A Nigerian care worker who moved to Coventry in 2023 was one of 28,495 who made it that year. Her younger cousin, applying now, is one of 395 who made it in the first three months of this year. Same route. Same country. Different door entirely.

Between 2021 and the first quarter of 2026, 49,498 Nigerians were granted UK work visas, out of 54,707 who applied. A 90.5 per cent success rate. Nigeria ranked second in the world for approvals, behind only India. For years, this was one of the most reliable doors in the whole japa conversation.

The year-by-year numbers are where the story actually lives. Approvals climbed from 5,119 in 2021 to 14,084 in 2022 to a peak of 28,495 in 2023. Then the UK tightened its rules. Approvals fell to 2,851 across the whole of 2025. In the first quarter of 2026, only 395 Nigerians got a work visa.

Nearly 43,000 of the total approvals came through the Health and Care Worker route. Care workers and home carers alone accounted for 22,376 visas, nurses another 9,359. This was, more than any other route, how a specific kind of Nigerian walked through the door. Trained. Often already working in a hospital or a private clinic at home. The UK built that door during its post-pandemic staffing crisis.

The UK didn't quietly let the route fade. It closed it with the same precision NIHSA uses on a river gauge. New rules stopped care workers bringing dependants. Salary thresholds for skilled workers rose. Compliance requirements for employers tightened. Every one of those changes had a start date, a document number, a minister's signature.

You know someone who walked through that door before it started closing. Maybe it was a cousin, a former colleague, someone from church who now sends photos from a ward in Leicester or a care home in Coventry. What they don't always say, when they call home, is how specific the timing was. Two years earlier and the door was wide open. Two years later and the same qualifications, the same experience, get 395 approvals spread across an entire country of Nigerian applicants in three months.

Nigeria still leads every other African country on this list, ahead of Ghana, Kenya, South Africa. That's not comfort. It just means Nigeria had the furthest to fall.