attack on hotel worker Rhiannon Whyte. Or Ali Alnour, locked up for endangering dozens of lives during a Channel crossing.

Then there’s Somalia – a failed state soaked in violence and corruption. Somalis make up barely 0.3 per cent of the resident population in Britain, yet they are chronically unemployed. Only 34 per cent of working-age Somalis are in a job, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Those that do work are concentrated in low-skill occupations such as care and leisure. Just 13 per cent are in professional roles such as teaching or medicine. According to the 2021 Census, 72 per cent of Somali households lived in social housing – more than four times the national rate.

Somali gangs such as the ‘Woolwich Boys’ and the ‘Mali Boys’ in Waltham Forest have been responsible for killings and violent feuds across the capital, such as the 2019 murder of 14-year-old Jaden Moodie in Leyton. These gangs play a leading role in ‘county lines’ drug runs.

Again, this isn’t to brand every Somali in Britain a criminal or scrounger. Just like any community, there are plenty of decent, hardworking people among them. But patterns matter when it comes to immigration policy – which shapes a country’s future.

Third on my ‘red list’ is Afghanistan: another broken state ruled by the Taliban, with a culture that routinely treats women as property.

Across Europe, Afghan nationals are over-represented in violent and sexual crime. In Germany, 2025 police figures show Afghans are up to nine times more likely to be suspects in violent offences than native Germans.

The 2021 Census logged around 86,000 Afghan-born residents in England and Wales but that figure is out of date. The last Tory government oversaw an influx of tens of thousands more resettled Afghans, leaving taxpayers with a staggering £6billion bill.

This month, seven young Afghan men, all granted ‘refugee’ status after arriving illegally, have been charged with a total of 40 sex offences in Norwich – including multiple rapes – against two girls who were barely into their teens.

Any serious red list must also include Afghanistan’s next-door neighbour – the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Most British Pakistanis trace their roots to the peasant-farming villages of Mirpur in rural Kashmir.

Mirpuris are a tribal community where clan loyalties run deep, cousin marriage is common and formal institutions take a back seat to ‘izzat’ – the South Asian concept loosely translated as ‘honour’.

In her memoir Honoured, Labour MP Naz Shah explained how a culture of izzat forces women into silence and leaves them vulnerable to horrific abuse by Mirpuri men. Her mother was repeatedly raped and beaten.

Time and again – in Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford – this community preyed on vulnerable white girls. (Kemi Badenoch pointed to this Mirpuri profile when she noted that the rape gangs often hail from a ‘peasant background’.)

Pakistan is now Britain’s number one source of asylum claims – many lodged by people who arrived on student visas. Universities including Coventry and Wolverhampton have imposed a total ban on new Pakistani applicants.

Last is Bangladesh. The 2021 Census reveals roughly 34 per cent of British Bangladeshis live in social housing – double the national average. Bangladesh has a track record of immigration fraud, with British police busting major visa forgery operations inside the country. Today, Bangladeshis are the second-most likely group to use a student visa as a back door to claim asylum.

Alarmingly, many Bangladeshi leaders in Britain have engaged in corrupt practices that mirror those in Bangladesh. Lutfur Rahman, the mayor of East London’s Tower Hamlets, was found guilty of systemic corruption in 2015, only to be voted back in once his five-year ban expired.

This red list is not exhaustive, nor the only tool needed to solve our immigration crisis. We must also tear through the legal quagmires that empower activist judges to block deportation: that means leaving the ECHR, scrapping the Human Rights Act and reinforcing border controls.

We must reopen detention centres, build new ones, and clean out the Home Office.

But any party that grasps visa bans as a powerful weapon will shape the agenda at the next election.

• Dr Mike Jones is a political commentator and former Executive Director of Migration Watch UK