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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