You may have heard rumblings in the news recently about plans to ‘curb’ immigration, by changing the rules so as to prevent foreign postgraduate students at U.K. universities from bringing family members to the U.K. with them. This comes off the back of an awful lot of ‘pitch rolling’ for an announcement that net migration to the U.K. has been in the region of 700,000 – 1,000,000 over the past year. Clearly, the Government wants to be seen to be doing something, and to have things under control. And this move might actually help matters (even while deflecting attention away from the fact that it is a problem almost entirely of the Tory party’s own making). Is it to be hoped that we are going to see a rational discussion emerge about the scale of immigration into the U.K.? Not judging by the reaction of the chattering classes, but perhaps among the people who actually count – i.e., the electorate.
First things first: the postgraduate dependant issue may sound like a fringe one, but it is genuinely important. In 2019, the Government changed the rules for foreign students, permitting them to stay in the country for two years (on a Graduate Visa) after their course has finished to look for work – the idea being, of course, that they will then find jobs and stay for longer. No doubt the government thought this was a brilliant wheeze for boosting the economy. And no doubt there was a similar rationale for allowing dependants of postgraduate students to also come to, and stay, in the U.K.: it would encourage more people to study at U.K. universities and hopefully contribute to the economy afterwards.
But – entirely predictably – this new scheme rapidly turned into a gravy train, the true scale of which has been concealed by the fact that universities are very reluctant to talk about it. Basically, U.K. universities are in a tough position financially at the moment. The number of domestic students is flatlining and will gradually decline over time due to falling birth rates. At the same time, inflation is increasing and universities haven’t been allowed to charge more in the way of fees. They are therefore being squeezed. What, then is a university VC to do? The only way to shore up, and hopefully increase, student numbers in these circumstances is to try to get more international students in. (In this way, of course, universities are a kind of microcosm for the U.K. economy as a whole.) Naturally, VCs seized upon these changes to the visa rules as a way to inflate international student numbers – by dreaming up myriad new taught master’s degrees with almost nothing in the way of entry requirements, advertised almost exclusively in overseas markets, and nakedly billed to prospective students as a pathway to employment in the U.K. The message has been simple: “Come to us to study for a two-year MA in International Something or Other, bring your family, and you will get a student visa, which will then allow you to matriculate to a graduate visa, and hence in the fullness of time a working visa, and you and your dependants can all stay in the country for as long as you like. Oh, and by the way, the course will be a piece of the proverbial and you’ll barely have to do any studying at all. PS – Please give us £24k for the privilege.”
The result has been entirely predictable: huge numbers of bullshit postgraduate courses, huge numbers of international postgraduate students who aren’t actually here to study but to look for work, and huge numbers of demoralised staff and domestic students who are forced to deal with the consequences of large influxes of very bad and unmotivated people on university campuses. My university’s library, for example, has been utterly transformed into what I can only describe as a creche – full of the family members of international students, many of them children, simply treating the place as a kind of public square. And what goes on in the classroom is abysmal. When most of these students turn up, they haven’t done a lick of preparation or reading (why would they, when they are fundamentally not here to study, but to get a visa?), and very often spend their time disrupting the session because they have no respect for the university experience and basically don’t give a toss what happens so long as they get that all important graduation and hence graduate status. Meanwhile, the quality of the experience for domestic students goes down the toilet, and the entire educational calling of universities is utterly degraded and debased: we have in a very real sense been reduced to the status of a mere hoop which people have to jump through in order to migrate into the country on a semi-permanent basis.
This isn’t to mention the impact on house prices, public services, wages… the familiar litany. Even in terms of sheer numbers, the consequences have been shocking – according to the Beeb there were nearly 140,000 visas granted to dependants last year, up from around 19,000 in 2020 and around 50,000 in 2021. It is fashionable and trite to use the phrase ‘this is not sustainable’, but, well, this really isn’t sustainable.
