By Alan Oakley
The government has been criticised for making international students ‘feel unwelcome with ever more onerous restrictions’.
The accusation was made by National Union of Students (NUS) International Students’ Officer, Daniel Stevens in an online journal following the Queen’s speech at last week’s State Opening of Parliament. Stevens added that he fears that the government’s tough talk and policies on immigration are creating an atmosphere that will deter foreign students from coming to the UK.
Each year at the State Opening of Parliament, the queen is required to read out a speech written by her government outlining the legislation it intends to introduce in the next year. During her speech last week, the Queen announced the government’s intention to legislate on immigration in the coming months.
The immigration bill the government proposes does not distinguish between international students and other migrants. Indeed, no provisions relating to any type of visa issued under the UK’s five tier points-based visa system are mentioned. There are, therefore, no changes to visas for high value migrants (Tier 1 visas), highly skilled migrants (Tier 2 visas) the aforementioned students (Tier 4 visas) or temporary workers (Tier 5 visas). Daniel Stevens is concerned that students may perceive that the UK is displaying a generally unwelcoming attitude towards immigrants. The government’s response is that its proposed bill will make the UK welcoming to immigrants who wish to ‘contribute’ and unwelcoming to those who do not.
The proposed immigration bill is set to include:
• A limit on foreign nationals’ access to the NHS
• Increased fines for employers who employ workers who have no right to work in the UK
• Responsibility in law for private landlords to obtain proof of tenants’ right to be in the UK
• Measures to prevent foreign nationals who have been convicted of a criminal offence turning to human rights legislation to resist deportation. Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights says that all people have a right to a family life. The government says that this has been interpreted too liberally by UK and European courts, which allow dangerous criminals to stay in the UK purely because they have fathered children, for example.
Mr Stevens told The Huffington Post, “The Home Office have set arbitrary targets for reducing immigration and international students are a soft target despite the huge academic, cultural and financial contributions they make to their universities and the communities in which they live. Ministers must stop treating international students like a political football by recognising their value and removing them from the immigration statistics”.
The UK currently issues between 200,000 and 300,000 visas per year. The Coalition is committed to reduce this figure from the 250,000 issued when it came into power in 2010, down to “tens of thousands”. Critics argue that in order to achieve a reduction to what they interpret to mean below 100,000, international student visas ill inevitably be curtailed.
The government has said that its intention is to prevent bogus students from coming to the UK while encouraging ‘the brightest and the best’ to study at UK universities. The current immigration minister, Mark Harper MP, told online education journal The Pie last month that the government had acted to close down colleges that sold ‘immigration not education’. He said that 500 bogus colleges had lost their licences to sponsor international students for Tier 4 visas but insisted that there had been a 1% rise in the number of university students studying at UK universities.
Daniel Stevens joins a long list of voices calling on the government to exclude students from the immigration statistics. In January, the chairman of five UK parliamentary committees (Three House of Commons committees; the Home Affairs Committee, the Public Accounts Committee and the Science Committee and two from the House of Lords; the Science and European Union Committees) wrote to David Cameron, urging him to remove students from the immigration statistics in order to ‘reconcile the tensions between visa policy and aspirations for growth’.
Some ministers in the UK government cabinet favour this approach including, it is believed, Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne and Business Secretary, Vince Cable. However, responsibility for policing immigration lies with Home Secretary Theresa May, who is opposed to any such change, citing international statistical standards which, she says, require that anyone who moves to a country for a year or more be classed as an immigrant.
Nicola Dandridge, Chief Executive at Universities UK, says the number of enrolments of international students at UK universities ‘remained broadly flat this year’. She argues that this showed that ‘there is now a need for more joined up thinking and better messaging in terms of international students. If the government’s aim is to make the UK a country that attracts people who will contribute, they need look no further than international students’.
