UK immigration debate ignores the real questions

Good morning. The government will — about a minute after this arrives in your inbox — unveil the full details of their planned changes to the UK immigration system, which I will write about tomorrow (and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow).

For now, Georgina has an excellent scoop, which I think illuminates the debate British politics should be having about immigration, but isn’t. More on that below.

Degree of doubt

Prospective overseas students are being lured into courses that do not meet their needs on a false prospect of an easy route to permanent residence in the UK and a decent job. Here’s Georgina’s story.

As a matter of conscious policy, since the decision way back in 1966 to charge overseas students different, higher tuition fees, British universities have been encouraged to recruit more overseas students in order to maintain their operations, something that recent governments have put rocket-boosters on. In recent years, universities have turned to recruitment agents, who are unregulated, to recruit students from overseas. As Georgina details, this is leading to people making decisions that are palpably not right for them (emphasis mine):

Tripti Maheshwari, co-founder of Student Circus, which helps international students find jobs, said certain Indian students were coming to the UK despite not being well-suited to the courses. “We’ve been asked by clients to deliver sessions in Hindi because students are not very comfortable with English,” Maheshwari added. “People will put their houses on loan to get the money for student fees and get a visa. Universities and agents together must responsibly recruit students.”

Louise Nicol, Malaysia-based international higher education expert and founder of Asia Careers Group, said “some agents in south Asia sell not just education but work and a path to indefinite leave to remain. They promise them: you can settle down and live forever in leafy Kent . . . But that isn’t the reality of what’s available to a lot of international students.” 

Vijaykumar Pydi, media head of the UK’s Indian National Student Association, said that often agents tell Indian clients the success rate of foreign graduates getting a sponsored job is more than 60 per cent, when in his experience it is 10 per cent.

These are straightforwardly cases of mis-selling. Tim Leunig wrote an impeccable newsletter on his Substack about the value of international students and why it is a mistake on the part of the British government to seek to reduce their number:

Take Huddersfield, for example. According to the Kirkless “Top 100”, the top firm in the greater Huddersfield area is US-owned card maker UK Greetings Ltd. They are a £130mn turnover company, but much of the turnover is the resale of goods imported from east Asia. In contrast the University of Huddersfield has a turnover of £180mn, and will import virtually nothing from east Asia or anywhere else. On the contrary, the university is a major exporter — every foreign student who comes to the UK is an export, because the money they spend on course fees is money that comes into the UK from abroad. I absolutely respect the hard work and entrepreneurship of UK Greetings, but there can be no doubt that the University of Huddersfield is much more important to the local economy, in simple financial terms, even without thinking of the benefits of improving local skills.

Huddersfield is not unique. In recent work with my Public First colleagues we discovered that there are over 100 constituencies where the local university is one of the top three exporters. No other sector is in the top three in more than 100 constituencies. As my co-author, Jonathan Simons says, “in a lot of towns your university is your car plant, it is your steel mill”. Of those 100, 85 are Labour seats.

Of course, that an export industry makes the UK a lot of money is not a reason to be relaxed about mis-selling or dangerous practices. Four-fifths of cars made in Britain are sold overseas, but if Jaguar Land Rover were selling those cars on false pretences that would still be a problem. Equally, however, the appropriate response to that wouldn’t simply be to stop selling British cars overseas. (The flipside, of course, is that if JLR sold cars on false pretences, and those cars regularly failed to deliver as promised, that would be a big problem for UK plc. In the long-term, if a university degree in the UK fails to deliver for overseas students, that is as big a risk to the health of our universities sector as anything that Yvette Cooper might do.)

But the problem with the UK’s immigration debate is that everything about it has been refracted through the lens of its “net migration” figures, a number that is the product of billions of decisions, small and large, made by the public and private sector, by households and businesses, over decades. It is a debate that contributes very little to more important questions about why someone comes to the UK (and, indeed, why they might leave it), how they are treated when they are here and what that means for them and the UK as a whole. Instead we have got a constant rhetorical obsession with reducing that net figure down, and until relatively recently, we haven’t even succeeded at that!

What we instead ought to be having is a debate about what people who immigrate to the UK do, how we treat them and what the consequences of those things are. But there is little to no prospect of that happening anytime soon.

Now try this

I saw The Glass Menagerie at the Yard this weekend — the final matinee at the theatre’s first home before it returns in a new, permanent venue. It was terrific (and I say that as someone who does not really care for Tennessee Williams at all). I don’t intend to make a habit of telling you to sign up for other people’s newsletters but it is worth hopping on the Yard’s newsletter so you can get ahead of their return in a new home.

Top stories today

• ‘Earn the right to stay’ | Migrants to the UK will need to spend a decade in the country before applying to settle unless they can show “a real and lasting contribution to the economy and society”, ministers are set to announce today.

• Campaigners sue UK government | Keir Starmer’s government will face a High Court challenge this week over the export of components for the F-35 fighter jet used by Israel.

• Shrinking graduate wage premium | Young people are bearing the brunt of a protracted slowdown in the UK labour market, as employers hang on to existing staff but hold off hiring. Though a degree still pays off over time, the road to well-paid work may be longer and bumpier than in the past, as this data-driven read explains.

• Office politics | Political parties’ local branches are failing to pay tax on their commercial income — even when that income is funded by taxpayers, analysis by Dan Neidle at Tax Policy Associates shows. In the majority of cases, the local parties pay no tax at all on income generated by renting out their spare office space. Often the office space is rented to the local MP, who claims the rent as a parliamentary expense. Most of this isn’t taxed at all.