A British education is prized all over the Indian subcontinent. Despite the anti-colonial and almost anti-British view of history that school textbooks in India propagate, studying in England retains vast prestige. The foremost leaders of the country’s anti-colonial pantheon were all educated here – Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, you name it.
Young people from the subcontinent tend to be highly motivated and go on to excel in some of the top universities in Britain. However, as British economist Joan Robinson said, whatever you can say rightly about India, the opposite is also true.
In the last two years, there has been a massive influx of Indians with student visas into England who are here not so much to study as to drudge. Vast numbers of young Indians who have entered the island since 2021 have used their student status as merely a back-door to working here. Even though the Home Office allows full-time students to work only 20 hours a week, this rule is flouted as many work in informal sectors and are paid in cash.
Scores of these youngsters come to this country as postgraduates, manage to find bog-standard ersatz universities in Britain where they secure admission through the help of extortionate middlemen ‘agencies’ based in India, make their way here and find work stacking shelves, delivering food, bartending and also serve as general factotums in ethnic restaurants. Because they work informally, it is easy for employers to exploit them and pay them ridiculously low wages. A home office raid found employee conditions approximating modern slavery in a south Indian restaurant in Wembley where workers were paid about £5 an hour.
While working during the course of one’s studies itself is perfectly fine, making it the sole purpose of coming to the U.K. is pernicious, both to the putative students and this country. ‘Doing part-time’ has become so rife amongst Indian circles in Britain that social media pages have sprung up in several Indian languages documenting the lives of recent arrivals who eke out a living from menial jobs. A small business owner in Lewisham looked aghast at me when I said “I don’t” when he asked where I was working part-time while a student at the LSE.
Third-rate universities in the U.K. are also to blame for creating a teeming class of pseudo-students by paving an easy path for them to come to this country. A look at their entry requirements are revealing. Leeds Beckett University, which ranks 102nd in the U.K., expects its Master’s applicants from India to have only a 2:2 from an Indian college. What’s more, it wants them to score a mere 6.0 in the standardised IELTS English test. London South Bank University, ranked 96th, does not even mandate an English test and accepts English grades an applicant scored in an Indian high school.
Even though the value of degrees from these universities is highly questionable, they boast of a significant body of international students. The University of Roehampton, ranked 111th, says 14% of its students are international and “warmly welcomes a healthy cohort of Indian students each year”. This is because people who apply to study here are not interested in the degree as much as the lucre to be accrued from exploiting the student status. Indian students have even resuscitated some moribund colleges in England. According to the Economist, about a quarter of all students in the University of East London (UEL) are from India, which previously drew its pupils from only three boroughs in London.
What happens after their student visa expires? Here comes the graduate visa, which grants foreign graduates from U.K. universities two years leave to live and work in the U.K. Finally, the pseudo-students can do overtly what they’ve been doing covertly through the length of their degree. I have personally seen many Indians in the U.K. who pass a Master’s degree of dubious value from an obscure university, secure the graduate visa and continue to work as Deliveroo or Uber Eats drivers, cleaners and bartenders. Not surprisingly, 41.4% of all graduate visas were granted to Indians last year.
The only party that benefits from students coming to the U.K. to go to third-rate universities are those universities. They revel in foreign cash as they dole out useless degrees to pretty much anyone who wants it. They churn out foreign graduates that go on to take up blue-collar jobs for which they did not require a degree qualification, taking away those jobs from a local unemployed British person.
It is time, therefore, to crack down on graduate visas to Indian students who don’t go to the top universities in the U.K. Australia blazed the trail this year banning student visas to students from certain Indian states as they were found to be dropping out quickly to work. But why just Indians? The sheer numbers speak for themselves. Indian students surpassed Chinese as the largest group of foreign students in the U.K. last year at 139,539 pupils or more than a quarter of all international students. As noted already, they also secure the largest share of graduate visas. Allowing them untrammelled access to the country even though they take Mickey Mouse degrees, in lowly institutions and are not here to study anyway is perilous. It makes a mockery of student visas, diminishes the prestige of a British education and perpetuates the excessive dependence of universities on foreign cash.
