Today’s row over the Migration Advisory Committee’s advice to Rishi Sunak not to close or curtail the graduate visa route illustrates how and why the Conservatives have managed to dig themselves into such a hole on immigration. Both sides have a point, and neither of them is prepared to publicly join the dots and own up to the consequences of their preferred policies.
Per the FT, James Cleverly commissioned the review “after applications to lower-ranked universities [from international students] more than doubled between 2018 and 2020”. The “graduate visa route” entitles international students to live and work in the United Kingdom for two years after leaving university.
Reporting today, the MAC says it found little evidence that the scheme is being abused, and that closing the route would cause “substantial financial difficulty” for the university sector. Some institutions might even end up insolvent. So, cased closed. Right?
Well, not quite. Robert Jenrick and Neil O’Brien, who have been leading the charge for more restrictive immigration policy, think the Government basically skewed the parameters of the review against reform:
“Both former ministers argued on social media platform X that the report was guided by misleading parameters set by the government. This included not asking the MAC to review the government’s goal of attracting 600,000 foreign students per year and asking it to assess the extent of abuse in the visa system, rather than the social and economic impact of this type of migration.”
It would certainly be inaccurate to pretend that the MAC is enthusiastic about the graduate visa, unless it has had a total Damascene conversion in the last two months. As O’Brien noted in his original piece on what he dubbed “the Deliveroo visa scandal”, its 2023 annual report was “scathing” on the subject:
“If the objective is to attract talented students who will subsequently work in high-skilled graduate jobs, then we are sceptical that it adds much to the Skilled Worker route which was already available to switch into after graduation, and we expect that at least a significant fraction of the graduate route will comprise low-wage workers. For these migrants, it is in many ways a bespoke youth mobility scheme.”
It would be interesting to see how many people demanding that the Prime Minister kowtow to the experts on the MAC when they’re defending the graduate visa took the same view when they were attacking it a few months ago. But how do we explain it appearing to hold such different positions? Is it true, as some suggest, that it has “changed its mind”?
Well, one suspects that Jenrick and O’Brien have a point about the terms of reference handed down by Cleverly. The biggest clue is in the above-linked FT report:
“Senior Tories have been divided over whether to restrict the route. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and education secretary Gillian Keegan have privately lobbied to retain the scheme in light of the severe financial strain many universities are under, said people familiar with the matter.”
The graduate visa route is not about attracting talent. That isn’t so say that it doesn’t do that, to some extent (although as the MAC says, not obviously much beyond what the Skilled Worker Visa does), but it isn’t the point. The point is propping up universities that make losses on every category of domestic student.
So it doesn’t really look as if the MAC has changed its mind about the graduate visa route, so much as it has been asked a different question. The Government’s terms of reference included maintaining the UK’s market share in foreign students; that was never going to produce advice to cut the numbers, was it. It hardly rebuts O’Brien’s complaints.
I wrote a more detailed treatment of how our increasingly stricken higher education sector is helping to fuel sky-high immigration back in November. I won’t repeat all its arguments here, but I did note that when it comes to delivering a sustainable policy for lower numbers:
“It’s not enough to stick a right-winger in the Home Office with an impossible task; any coordinated effort to reduce this country’s reliance on imported labour would need to be coordinated across – and indeed, imposed upon – at the very least such departments as Education, Business, and the Treasury.”
This has been a common theme when we have covered immigration policy. The Government talks about numbers because we have reached the point where it can no longer ignore them; immigration is a top policy concern, especially amongst Conservative (and ex-Conservative) voters.
But it has not yet internalised that you cannot deliver a sensible or sustainable pathway to substantially lower net immigration by focusing on the numbers alone. It will require a fundamental re-assessment of Britain’s current political economy, and how it got so dependent on the mass import of labour and taxpayers (and, in the universities’ case, consumers) to stay afloat.
Large parts of government will not want to do that, because the ultimate reason that immigration has got so high is that it is almost always easier, in the short run, than structural reform. So long as departments such as Business, Education, and the Treasury are not yoked to a coherent, government-wide reform programme, there is precious little even the most able home secretary will ever be able to do about mass immigration.
Yet both sides too often fight shy of that sort of dot-joining exercise. The MAC is right that curbing switching off the international-fees life-support machine would have serious consequences for many universities, and the restrictionists have not as yet spelled out how they would respond.
One suspects their instinct would be fewer places overall, of the options available. There is certainly a potential case to be made for that: the role of degree education and “skills” in Britain’s economic recovery is already exaggerated, and the current university funding model is basically designed to maximise demand for degrees by divorcing it, and the eventual payment, from any assessment of a degree’s actual value.
But shrinking the sector would not be an easy political task, and we have not yet heard from any immigration restrictionists how they would do it.
On the other hand, ministers such as Hunt and Keegan continue to privately lobby for lax rules in order to prop up this or that part of the economy without acknowledging that they support a mass-immigration economic model, or adopting any of the other policies (most obviously, messianic support for mass housebuilding) that must be held in order to advocate the net import of hundreds of thousands of people a year with a straight face.
If the Prime Minister really does intend to press ahead with restrictions on the graduate visa route despite the MAC’s report, that’s completely fine: elected ministers set policy, and are well within their rights to take a different view to their advisors. But if so, he made a rod for his own back by commissioning a report which could only ever have told him to do the opposite.