Student immigration clampdown

The Government will persist in its clampdown on international student immigration, despite demands from UK universities that restrictions are eased.

Warwick was one of 68 signatories to a letter urging the government to rethink its immigration policy for international students, insisting that the new policies would harm their chances of attracting genuine overseas students and would cost the UK economy billions of pounds per year.

Among the concerns raised in the letter are the removal of international students from net migration statistics and for the government to make a clear distinction between permanent and temporary migration.

Conservative Minister Damien Green rejected the universities’ demands, saying that the measures were necessary for cracking down on “bogus” colleges. The government wants to reduce net migration from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands.

In April 2012, the government abolished the Tier 1 Post-study Work (PSW) visa, which allowed international students to remain in the UK for up to two years after graduation. Now international students must secure a skilled job with a salary of at least £20,000 or face losing their right to stay in the country.

The letter to the Prime Minister states: “International students… bring significant cultural richness and long-term political and social benefits to this country, and return many benefits to the countries from which they come. However, global competition for international students is intense and a number of other countries are increasing their efforts in this area.”

Despite the new restrictions, 2012 saw a 13.7 percent increase in non-EU applications to British universities.

For the academic year 2011/12, 6,411 non-EU international students enrolled at Warwick, out of a total of 23,420.

Students’ Union (SU) Education Officer Sean Ruston said that international students were valuable members of the University.

“One of the attractions of Warwick is your ability to meet people from different cultures and from around the world, he said.

Ruston sharply criticised the government’s decision to ignore the requests of the letter.

He noted how the government had failed to achieve its promises to tackle immigration, and argued that they were persecuting international students in order to achieve lower figures.

“Net migration is a poor indicator of the migration the tabloids might be worried about” he said.

Ruston gave the example of Australia, which implemented a similar policy several years ago. “International student numbers dive-bombed and the whole sector was in massive trouble, and they had to reverse the whole thing”, he said.

Kit Long, President of Warwick Conservatives, dismissed this analogy, saying that there were “isolated cases in the Australian higher-education sector of colleges and universities failing to hit enrolment targets after the student visa crackdown.

“Few people would reject the belief that a reasonable and sensible intake of international students within higher-education brings social, economic, and cultural benefits for Britain”, said Long. “That is not in dispute. The issue here is that the annual intake has increased incrementally every year to the point where the numbers are neither reasonable nor sensible.

“The claim that the majority of international students return home only strengthens the core argument for why these reforms are needed; when they leave the UK they take the skill sets and knowledge they have developed with them, which may be inconsequential on the small scale, but on a larger scale, the chance of this having a detrimental economic impact is self-evident.”

SU President Leo Boe calls the government’s policy “a completely ideological move”, saying that “universities are better places with international students.”

“What would a campus like Warwick or LSE, Oxford or Cambridge – what would they look like, what would they feel like, without international students being there? One of the main nails in the coffin of their argument should be that top employers are criticising the government for it.”

A spokesperson for the University said that Warwick signed the letter because “we agreed with what it said.”

He said that besides the obvious economic incentives, international students make Warwick a “truly international campus… to give all our students a chance to research and study in a truly global environment.”