Restricting graduate visas to graduates of Russell Group universities will mean that only those who are sincere about studying will come here, which is what Britain must aim for – attracting the best.
Whitehall considered a similar plan last year, but it was dropped because of the unholy degree of dependence on foreign students of U.K. universities. Without an annual influx of Indian students, places like the University of East London would go bust. An educational system that leans so heavily on foreign students, particularly when they are just gaming the system to obtain visas, isn’t fit for purpose.
Aditya is a writer and has a Master’s in International Relations from the London School of Economics (LSE). Find him on X (Twitter).
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The abuse of the university system is deliberate and I dare say encouraged by the government. This is immigration by the back door and given the gloss of legality. In London I would put money on Khant having his fingers in this lucrative pie and quite possibly throughout the whole system. The corruption is barely hidden. Obviously if the intention is to undermine Britain then importing third world dross fits the bill marvellously so Klaus’s little helpers Fishy and Chunt will have no qualms about this scam.
The rubbish third rate universities clinging on with foreign fees are also playing their part in undermining this country but they are also only delaying their rightful demise and ultimate destruction. Still, if they have indoctrinated thousands with useful wokery they too will have played their part in Demolition Britain.
The seeds of Bliar’s treachery were laid years ago but I am sure he is delighted as they gradually come to fruition.
I know, hux, but what the heck are they being taught?
https://twitter.com/goddeketal/status/1700184758515302820/photo/1
Thanks Mogs. Love it. Your question is serious though. Personally I shudder to imagine what is being taught.
All immigrants for study or work should have to take a test, 11+ style, in English, and score sufficiently well to place them in the top 20% of the UK population by intellectual ability. Even if they then don’t take their education seriously at least we could be fairly confident that they’d find something productive to do.
Large chunks of higher education – basically everything outside the hard sciences, engineering and accounting – don’t add any value. Possibly small centres of excellence in history and such like could be justified.
It might be said that they bring in money for the UK, but all that really means is that they pay for academics to be busy doing not very productive things, and outright damaging things like inculcating socialism in our young ones. They would be much better employed in the building sector (or, for the social science lecturers, on onlyfans). I mean it, people.
Cutting all funding from higher education should be the easiest action a Conservative government could ever do.
With you 100%.
I have a science degree but we shouldn’t just dismiss the arts degrees out of hand. The arts add a different perspective to the world, often enabling us to see it differently. Beauty for the sake of beauty & the pleasure that it brings adds a lot of value, which cannot be financially quantified, to society.
I do understand where you come from but I think it is best if artists are left to produce art that people are actually willing to pay for.
Virtually all art in history was funded privately.
Similarly, you might not find many benefactors for economic research and such like, but the quality of analysis you can find across substack rivals that of many academic papers.
There are some areas where it is tricky, I don’t think big pharma should fund the medicines watchdog for example. In that case, independently evaluating drugs by a cloister of academics forever banned from working for big pharma, on paper sounds sensible.
But I’d be cautious about creating a bureaucracy in any area. Government posts, and work in charity, of any kind are magnets to the mediocre in all disciplines.
Thank you for responding, unlike the 3 downtickers who didn’t.
Public art is not what people want, like or value in the main as it is usually chosen by political committee whereas private art is chosen because it has meaning to the individual who purchases it. So on that we both agree.
The problem I have with sciences as now taught is that they have become ever more specialised so that an overview of where & how that specialism fits in, contributes to the world is lost to those specialists, granting very narrow world views & which enables easier manipulation as nobody has an overview of the subjects.
I include in the arts subjects like English Literature, Classics, Philosophy music – all aspects of music: composition, playing, singing, conducting – for which advanced studies are required. All of these add value to the soul of us as men & women, without soul, without spirit, without place we are diminished & easier to manipulate, brainwash & enslave. Mass produced, formulaic art degrees I agree add nothing of value to society, but opportunity for advanced studies for fine art & the skills required for restoration, preservation etc of priceless masterpieces is required,
I concur that government needs to be kept out of creative industries, degrees for many of which are unnecessary & stifling but access to opportunities to learn advanced skills & techniques is needed. Those opportunities don’t need to be degrees.