But this also makes abolishing the ‘right’ (I hate the use of that word in this context) for dependants of postgraduate students to come to live in the U.K. a relatively ‘easy win’ to get net immigration down by a not inconsiderable amount, if done properly. And the move is therefore to be welcomed, as anyone with an ounce of common sense would realise.
Of course, common sense is in short supply in U.K. academia, and the reaction from that sector has been predictably foolish. The same BBC article as linked to above cites Jo Grady – the utterly incompetent General Secretary of the University and College Union (UCU) – calling the change a “vindictive move” (welcome to left wing politics in 2023, where it is vindictive for a Government to want to have some control over how many people enter the country), and Adam Habib, director of SOAS (by some distance the most easily caricatured loony-left academic institution in the country) bleating that this will create a “financial crisis” for those universities which are “dependent on the fee income of international students”. That becoming dependent on international student fees might not have been such a wise move in the first place is of course lost on him; the Government might reflect that a financial crisis at SOAS and other institutions like it may be precisely what the country needs right now.
But it is rarely worth taking the views of academics seriously. The wider point to be made is that, at long last, we might just be seeing the Conservative Party begin to do what it is supposed to do and respond to electoral forces. Long before the release of these latest figures, people could see for themselves just how widespread and rapid the increase in immigration has been since 2016. It is not racist, nor indeed in any sense illegitimate, to be worried about the effect this is all having on schools, hospitals, housing costs, wages, and so on. And people are actually now starting to talk about it properly where for a long time they were simply forbidden from doing so. The issue – and the fact that it has long been impossible to even discuss it as an issue – has been a running sore in our politics for too long. This move to cut down on international student dependants is a sign that, while it might be a while before the tanker turns completely, the Tory party is beginning to grasp that it has to do something about immigration or lose power for a generation.
Busqueros is a pseudonym.
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This is not as virtuous as the writer claims and it will have trivial effect.
high quality students, especially post-grads, in subjects of importance should be welcomed in manageable numbers so our institutions do not become more interested in them than in our students.
All visitors should provide their own medical insurance. If they are from any country or group with a history of not leaving on time we should require financial bonds. This, of course, would require a significant improvement in record keeping about arrivals and departures.
the bug problem is the minimum salary of £10k below uk average income whereas it should be (say) double it. Also they should come as guest workers on permits in jobs we want and not as permanent residents.
Good morning , Woken by dawn chorus today so about early.!
I am shocked by the impact this scheme is having on the Students experience as well as the Immigration problem. When I was at University in the early 80s we had a smallish contingent of overseas students on my Undergraduate course , and they all worked very hard .My only problem was you could never get a set text at the Library as the overseas students always had them straight after the lectures LOL. The ” just turning up” issue did not exist .
I think that an expose of how many weasely ways there are to stay in the UK should be a priority for the Sceptic as the truth I suspect would be shocking .This is the tip of a Glacier of “Legal” immigration .
Although this story refers to secondary school and not university, the case is similar.
A friend is responsible in NZ for recruiting overseas student / pupils because their fees subsidise the locals. The school policy is to restrict the proportion of overseas and the proportion from any one country to prevent them dominating studies or the finances of the school.
It seems to work and my friend gets annual trips to the northern hemisphere to carry out interviews and liaison.
In may UK universities the proportion of overseas students is dominant and our own able kids can’t get in.
Post BRINO, the Not-a-Conservative-Government does have control over immigration. It has completely failed to exert any control. Everything they have done has encouraged more low-wage immigration.
Of course they should stop so-called students from shipping over their families. But they should also raise the minimum wage for an immigrant to £50,000 pa. And the company proposing to employ them should have to pay £250,000 to the Treasury upfront (the estimated cost of every immigrant to taxpayers).
I’m sick to death of the Not-a-Conservative-Party’s lies and treachery over immigration. Not that Labour would be any better.
My country has been destroyed by both of them.
Your mistake is your phrase “my country”.
