Cutting the surge in legal and illegal migration is one of the Government’s priorities. An urgent report on overseas students from the Migration Advisory Committee is due to be published shortly before the next set of migration statistics. The plan appears to be to announce another toughening up of the overseas student regime to offset another big migration figure.
Real migration is understandably and rightly a highly charged political issue. The way the debate plays out in the media and amongst policy-makers goes back to an interview on Anderw Marr’s programme back in 2010 when David Cameron was pressed on reducing net migration and said he would aim for “tens of thousands”.
I do not believe he intended it to be a target. Nor was there any serious discussion of including overseas students in this total. Indeed, David had already given an interesting speech on the pressures of population growth and this was probably the angle which drove his thinking on migration – and which is closer to why the public worry about real migration.
But when, in the immediate spasm of media briefing after his interview when journalists took this as a new target and then asked how it was to be measured, they were told it would be the UN definition of people in the country for more than a year. That has distorted the debate ever since.
We could instead have used the everyday meaning of the word as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary: “to leave one’s country to settle in another”. Young people coming here to study and then returning home aren’t settling here. We could have used the OECD measure – “permanent movement of foreigners” to the country. People coming here to study aren’t moving here permanently. And when pressed on real migration by overseas students, we could have used a measure based on the five years you have to live in the UK before you can apply for settled status.
That focus on real settlement would have shifted the focus from the large annual flows of students and temporary workers in and out of the country towards instead the serious long-term change in the population driven by settlement here. It would capture the reality that most overseas students leave within five years. The ONS suggests 83 per cent. Indeed of those who came on a study visa 2008-2012 only 5 per cent were granted settlement within the subsequent ten years.
The current net “migration” figures are heavily influenced by Covid distortions. Not many overseas students came during Covid. After Covid, there was a surge in overseas students as it included some of the backlog that had built up – rising to an exceptional net “migration” by students of 250,000 or more.
This net figure is so high because there has not yet been a balancing flow of departures by the students who surged in post-Covid. The ONS estimate that when we return to the usual high levels of so-called “emigration” by students then that “may lead to a negative net migration estimate.” The next Government is very likely to benefit from this reversal of the Covid distortion. It is not a reason for further tightening now.
To make these assessments of net migration more real and robust we should institute a proper system of counting people entering and leaving the country. We would know who came and who left the country.
Instead, the figures are based on a survey by officials with a clipboard standing at a few airports and ports and asking a few people as they leave what they have been doing here. So if someone comes in to study and after that does a year’s work and gets questioned when they leave and says they’ve been working then the survey does not show that a student has left but a worker has left.
This focus on overseas students is far removed from the reality of popular worries about migration. Conservatives, despite being increasingly wary of international obligations, have handed determination of our migration policy to the UN. Of course, the UN statistics needs to be collected but very few other countries use then use this particular measure as the basis for policy.
There is a competitive market for overseas students in which English-speaking countries dominate because of the attractions of being taught in the global language so we should match the way our competitors treat overseas students. We could follow the US and distinguish between “immigrants” and “temporary migrants.”
Australia treats overseas students as “temporary entrants.” In Canada, overseas students are “non-permanent residents” as distinct from “immigrants.” This is not some linguistic trick – it reflects the reality of what voters worry about. The EU does, however, use the UN measure.
After Brexit, it could have been dropped and we could have celebrated our power to formulate policy and measure it based on a sovereign assessment of our national interest. But for some reason, even the hardest-line Brexiteers seem to think this vital policy area should be determined by the UN as endorsed by the EU.
Treating people coming to study and indeed to work for a time who will then return home as “migration” creates further confusion. Migration tends to mean settlement. And if you think this movement of students is migration and these are people coming to settle in this country then it is understandable to want to recruit the “brightest and the best.” But this is a misunderstanding.
The British student visa is about selling a valuable service after which the graduates should, in most cases, leave – a condition that we should enforce rigorously. It isn’t a skilled worker visa. We aren’t recruiting them for long-term employment here.
I accept that overseas students could be used as a potential means of getting controlled skilled migration of the brightest and best by a regime that gave a few of them the right to settle afterward if they achieve exceptional standards. This is roughly the American approach – going to study there has been called “the world’s longest job interview”.
But that doesn’t mean we require them all to be the brightest and the best before they even turn up to study. We are selling an education service with some kind of experience of work thrown in to make the proposition more attractive. We then expect overseas students to leave.
I have great respect for Neil O’Brien, but he has treated selling an education service as recruitment of the brightest and the best and painstakingly analysed the jobs they did if they stayed on for a year or two. His argument rests on a misunderstanding of what we are trying to do.
The focus on the brightest and the best also leads to Robert Jenrick’s argument that overseas students are fine if they go to the Russell Group but not to “lesser” universities. This is the deep-seated idea that our prestigious research-intensive universities are “good” universities and the rest are “bad”. It is the influence of the Oxbridge who spent 60 0years suppressing the creation of other universities and left us with only one model of what a good university looks like.
However universities come in different shapes and sizes. A university can deliver world-class teaching or develop world-class links to business without doing world-class research. The University of Teesside focuses on auto-engineering for the nearby Nissan plant. Universities train our nurses and public health officers. Developing countries want to send some of their students to learn these skills.
Some overseas students bring dependents. The Government’s Education Export Strategy specifically argued for a rebalancing away from China towards countries such as India and Nigeria. But these are countries with much lower ages of marriage and child-bearing so their students bring more dependents.
One estimate is that about 140,000 Chinese students bring just a few hundred dependents in total. By contrast about 60,000 Nigerian students bring at least that number of dependents with them. We can toughen up on dependents provided we accept that probably means a higher proportion of overseas students will be Chinese,
Students looking to study abroad are savvy and will apply to several universities in different countries. They may well apply for several study visas across the globe – not least because the process of getting one is slow and unreliable. They may get several offers and only decide quite late in the day which university to go to. That can cause further confusion if the number of visas granted is taken as a measure of students coming to the UK.
I support sensible measures to tighten up the overseas student regime. That could include much tougher rules on dependents. There could also be tougher regulation of the agents advising overseas students. Above all we need the Home Office to share with universities the granular information they have on overseas students and their visa status so universities know whether they have left the country.
There is great value in attracting overseas students and the graduate visa. We should not damage a valuable service boosting Britain’s international influence and earning useful revenues. Educating overseas students is a great global role and helps us pay our way in the world – to the tune of £42billion a year. We should be proud of it.