MigrationWatchdog

Vietnam: what the official figures show

Detected arrivals by illegal entry routes, and the asylum outcomes published for Vietnam. Every figure is as its publisher recorded it.

1,440 people recorded as Vietnam were detected arriving by illegal entry routes in 2025, and 1,598 asylum claims were made, with 21% of decisions granting protection.

What this page is not

It is a page about figures published for a nationality, not about the people who hold it. Nationality here is as recorded by the publisher, sometimes at the point of encounter and sometimes self-reported.

There is no prison figure on this page, deliberately. This site holds the foreign-national prison population by nationality and publishes it on the index page with the caveat it needs — that prison nationality is not immigration status and includes people living here entirely lawfully. A country-headed page carrying a prison count is the one thing on this site most likely to be screenshotted without that caveat, so the figure is not here at all.

Nothing here is divided by any population. No official count of UK residents of a given nationality exists, so no rate can be constructed and none is — the rule in full.

1,440
detected arrivals, 2025
calendar year 2025 · source
1,598
asylum claims
Year ending June 2026 · source
21%
of decisions granted protection
Year ending June 2026 · source
1,178
awaiting a decision
Year ending June 2026 · source

Detected arrivals, year by year

3.7k0201820252018 — 42019 — 32020 — 1182021 — 1,4032022 — 5052023 — 1,3062024 — 3,6582025 — 1,440
People detected arriving by illegal entry routes and recorded as Vietnam. Illegal entry routes to the UK summary tables, year ending June 2026 (Home Office).

The highest year in this series is 2024 with 3,658, against 1,440 in 2025. The series covers 2018 to 2025 only. A zero is a zero in the published table — it means none were detected and recorded under this nationality that year, not that none arrived.

calendar year 2025 · source

Asylum outcomes

Claims, decisions and the grant rate as published. Decisions in a period are not decisions on the claims made in that period — a claim can take years, so the two columns describe different groups of people.

Asylum claims, decisions, grant rate and people awaiting a decision for Vietnam
MeasureFigure
Asylum claims1,598
Initial decisions2,375
Of those decisions, granted protection21%
Awaiting an initial decision1,178
Small-boat claims decided1,173
Of those, granted protection16%
Year ending June 2026 · source

The small-boat rows come from a separate published table covering claims by people who arrived on small boats, over its own period — Year ending June 2026. They are a subset of the claims above, not an addition to them.

Foreign national offender returns

115 people recorded as Vietnam were returned from the UK as foreign national offenders (year ending June 2026). This counts returns carried out — it is not a count of offences, not a rate, and cannot be divided by any population to make one. A larger number here reflects enforcement activity as much as anything else.

year ending June 2026 · source

Other nationalities

Pages exist where both the arrivals series and the asylum outcomes are published.

EritreaAfghanistanIranSudanSomaliaEthiopiaIraqSyriaYemenTurkeyPakistanBangladeshIndiaNigeriaBrazilAlbania

All nationalities, compared →

Data as of

Cite this page

Vietnam: arrivals, asylum claims and outcomes. Migration Watchdog, data as of 2026-09-03.
https://migrationwatchdog.com/nationalities/vietnam
Underlying figures: UK official statistics, re-published under OGL v3.0 — every figure links to its source on the page.

Sources for this page