Too many migrants to integrate into society, says Robert Jenrick

But Mr Jenrick wanted to go further, with official caps on visas and an immediate overhaul of the two-year graduate visa route to stop universities from exploiting the lucrative foreign student market.

“Too many universities have fallen into the migration, rather than education business, and are marketing low grade, short courses as a back door to a life in the UK,” he said.

On Thursday, Mr Sunak insisted the proposed legislation was “not only the right approach, but the only approach” to get deportation flights started before the next election by declaring Rwanda safe and blocking all but a “vanishingly” small number of legal challenges.

He has said Rwanda would have pulled out if the Government had gone further in disapplying international human rights law, which would have left UK without anywhere to send deported asylum seekers.

The Prime Minister’s emergency Rwanda ­migration scheme has only a “50 per cent at best” chance of success ahead of the next general election, according to the Government’s official legal advice.

Victoria Prentis, the attorney-general, has been advised that the legislation leaves a significant risk of the European Court in Strasbourg blocking flights. 

The government legal department advice was signed off by Sir James Eadie, the UK’s most senior legal adviser on issues of national importance, who headed up the government’s defence of the Rwanda policy in the Supreme Court this year.

Opening his article, Mr Jenrick described his arrival at the “beleaguered” Home Office a year ago, with the UK “beyond breaking point” at the peak of the small boats crisis.

He said that was compounded by the “indefensible” and “farcical” situation of hotels full of asylum seekers, where action was prevented by human rights laws.

“The Prime Minister was right, therefore, to promise to do whatever it takes to end this farce. And, until Wednesday, he had kept his word,” he wrote.