You’ll be forever disappointed with that attitude!
We each can hope to control only two things in this life – our emotions and our expenses.
Totally agree that the employing company should pick up the tab for all elements of them employing an immigrant .As it stands UK employers love it because its cheap in effect subsidised labour ..We are never going to get investment in equipment and improvements in wages and productivity as long as this goes on.Think hand car washes!!
Post BRINO, the Not-a-Conservative-Government does have control over immigration. It has completely failed to exert any control.
There’s now a customs border between England and continental Europe and I (and millions of other people) had their supposedly permanent right of residence revoked and had the re-apply for it in a seriously cumbersome and nerve-rattling process. And – of course – people from continental Europe now cannot move to the UK anymore without explicit permission of the home office.
That’s all Brexit ever meant – minus a couple of minor injustices/ drawbacks – and you got all of it. So, sing, dance and be happy. And have no fear — when the Brexit party continues to rule the land, you’ll soon even be relieved of having this nagging feeling that England is a European country and not an African/ Asian one. One overseas student at a time.
All the leave voters I know had only one reason to make that choice, it was to put our legislation under the total control of people that are elected by the UK electorate.
That’s the first step, the next one being to change the way UK politics works and to elect people with knowledge and experience of work outside of politics.
None of us expected these changes to be simple, quick or without pain.
I don’t quite understand what that’s supposed to tell me (and by the way, the English electorate is the subset of citizens of all commonwealth countries who are presently legally resident in the UK). In any case, turning millions of people who have been legally resident in the UK for years and who were (wrongly) told by the home office that they had a right to settle here into principally illegal aliens who may appy for permission to continue to live where they’re already living was very much not in name only.
Brexit was about regaining the ability to govern our own country through a democratic process so that the people governing the country could be held to account for their decisions.
The second stage is to hold them to account.
The third stage is to reform it so that, in the future, they will be far more responsive to the wishes of the British people ,….. not a mega-bureaucracy in Brussels; the likes of Merkel and Macron …… or Klaus Schwab.
The figures declared for the number of people known to have to have come to the UK in the past year, is not immigration, it is invasion.
A better question would be “why were they ever allowed to come here in the first place”
In he case of Postgrads its the “university” who gains from the fees paid .But there is no limit and their mouthpieces on the radio all talk about how good this money is for local economies .They do not get to cover the negatives ie housing costs , healthcare and more importantly the effect on our English cities culture and feel.
You end up with Third world pockets and all that entails ..
Oh how enriched we must all be feeling now..
Thanks for this. It’s fanciful to think that the Tories are waking up on mass immigration. They need utter electoral destruction before they wake up, and that won’t happen because idiots on the political right keep voting for them.
This is almost too funny. News Round-Up today includes a link to a Spiked (boo, hiss) article about stupid green EU energy policy. It is written by James Woudhuysen and is a puff for his report on energy for MCC Brussels. Marcus Corvinus Collegium. A Hungarian think tank. Right meets Left, round the back.
Aurelius, are you on board?
Thanks for the info.
Some of us do research outside the ATL round-up and just as well because too much MSM carp is certainly not furthering our agenda. TCW posted some good pieces today so I have linked them BTL.
There’s something important this article is missing: Provided said overseas students and their dependants come from a commonwealth country – at most of them likely will – both they and their relatives immediately have full voting rights once they legally entered the county.
Talk about whistling in the dark to keep your spirits up. The idea of selling education worldwide to fund UK universities no doubt sounded like a clever wheeze a generation ago; did anyone consider the longer term consequences? Probably not. UK citizenship was moreover offered as an incentive – another expedient – and taken no more seriously than giving away a plastic toy in a box of cornflakes. As for the economic argument that our only hope of prosperity lies in population growth, exactly where does this end? How many more people do we have to allow in to eliminate real poverty from UK? Why on earth can we not run a satisfactory economy in a country of 40 million people rather than 80?