The less government we have interfering in our lives the better! We’re sovereign adults, capable of making decisions for ourselves, not helpless children who need to seek permission or be given instructions for everything we do.
Simple solution: Make the university itself responsible for the student loans and the problem will be self correcting. By issuing loans that are not paid back when the graduate earns it, the uni is on the hook for the debt not the British taxpayer. That will put an end to worthless degrees.
Time to pause almost all immigration, for a few generations. We’ve had several generations of far too much.
I don’t necessarily agree. Any sentimental notions I had about the British as a people, and indeed the entire Anglosphere, the West and humanity in general have been sorely tested over the last few years.
Of course, the number of people in the country, the quality of the people, and also the pace of immigration, do affect the quality of life in this country, and limits to immigration should be designed with these things in mind.
That said, I do recognise the right of the natives to determine who come to live in their country, just as I can decide who can come to my house parties.
Full disclosure: I’m half immigrant myself (half scouser, so I’m probably entirely unwanted :-).
I am half immigrant and married to one. I am under no illusions as to the wonderfulness of the British people. They are plenty of idiots here, and plenty of non-idiots elsewhere. However I think England in particular and the UK in general is one of the best countries in the world to live in – I know I would say that but lots of people from elsewhere seem to agree as they try to come and live here. England is (or was) also English. For better or worse. Slow evolution, not radical change that sees whole areas completely change in the space of a generation, has got to be more conducive to a society being able to live in relative harmony. Yes, immigration can enrich, but it also does immense damage. Even if you were importing the “best” people, they are still not English. They have not grown up here, do not have our roots, culture and language. You can fill England with a hundred million Japanese geniuses and it may well turn out to be a super country, but it would no longer be England. Countries are arbitrary and imperfect, but they have served us well. Limited immigration, maybe, but as I said we have had enormously high levels of immigration for decades. To redress that imbalance, we need to stop dead and take stock for many decades. We won’t though, and the Anglosphere (including the world’s only Hyperpower) and White European civilisation will be overrun, destroyed and/or commit suicide.
I agree that immigration and diversity can enrich a society, no doubt about that, but there comes a point where this uncontrolled influx of ‘asylum seekers’/economic migrants just eclipses and suffocates what once was a healthy and balanced populace. It’s a fact that many cities and towns all across Europe have natives now as a minority. There was that study I shared which looked at several cities including Hamburg, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels, and found kids with both parents as natives were a minority. This then leads to the topic of declining birth rates across Europe, as covered here;
”The demographic crisis is perhaps the biggest threat Europe is currently facing, warned Hungarian President Katalin Novák in an hour-long interview with news station InfoRádió, just ahead of the 5th Budapest Demographic Forum.
“Not having enough children is not only a Hungarian phenomenon, it is the same everywhere in the so-called developed Western world. If we just think about the fact that there is not a single country in Europe today that has enough children to even maintain its population — so we are not talking about population growth — then we can sense how big the problem is,” Novák said.
“Or I could quote Elon Musk, who said that the demographic challenge is now more serious than the climate crisis, it is a bigger problem for the future of the developed world. I am also inclined to take that as a true statement. It is a problem for Europe as a whole, and indeed for the Western world as a whole.”
Promising political figures like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni have since betrayed campaign pledges to boost the birth rate and instead have turned to mass immigration to fill the gap.
https://rmx.news/hungary/not-a-single-european-country-has-self-sustaining-birth-rates-warns-hungarian-president-as-demographic-crisis-grows/
I wouldn’t be so generous as to pause. All immigration to end immediately and for ever. Let’s put the message out loud and clear. Any illegals to be shipped off to the latest war zone.
Pause for at least 50 years, then take stock. After that, I think a tiny tiny amount is OK, like it used to be.
But you’re speaking too much common sense. ——-The Immigration free for all is devoid of common sense. Common sense is not a consideration in the world of the open border one world government people who may voice on TV their concerns about the “small boats” or immigration numbers but that is all simply PR. It is a bit like when you phone up a helpline or customer services and hear the words “Your call is important to us”. What they really mean is that your call is a pain in the neck. To the globalist politician, concerns about immigration are simply that. —A pain in the neck.